Britain's last General Election?

There is an international frame for all of the various crises that have been rolling across the West since 2008. And these crises (which are constantly unresolved) do have more coherence than is often understood. For example, Trump's America appears primarily to be attacking China's economic rise. China's subordination seems to be Trump's main goal. Less understood and more surreptitiously, Trump is actually at economic and political war with the EU.

The 'strange' and 'personal' behaviour of the US President in relation to Putin, often explained by Trump's 'macho male' attraction, becomes more explicable when Russian leverage in the EU is added to the strain and pressure on the EU and its German leadership. Trump wants a decline in the Chinese economic influence across the world. He also wants that in relation to the world's biggest market, the EU. But he needs the destruction of the EU, as opposed to his acceptance of the Chinese regime. 

The Trump leadership sees the crisis of 2008, and its invariable recurrence, solved by the simple, straight-forward subjugation of the US over China and the necessary dissolution of the European Union. The total supremacy of the dollar (tied to the US's financial state machinery, starting with the 'Fed') would then be able to 'solve' the world's next financial crisis through US global political leadership and its financial domination.

The great battles of the new capitalism are played across a vast theatre in which the relatively minor disputes being fought out in Britain, for example, are small beer. Nevertheless, Britain's part of the crisis is going to be big enough to reorganise its nation and most of what was the post war British society - in a more substantial way than any time since WW2. Brexit has provided Britain's crisis with its current title. But much more substantial movements than Brexit are underway. 

The would-be the next Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has a primary slogan of 'Getting Brexit Done' as he and his extreme right Tory Party fall into the General Election. It is a fatuous fantasy even in its own terms. Boris's main slogan sums up the emptiness of the election he wants to win and believes it works because it is empty, because it covers up the real and rotting politics and economics of British society. Boris's Brexit, if he gets it, will only begin the British agony with the EU - spreading over years and years.  

What will actually unfold through and after Britain's election? What is the real British crisis?

Brexit is not and never has been the critical question for Britain's future. The main issue for Britain's future has always been the direction that British capitalism takes. It has been a dilemma over the decades since Thatcher, and in turn it has created a smouldering political crisis. Britain's political crisis did not start in 2008. It was initiated by Labour leader Blair's 1997 election which welcomed American wars and the financial legacy of Thatcherism. And it was Labour's Gordon Brown that pulled away the last restraints that might have limited the the whirlwind of the British-based banks and their epic financial storm. It was the madness of the Royal Bank of Scotland - the largest bank in the world (read the biggest purchase of the largest debts - called its assets) that forced the British state to have to turn its financial resources into propping up international finance in 2009.  And it was an election which reflected the disappointment with Blair's Labour Party that duly sent the people of Britain into the depths of austerity in 2010, under the banner of the Tories and the Lib Dems.

The politics of the 2008 crisis and its political ramifications in Britain have now become simple. It took a while to get there but Labour has begun to draw together a leadership and program that challenges the direction of international finance and its associated globalisation. The Tories, the main party of Britain's rulers, has decided for Trump. The relationship to the EU has always been secondary in this battle. (The Tories pretend that Brexit is over if they win the election, whereas years of Brexiting are ahead.)

A new General Election has always been the decisive political issue since the 2016 Brexit referendum vote - not because Brexit itself is the decisive question and not because Britain's democracy is a particularly incisive or any sort of successful instrument for most of its population, but because there is no other effective alternative for change - for either of the two main social classes. (There are the partial exceptions to Parliament's importance, including the extinction rebellion battles and some ferocious trade union struggles - set up by managers expecting a Tory victory.) For the population as a whole, the fight between Labour's program of social democratic reform and the Tory restoration and expansion of British based finance capital - with all of its associated requirements (cheap labour, slashing legal restrictions, sales of state property etc.,) are the only political leaderships and directions that seem to be available.  

