Brexit starts after October.

Two apparently key events will decide the next stage of Britain's expanding crises. The most obvious one, and the one that has just put Boris Johnson on his throne, is that Britain is shelving the EU on 30 October. The second, which is the real meat in the sandwich, is the coming General Election.

These two events will set the future for the UK. Except that one of them; Boris's great promise to the people who are sick to death with the EU whether they were 'leavers' or 'remainers' - that the UK is finished with the EU - turns out to be 'fake news' (in the delightful terms used by Boris's own coach.) 

The idea that the UK (or for that matter, the EU) will stop organising trade etc., after the 'No Deal Exit' is fatuous. That's when the real negotiations will start. There is even the chance that Boris will get an EU 'deal' before the end of October. It is truly absurd, as some of the media correspondents and old Tory gurus would have it, to expect the EU will insist on some moral rejection of their trade rather than deal the cash. The EU has already got its main result. The UK's pathetic performance, the total collapse of its long term reputation of political savvy across the world, has done the damage that the EU needed to prevent any further break up in its own camp, at least for the next few years. After October 30 the EU will ferociously demand a deal from the UK. And Boris will accept it - if he's still around.

The reality is that Boris's Brexit will just be be the start of the negotiations with the EU, under conditions where there has been a considerable shift in the relation of forces between the two contenders. Brexit does not finish on October 30. When the Brexiteers cheers finally fade away, that's when it all starts. 

And an early General Election? Well, here's a gap even smaller than the number of days offered to MPs to stop 'No Deal'. The next General Election, which will effect the real political and economic future of Britain, will instantly follow October 30 - whether MPs manage to block Brexit or not. If Boris is blocked he will call the election 'for Brexit.' If he gets it through, he will call the election on the immediate effect of his 'successful' promise (before the roof falls in.) 

That is the big game. The election, believes Boris, is the critical issue for his own future because it is the most important issue for Britain's economic and political elite. If he can break the prospect of a radical Labour Government then he opens the renovation of the Tory Party as the political instrument of the ruling class once more. (So long as his victory is big enough in terms of the number of MPs, he will also try to dump his some of his more manic, Brexit-believers.) 

Polls all show that Boris's Tories are now 5 or 7% above Labour. But both Labour and the Tories are being bitten from the margins. The current 18% for the Lib Dems is shaky, particularly after its leader rejected Corbyn's place as temporary Prime Minister if the Tory government was voted down. (Even the Tory grandee Kenneth Clark was for it.) Similarly, Farage's 14% is needed for the Tories to do better than their current, tiny, jiggered, majority. But the 'science' of polling is practically meaningless in Britain, as was clear in the last election. 

The substantial issue of the coming election partly lies with the ability (or lack of it) of the leadership and of the conference of the Labour Party, ideally promoting mounting mass action against Boris across the country and building key alliances which presents a popular, practical and attractive future.  Boris's spray of a few £millions, plus a false end to Brexit, is not a future. It is a Trumpite disaster. The future is a different economy, because the one that Britain has doesn't work; it is concentration on health, education, welfare and redistribution as the key jobs of government and it is stopping getting into Trump's wars and fights across the globe.

The current crop of Labour MPs, even including a hopeful new selection, will not be enough as a large number remain who are hostile to all things radical and socialist. They hang on to the Blairite history, where it was supposed that all classes, in practice mainly the rich, were well supported. Besides these MPs, more dangerous is the fact that the general population is not receiving an alternative message - one that stands against Boris's bombast. If Labour starts setting up concrete agreements now, particularly with the Scottish Nationalists and the Greens, that would make a radical future seem far more real. Support for the ridiculously under-represented Green Party requires a large-scale Labour outreach to them and an open, publicly-shared support in common for a new green economy. Millions of young people see the centre of their political lives in a battle to be green. Equally, the dissolution of the House of Lords would allow for the great cities and their leaders to build a new institution that raises democracy among local people. All of these steps and others, starting now, would demonstrate powerful  images of a different, better society which everybody can understand. 

