Lots of commentators are trying to explain the increasing chaos in Britain's political leadership. From university professors with their historical analogies on Radio 4, to the screaming expressions of the id to be found in social media - and everything in between - Britain's political crisis is showing the nation in a new and unparallelled light.
At least two of the more serious 'analyses' so far are worth some examination.
David Runciman (see London Review of Books, January 2019) describes Parliament as 'incapable.' In his view Parliament is an institution that is structurally unable to manage Brexit because Brexit must inevitably boil down to a compromise. The British Parliament is, by definition, confrontational. The implication of this view is that the British Parliament needs to reform itself, via a more European style voting system, into coalition-based governments. The British Parliament as it stands is simply heightening the Brexit divisions in its own chambers and in society.
Many others have focused on the apparent decline of Britain's mainstream political parties. Despite the huge expansion of the membership of the British Labour Party, it is argued that both of the main British parties are no longer rooted in separate social classes that originally defined them. Instead they are becoming backward looking anachronisms, unable to deal with the new society of the 21st century.
Looking at the strong points of these arguments it is certainly true for example that the reform of Britain's Gilbert and Sullivan style Parliament is long overdue. And it is also right that all of Britain's political parties are, from different angles, in serious trouble. But Britain's political crisis is not, essentially, a Parliamentary problem. It cannot be solved, not by Parliament however reformed, and not on its own.
The British 'problem' starts from the dramatic shift of Western capitalism from the end of the 1970s. This is something that has not been addressed at all in the British Parliament. And therefore, for millions, Brexit was simply the accessible opportunity to act as a representation of resistance to globalisation and the concomitant decline of working class living standards. Why? Because a powerful chunk of the Tory Party and its membership went awol and broke from their traditional defence of the evolving, internationalist, finance-led ruling class. Instead they settled on its most backward and rightist elements, among other things because racism could be weaponised against a radicalising Labour Party. All that opened up the anger of Britain's working classes and mobilised an unprecedented vote for Brexit (in its course sadly splitting the labour movement.)
The British Parliament has not seriously dealt with the matters of wealth and power since 1948. The role of Parliament (whatever government) has become narrower and narrower over decades. Occasionally (most significantly in the stop the war march against Labour PM Blair) critical issues and mass actions have produced reflections in Parliament. Today, the British Parliament is drenched by Brexit because the ruling class party has split away from the main parts of the ruling class, and because Brexit has become the imitation for austerity, insecurity, decline and marginality.
Consequently Parliament appears to be the centre of the cauldron. The fury of large sections of Britain's working class appears to be over Brexit. And the efforts of the main political parties (despite the heroic attempts to turn the issues to poverty and wealth, to welfare or decline by Corbyn and others) appears to be what sort of Brexit should Britain have. That is the point of Corbyn's continual call for a General Election. It is to get to the essence of the conditions of the working class, today, in Britain. Corbyn hopes and argues for a General Election that will force out the substantial, critical, realities from behind the Brexit shenanigans and reunite a class on the basis of radical change.
The battle that is on the horizon; resisting and defeating a coalition of big business, of a large part of (suddenly united) right wing parliamentarians, of EU rules on government intervention, of Labour MPs and ex Labour MPs that support globalisation, will put Brexit in to its real place. It will also demonstrate why mass action and a mass movement with the European peoples' support, will be the real engine room for political reform of any note. The failure to take on this battle will not just send Parliament back to sleep. It will build modern fascism, because only the steel fist can force the working class into greater and greater sacrifice.
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