But just as a genuine, long term Labour victory would require a relentless battle with national and international capital - led in the first place by the EU - so the prospects for a Boris 'victory' are equally shaky

The political orientation that Britain has had since it gave up its navel superiority to the US in 1921 and the remnants of its Empire in 1956 to 1961 (minus Hong Kong) has been to rely on the US as part of an Anglo-Saxon bloc. As Britain grew weaker it decided to carry the Anglo-Saxon banner into Europe and what has become the EU. This assured, among other things, the continuing global role in the expanding world of finance via the City of London, a seat on the UN's Security Council, shared war materials and wars etc. But Boris proposes to cut away any influence on the EU which, inevitably, diminishes the 'Anglo-Saxon' presence in Europe and increases the reliance of Britain on the direct requirements of the US regime.

This means that Boris will be the subject of Trump in virtually all spheres (attitudes to China, imports and exports, food, health etc) excepting the City of London. And the City will use the opportunity to expand its financial liberties to the detriment of the overwhelming population of the country. 'Singapore on the Thames' as one EU administrator suggested. This is Boris's proposed future for 63 million people.     

More significantly still, both Northern Ireland and Scotland are already politically convulsed, supposedly by Brexit. In reality a decade of austerity, the contradictory issues across Britain around racism and identity and the possible re-opening of the routes to a united Ireland and an independent Scotland will boil over with Boris in charge.

The fact that both NI and Scotland are ahead of Britain as a whole in their opposition to Westminster reflects the alternative political leaderships and the mass political initiatives that have evolved over decades - including through civil war in the case of NI.) Both countries are pressed by the increasingly Little English leadership of the UK Parliament that prefers its own minority political blocks in both countries rather than accept the indigenous politics. The United Kingdom in different ways and with different answers has already failed to accept the democracy of two parts of its united nation. An organised, coherent and thought out Irish nationalist leadership in NI and the experience, the popular movement and the political party in Scotland will act decisively against the minority core in Boris's Westminster should it come to lead the so called UK.

The break up of Britain and worse is the likely result of a Boris win in the General Election. The consequent drive against labour, with a small 'L', essential to British Capital's new rules, will produce anti-parliament or non-parliamentary reaction by tens of thousands, being driven into Britain's new 'third world.' Proto fascist and racist currents, bolstered by state action, are then most likely to be the preparation or the response against any sort of resistance, of the sort which is now emerging across the world in Hong Kong, Iraq, Chile and France. As the shifts in big Capital re-arrange the world, so Britain will echo the battles now emerging.

A victory for Corbyn's Labour, while contrary to the expectations, claims and hysteria from virtually all of the mainstream media, has the potential to mobilise the peoples of Britain, rearrange the UK nations - and wider. It will need to. At the heart of the matter is whether our crazy system inflates another financial ball of empty air in its scrabble for wealth or whether the citizens across the world decide to stick in the pin before their society becomes yet more unliveable... 

Brexit's future

History has its own momentum and has just wiped out Brexit's front row. Brexit's main leader, Boris Johnston was nailed by his second in command Michael Gove, who promptly destroyed himself by his own breathtaking ambition. The 'brain' and the 'brawn' of Brexit having eaten each other, Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, the long term pilot of Brexit, has now resigned (for the third time) to spend time with the European Parliament!

The British political crisis, the end of Britain's long reputation for 'stability', suddenly sped up and rolled over Brexit's front line in the process. Now the UK is left with a bunch of second rate Tory politicians and 'would be' Prime minister and Cabinet ministers, scrambling to get to the top of the mouldering heap of a deeply wounded government and its uneasy MPs.

Although most of the Tory pack insist it is their intention to carry on governing until 2020, the first glance into Brexit's future would suggest that they are likely to be disappointed.

Brexit, economically speaking, has only just begun. During 2014/15  the UK recorded a total of 1,988 Foreign Direct Investment projects – 12% more than in the previous record-breaking year. And UK inward FDI Stock – the amount of foreign direct investment in the UK - is estimated to have passed the £1 trillion level in 2014. (UK Gov. May 2016.) This was of course considerably bolstered by very large amounts of foreign property purchases, especially in London. However, FDI is a life saver for the British economy. And virtually all economists predict a serious decline in foreign investment in the UK as a result of Brexit. Indeed, according to Bank of England figures it has dwindled, particularly in the property market, since the start of the referendum debate.

