All we need is for the really difficult negotiations to start.....
Then, once the Cabinet has agreed on a common approach, the Government can begin attempting to agree the broad outlines of any deal (Free Trade Agreement) as part of the Article 50 negotiations.
Then, assuming that a Brexit deal can be ratified, trade negotiations on what can be agreed, and I'm not sure that the EU will be that keen on Canada+, between the EU and the UK as a third party country can begin.
All we need is for the really difficult negotiations to start.....
Then, once the Cabinet has agreed on a common approach, the Government can begin attempting to agree the broad outlines of any deal (Free Trade Agreement) as part of the Article 50 negotiations.
Then, assuming that a Brexit deal can be ratified, trade negotiations on what can be agreed, and I'm not sure that the EU will be that keen on Canada+, between the EU and the UK as a third party country.
I don't expect this to gain any traction at this point in time but it shows the direction certain Tory MP's are looking to take the UK in post-Brexit.
When Parliament voted against a ministerial power grab last week it was a tough fight, however the blood runs cold thinking about Gove, Johnson, Davis, Fox and others making it up as they go along (as they're doing with brexit). One of the reasons I want to stay in the EU (get ready to scoff brexiters) is the extra layer of EU protective democracy against the dictatorial instincts of politicians like Johnson, for whom power for the sake of power is their motivation.
Good to see that Fintan O'Toole wrote a long article (Irish Times subscriber pages) over the weekend especially for @seth plum.
He's nice like that...
Fintan O’Toole: UK voted for Brexit because citizens feel their country is ‘broken’. It can be fixed.
Decades of demonisation made the EU a natural fit in the search for an 'oppressor' to revolt against.
The wave of reactionary resentment that has swept across Europe and the United States is generally filed under the vague and often inaccurate label of populism. But if progressive politics is to respond effectively it has to start from a more subtle analysis.
If we look in particular at Brexit we can see that there are actually two distinct phenomena at work: the sore tooth and the broken umbrella. The first will be very hard to deal with. The second is where hope lies.
The sore tooth Nationalist fervour is like having a sore tooth. The tooth is a very small part of the body, and a sense of national identity is actually a very small part of most people’s lives. But a person with a sore tooth finds it hard to think about anything else. There is a pain there that will not stop until it is somehow assuaged – the ache of collective resentment, the nagging feeling that “we” have somehow been done down by “them”.
The problem is that the pain is not necessarily rational – and therefore it may be very difficult to alleviate. It feeds on feelings of loss and on resentment at slights that may or may not be real. And indeed it doesn’t much matter whether they are real or not: the effects are the same either way.
One of the most striking aspects of, for example, the resentment of immigrants that is at the heart of so much of the current wave of nationalism in Europe and the United States is that anti-immigrant sentiment tends to be strongest in places where there are fewest immigrants. The sense of being “swamped” is often most potent in places where in fact the demographic tide is going out.
Telling these people that immigrants are okay is not going to change their feelings. Because those feelings are not rooted in reality, they are not susceptible to this kind of argument.
Brexit is driven above all by a force that was gathering itself in the shadows: English nationalism. The problem with this English nationalism is not that it exists. It has a very long history, and indeed England can be seen as one of the first movers in the formation of the modern nation state.
The English have as much right to a collective political identity as the Irish or the Scots (and indeed as the Germans or the French) have. But for centuries English nationalism has been buried in two larger constructs: the United Kingdom and the British Empire. The gradual construction of the UK, with the inclusion first of Scotland and then of Ireland, gave England stability and control in its own part of the world and allowed it to dominate much of the rest of the world through the empire. Britishness didn’t threaten Englishness; it amplified it.
But now the empire is gone, and the UK is slipping out of England’s control. Britain’s pretensions to be a global military power petered out in the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan. The claim on Northern Ireland has been ceded, and Scotland, although not yet ready for independence, increasingly looks and sounds like another country.
In retrospect it is not surprising that the reaction to these developments has created a reversion to an English, rather than a British, allegiance. In the 2011 census 32.4 million people (57.7 percent of the population of England and Wales) chose “English” as their sole identity, while just 10.7 million people (19.1 percent) associated themselves with a British identity only. But there are few positive democratic expressions of this English identity.
The sore tooth is being felt by millions of tongues, but those tongues were not able to give it expression until Brexit came along.
