No middle-way for the UK!

In the UK a body called the Electoral Commission monitors Party Political Broadcasts which appear on the traditional media (mainly TV and Radio). On September 20th the Liberal Democrat Party -  12 MPs now led by Vince Cable - were allowed one of the seasonal offerings available to all parties with representatives in Parliament. It was a dreadful piece in that it tried give viewers a comedic vision of the Party' strengths and appeal particularly to the now very active youth vote. It was neither funny - nor appealing. (Lib Dems trying to be funny with the Metro youth!)

The broadcast failed on 2 fronts. First it patronised and mocked the very youth that it was designed to win over. It implied they were stupid. In the June 2017 General Election the radical youth vote was a dramatic new feature in Britain's political life. The vote for Corbyn's Labour Party was not, as the Lib Dem broadcast suggested, a half-baked search for 'real' personalities. The youth vote stood against a tidal wave of mainstream attacks from all sides on Labour in general and Corbyn in particular. Labour's Manifesto featured as a major deciding point for many younger voters as indicated in several surveys. It has been half a century since any British Political Party's election manifesto has been studied with such attention. Against the tide, and with an unprecedented participation in the arguments and debate, the British youth vote, 3 months ago, was a tremendous breakthrough against the grim prospect of a mountain of Tory MPs, topped by a humourless and insecure Tory martinet.  

Second, the broadcast tried once again to open up the 'middle way.'

Labour peer Lord Adonis, ex Labour PM Tony Blair and various leading commentators like Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian newspaper have set up the symbol of a second referendum on 'the Brexit deal' as the means to avoid Corbyn's radical Manifesto on the one hand and the impact of the Tory's ever more fractious Brexit on the other. The Lib Dems want to be its Party and Vince Cable has said he will be its Prime Minister. Whatever else is missing in the increasingly shaky and malodorous British Parliament, there is no lack of ambition! (With all proportions guarded, a dire political psychology we have seen before in the Wiemar Republic, the end of the Soviet Union, in John Major's Cabinet and in the current scramble for influence among President Trump's coterie.)

Brexit is undoubtedly accelerating Britain's political and economic fragility. But is Brexit causing this lurch? And would the restoration of Britain's status inside the EU reverse these trends? Is there an EU based middle-way out of Britain's crisis?

The key weaknesses of the British economy have been evolving through decades. Nearly a century ago (as Will Hutton quoted in an Observer article, 10 September '17) Churchill and Keynes said that in Britain 'finance is too proud and industry too humble'. France's new President Macron may be buffing up Paris's financial centre but the American banks, the Hedge Funds, the Wealth Investors, the Insurance Companies and all the rest of the gang that make up the City of London are slavering at the prospect of being at the centre of the world's largest tax haven. Indeed it one of their conditions to remain in London and to resist Mssr. Macron's blandishments. The City of London is not interested in a middle-way. Another opportunity has opened up. But the fundamental point remains. The City continues to be the enormous parasitic growth in the belly of the British economy and it is now, as it has always been, squeezing the life out of its host. The biggest bank in the world, with its glittering name projecting solidity and 'gentlemanly' behaviour, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Britain's biggest international investment in 2008, turned out, like all the rest, to be a den of liars, spivs and thieves. These people still dominate Britain's economic life.

The pitiful and declining productivity of British labour is another, critical long term, feature of Britain's economy. Why? Britain lacks serious long term investment. Finance Capital dominates. PM Harold Wilson in the 1960s was one of a long list of post WW2 PMs that tried to take on the task - and failed like all the others. His 'white hot heat of the technological age' fizzed out, along with all the other efforts to win over an insatiable ruling elite away from their sumptuous, instant, share dividends and huge managerial pay, and instead use resources for future investment.

Today's version of this most regular feature of the British economic helter-skelter is illustrated by the recent fate of one of Britain's most successful tech companies, ARM Holdings. As Private Eye (No 1452) pointed out, PM Teresa May's joy as she applauded Japan's foreign investment in the UK on her recent visit, included plaudits for 'SoftBank.' Their 'investment' amounted to buying up ARM Holdings - helped by a 10% fall in Sterling. This discount on the £24bn price was expanded when 'SoftBank' sold on 25% of ARM Holdings to a Saudi Government company. So, a large British company provided an enormous payoff to its British shareholders, and world standard British Tech is now divided up between Japan and Saudi. From the fantasy that 'my word is my bond' to the generations of rapacious greed, Britain's ruling class, fostered by the golden days of Empire, is the least functional element in modern, Western capitalism. That is to say, it plays little or no productive role within its own system. It has an almost entirely parasitic relationship to its own means of production. Brexit's role in this malaise is marginal. Brexit speeds up Britain's economic realities. But neither would continued membership of the EU stop it, let alone reverse it.

On the political level the latest revelation that over a year 115 Lords claimed £1.2 million of expenses without saying a word and £4 million was handed to the 277 who spoke five times or less in Parliament, shows where Britain's mainstream politics finds itself. MP's expenses; constant movement between Ministers, big corporations, banks and lobbyists; illegal arms trade; choice international trips and post Parliament jobs have created a nouveau riche political class, but this too is over decades. Brexit will not stop it. But the EU certainly nurtured corruption within in its nation states and between them.

The conclusion from these facts of life is that it is not true that Brexit, at the level of British capitalist economics or British political rule will make things worse. Here and there it will speed things up. At a social level, there is no doubt that Brexit continues to stimulate (already existing) racism into new activity. At the political level of international corruption and lack of accounting it may slow things down. Equally, a return to a Blairite age through reapplying for membership of the EU is neither feasible nor available. And the EU does not challenge racism. On the contrary Shengen is great crime against large parts of humanity. Individual nations that are responding positively to refugees are not doing that through any agreed EU framework.

The trends that are changing Britain's capitalist economics and politics are fertilised from domestic roots and do not stem, fundamentally, from the EU and nor from Brexit. Those two particular choices simply make change more stark. Britain's domestic roots are undoubtedly entangled internationally in a globalist jungle - but even that aspect is neither 'solved' positively by Brexit nor by its reverse. Britain has been building great change in itself for half a century and more.

In that context there is no (longer) a middle way for Britain. Radical change is coming in all major departments of economic and political life. The choice here is straightforward. Who will plan for the radical change that the people of Britain already want, and who among their political leaders will be able to act on that and win?