Meanwhile domestic investment, by both the government and private capital, has been a systemic problem since WW2 and remains so. As the Office of National Statistics  have recently noted:
'...the proportion of total expenditure accounted for by spending on investment has fallen from an average of 13.5% in 2007, to an average of 10.9% during 2012 and to 10.4% in Q2 2013: the lowest level recorded since the 1950s. This compares with 14.1% in France, 16.7% in the United States and 17.9% in Canada. Across the G7, investment accounts for an average of 14.6% of Gross Final Expenditure.' 

This means a job crisis.

The 10 - 12% reduction in the value of the £ means imports cost more (including all the 'outsourced' goods currently sold in Britain's shops.) This means the value of wages goes down and a standard of living crisis. The only way to reduce the impact of rising prices is to increase the already nerve wracking levels of domestic debt. Which the Bank of England has just assured can increase at will. This will mean a debt crisis.

Government taxes will fall. For example, currently the City of London is forced to pay a minimal £67 billion a year off its gargantuan profits. Brexit will mean the bleeding away of City wealth holders as financial services will now cost more to sell in the EU. This means the Brexiteers will need to make the City into another tax free zone to keep the world's wealthy and rely on the pickings, or make unprecedented cuts. They will probably do both.

All this could be foreseen if the UK had stayed in the EU - albeit erupting at a different tempo. Taking one (very large ) case, the City of London has been the tail wagging the UK's economic dog for decades and this unstable and unbalanced arrangement was bound to come to grief under the new pressures of the global crisis. Similarly Britain's mountainous domestic debt and the relentless meagerness of its domestic investment, are not sustainable, even in the short term. And the list goes on. As globalisation squeezes through the EU so Britain's series of economic weaknesses would have blown. Brexit has simply brought them all together and made them all blow at once.

This, in the context of the new, fragile, unanchored UK political institutions, means that political crises will rapidly follow any serious economic shake up. As some of the major economic consequences of both Brexit and the new cycle of western economic crises are underway, so a major watershed in the weak link of Britain will break, and break early. The calls for a new vote on Scottish independence will only get louder. The fight against austerity, war and racism  can only get sharper. All this melee of politics and economics is therefore likely to produce a general election much earlier than 2020.

The Labour Party crisis has little to do with Brexit, but will certainly be caught up in its tangles. The sources of Labour's crisis are Blair, Scotland and a forty year retreat from even the most basic social democratic perspective. If Corbyn maintains his firm stand in defense of the Labour Party's growth and its membership's rights, he is likely to win any vote for a leader. He would then isolate the most right wing, rancorous and self seeking Labour MPs but not manage in a stroke to remove them. And the next stage of Labour's battle becomes how the right wing Labour MPs attach themselves to a national political purpose through which they might gain office and significance, while maintaining their base in the country.

This is not a puzzle without precedent. The last time there were major economic and political crises in the country, national governments were created to bring together 'the great and the good' (the rich and the powerful) to solve the nation's problems. One can easily imagine the new tyros of the anti-Corbyn League grasping at, or even proposing, the merging of Democratic? Labour with their Tory and Liberal counterparts in a government of national survival. Facing down such a charade, led by a solid Parliamentary, socialist group, backed by the mobilisation of millions in the country, is worth every moment of consternation and the beads of sweat that the Corbyn leadership is now experiencing.

Today, in Britain, big politics and economics are inextricably, moment by moment, bound together. Their intimacy, paradoxically  means that the overblown weaknesses of British society are starting to pull apart, between the nations of Britain, inside, as well as between, the mainstream political parties, inside, as well as between, the main classes in society and, underpinning all, economically, where the fundamentals no longer stick together or stack up.