As a nationalist revolution, however, Brexit is doomed to failure because it is radically incoherent. It does not know what kind of nationalism it wants to articulate. Crudely, passionate nationalism has taken two forms. There is an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to dominate the world, the other to throw off such dominance. The incoherence of the new English nationalism is that it wants to be both.
On the one hand Brexit is fuelled by nostalgic fantasies of Empire 2.0, a reconstructed global trading empire in which the old colonies will be reconnected to the mother country. On the other it is an insurgency and therefore needs an oppressor to revolt against. As England doesn’t actually have an oppressor it was necessary to invent one.
Decades of demonisation by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and by the enormously influential Daily Mail made the European Union a natural fit for the job. But these contradictory impulses cannot be made to work together: throwing off a nonexistent yoke cannot lead to Empire 2.0.
Thus the oddest thing about the political turn this English nationalist revolt has taken since the Brexit referendum: it is very, very French. It is pure Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the “general will” of the people has been expressed once and for all on referendum day, and therefore anyone who seeks to question that popular will is a traitor.
Theresa May, in reality an old-fashioned Home Counties conservative, thought the way to gain and consolidate power was to embrace a phoney populism in which the narrow and ambiguous majority who voted for Brexit under false pretences are to be reimagined as “the people”.
May’s allies in the Daily Mail using the language of the French revolutionary terror characterise recalcitrant judges and parliamentarians as “enemies of the people” and “saboteurs”, and even the Daily Telegraph, which used to be a quality conservative paper, published a wanted-poster-style front page with mugshots of dissident Tory MPs under the headline “The Brexit mutineers”.
In their feverish imaginations the hard Brexiteers can hear the tumbrils squeaking over the cobblestones and the knitting needles of the old ladies waiting by the guillotine clicking away as they wait for the renegade heads to roll.
But actually England was never ready for a French revolution. Its democratic traditions are suspicious of monolithic power and rooted in the idea that dissent and deliberation are both necessary and legitimate. May’s demands for an overwhelming parliamentary majority that could command obedience to the Brexit revolution were decisively rejected in the unnecessary general election she called.
The broken umbrella The whole project of Brexit as a national liberation movement fell apart and cannot be put back together. Ein Volk, ein Theresa, ein Brexit does not work for Britain as a whole, and it doesn’t even work in England. Part of the reason for this is that there is another force in the rise of nationalism in England and elsewhere. It is not just the sore tooth. It is also the broken umbrella.
For all the incoherent resentment that expresses itself in a negative identity politics, there is another, entirely rational side to allegiance to the nation state. People look to the nation state as a shelter, an umbrella that will shield them from the worst effects of economic and cultural globalisation.
The umbrella is not a bad image of this expectation, for people know that an umbrella doesn’t change the weather or even keep you entirely dry. It just makes your exposure more bearable.
People know that nation states can’t protect them from the immense forces of global change; they just think they should be able to offer them some shelter from the storms that make their lives more and more precarious.
The problem is that the umbrella is broken. After the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, nation states lost confidence in their core mission of protecting and enabling the fundamental rights of their citizens to dignity, equality and security – rights that are steadily eroded by the so-called free market.
After the second World War and the Holocaust the nation state in Europe and, to a large extent, in North America became the welfare state. The potential for the sore tooth may always have been there, but the body politic could feel its other limbs: educational opportunity, public housing, national health systems, a steady shift towards economic equality.
The gamble of the centre right (and eventually of the centre left, too) was that the erosion of the welfare state, and with it the concrete, practical attachment of citizens to the nation state, could be somehow made okay by the European project. Never mind that the umbrella is broken, here’s a much bigger umbrella.
But however much the EU has indeed sought to protect social rights, it has not had the power – and its dominant orthodoxy has not had the desire – to create a European welfare state.
The disillusion that many people feel with the European project is because it has not been able to live up to the implicit promise that we could replace the broken umbrella of eroded national welfare states with the shiny new umbrella of a postnationalist cosmopolitanism in which all the sore teeth will be painlessly extracted.
The worst political upheavals come when the person with the sore tooth is standing in the gales of globalisation under a broken umbrella. The power of a force like Brexit is that it combines the irrational energies of incoherent resentment and unarticulated nationalism with an entirely rational fear of the loss of the welfare state.
And in trying to respond to Brexit and to the other ethnic nationalisms, including Donald Trump’s, progressives have to weaken these forces by decoupling them.