Mass-action and a radical Labour, projecting a new version of the sort of country (and countries) that could be won by millions of ordinary people across the whole of the UK, will build a new vision in society. That is yet to be won. There needs to be a different picture of the future in the countries of the UK. Radical Labour and its allies need to de-centre Dunkirk and the all the other remnants of Empire, and create a new majority in society. In turn a new majority will help a new unity among the working class and its allies that can put Brexit in its proper place - with Brexit measured as a part and only a part of the much wider future that needs to be constructed. These are essential goals to be won through mass action and political clarity. 

If Boris wins and gets through, he will start failing very, very fast, both inside his party and outside in society. And then it will be the fight against fascism that will become the priority. 

Hope and Fear.

Despite the significance of the UK May 7 General Election, which points up the dangers of the political crisis for the country's establishment (see blog 22 April), it is still a moot point whether the majority of the people of Britain have the means to exploit their foes' weaknesses.

A genuine, democratic and socialist model of society is, of course, not an option for the mainstream  majority in this election. Among other things, the conditions for such a choice include a developed political understanding among the majority. Positive political understanding in the working class of Britain has, as a product of major defeats, including in and by the Labour Party, been rolled back since the 1980s. Yet in the modern age all great progressive change requires heightened political consciousness among the mass of the people. When South African apartheid fell, the black majority understood their oppressors better than they understood themselves. Even in the recent Scottish referendum vote, the result and then the continuing enthusiasm and mobilisation of a large, younger and poorer sector of Scots, mainly in and around the SNP, reflects a year long argument in that country and the experience of decades of a democratic deficit.

Socialism is a qualitatively higher ambition. Tremendous change has and does happen very rapidly. But achieving socialism can only result from the conscious act of the majority. It is not available through simply reading books or by luck or through the will of 'great men and women', much as all that might also be required. It comes through deep understanding of society's contradictory forces and its clashing events, and the organisation of the people embedded in that experience, who, through the collective energy released are therefore able to seize on the practise of their own and others' lives as the basis for revealing society's essence and its meaning and its potential alternatives.

Socialism may not be available but anti austerity politics are on offer in the coming UK election. And here lies the question of hope and fear. Because none of Britain's anti-austerity parties offer a coherent image of a world where austerity - and all of its associated conditions - of growing inequality, of the collapse in useful production, of the dominance of finance capital, of endless savage wars, of the fright and horror released by the collapse of underdeveloped counties, of the apparent fragility of the West, are addressed and a confident alternative offered, then voting 'anti austerity, can seem itself a fearful and short term, not to say utopian act. In this context, driven by fear, those who sound most relentlessly defensive will, in the end, and with their reluctance, attract the most support. While the fight for a separate, small, modern, social democratic nation seems, in the context of Scandinavia, a feasible, coherent and therefore hopeful possibility for a considerable proportion of the Scots, such an image is not projected by the Miliband Labour Party. The Labour leadership has no hopeful, new nation, new image, proposition to offer. You vote Labour because you are more frightened by the Tories, that's all. And that is a very weak vantage point. You wonder; if I vote this way will a weak Labour Government mean the big powers who run the world make things worse for me?

Obama called together a huge mass movement before his first election. How did that happen? Because, despite his empty phraseology and his bedrock commitment to the traditional Democratic Party machine and capitalist America, he seemed to represent the real end of slavery; he seemed to speak for the disenfranchised and for a welfare state and for the end of endless wars. People believed he was going to build a new America. And with that country's immense wealth it seemed feasible. In other words he seemed to offer a realistic alternative future. Anti-austerity alone is not a future.

What is available from this election is the platform of credibility and legitimacy that millions of votes for the SNP, for Plaid, for the Greens, for the handful of well known independent anti-austerity candidates, will create for the ongoing struggle against austerity. An outright defeat for the Tories would also help -  by forcing the issue right into the heart of the new Labour led government's day to day prospects of survival, which is by no mean a small matter! Nevertheless, unless the anti-austerity movement in Britain can bring together those voters who made the first step in the direction of hope and away from fear, and begin to enlarge, together with the parties and organisations who fight austerity, on a model of a country and society that looks credible and could be successful and worth a fight, then the gains possible from this election will dissolve.