First we have to recognise that the broken tooth will not easily be extracted; the inchoate resentments will not go away anytime soon. Brexit’s French revolutionary moment has passed and its appeal to an imagined, unified “people” has completely failed. It is no longer a credible national project. But that does not mean that it will cease to be potent.
Indeed the more it recedes as a practical proposition the more its focus will shift into blame and betrayal. Brexit is doomed to be a national resurrection that would always have been glorious – if only it had not been stabbed in the back.
As Brexit fails, the sore tooth will get angrier and its poison will become even more toxic. There is nothing much any of us can do about that: England is going to have find its own version of a nationalism that expresses its best, not its worst, traditions.
But there is a great deal that Europe can do nonetheless. It can get on with fixing the umbrella. It can urgently re-create a European narrative of equality, dignity and protection. What we’ve learnt in the past two years is that two well-known phrases are tautologies. One of them is “social Europe” and the other is “social democracy”.
There is no Europe that is not social Europe. If the European project is not animated by the urgent imperative of social justice it will die a horrible death. And there is no democracy if it is not social democracy. Democracy cannot withstand for very long the inequality, insecurity and indignity that are produced by neoliberal globalisation.
We are fortunate to have been given these lessons while there is still time to learn them.
Good to see that Finatan O'Toole wrote a long article (Irish Times subscriber pages) over the weekend especially for @seth plum.
He's nice like that...
Fintan O’Toole: UK voted for Brexit because citizens feel their country is ‘broken’. It can be fixed.
Theresa May, in reality an old-fashioned Home Counties conservative, thought the way to gain and consolidate power was to embrace a phoney populism in which the narrow and ambiguous majority who voted for Brexit under false pretences are to be reimagined as “the people”.
May’s allies in the Daily Mail using the language of the French revolutionary terror characterise recalcitrant judges and parliamentarians as “enemies of the people” and “saboteurs”
Good to see that Finatan O'Toole wrote a long article (Irish Times subscriber pages) over the weekend especially for @seth plum.
He's nice like that...
Fintan O’Toole: UK voted for Brexit because citizens feel their country is ‘broken’. It can be fixed.
Theresa May, in reality an old-fashioned Home Counties conservative, thought the way to gain and consolidate power was to embrace a phoney populism in which the narrow and ambiguous majority who voted for Brexit under false pretences are to be reimagined as “the people”.
May’s allies in the Daily Mail using the language of the French revolutionary terror characterise recalcitrant judges and parliamentarians as “enemies of the people” and “saboteurs”
Contd....
"Phoney populism"......sums Brexit up perfectly!
If we keep in denying the aspirations of the majority we may see some real populism.
Good to see that Finatan O'Toole wrote a long article (Irish Times subscriber pages) over the weekend especially for @seth plum.
He's nice like that...
Fintan O’Toole: UK voted for Brexit because citizens feel their country is ‘broken’. It can be fixed.
Theresa May, in reality an old-fashioned Home Counties conservative, thought the way to gain and consolidate power was to embrace a phoney populism in which the narrow and ambiguous majority who voted for Brexit under false pretences are to be reimagined as “the people”.
May’s allies in the Daily Mail using the language of the French revolutionary terror characterise recalcitrant judges and parliamentarians as “enemies of the people” and “saboteurs”
Contd....
"Phoney populism"......sums Brexit up perfectly!
If we keep in denying the aspirations of the majority we may see some real populism.
Telling these people that immigrants are okay is not going to change their feelings. Because those feelings are not rooted in reality, they are not susceptible to this kind of argument.
One new EU migrant arriving for long term residence in the UK every 5 minutes, is a reality, as are the housing shortage, overcrowded schools and public services. These problems stem from this island being overcrowded and the inability to build infrastructure to match this increased demand in matching time.
There is an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to dominate the world,
For me, I can't remember the last Brit I spoke to who wanted to "dominate the world"
On the one hand Brexit is fuelled by nostalgic fantasies of Empire 2.0, a reconstructed global trading empire in which the old colonies will be reconnected to the mother country.
For me, I can't remember the last Brit I spoke to who could even name the "old colonies" let alone wanted them "reconnected to the mother country". I hardly think buying a shipment of New Zealand lamb counts as "reconnecting to the mother country". This part of the article is tosh.
After the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, nation states lost confidence in their core mission of protecting and enabling the fundamental rights of their citizens to dignity, equality and security
What on earth does this mean - "lost confidence in their core mission of protecting the rights of their citizens to ........"
Does the writer believe that the UK Gov't is not prepared to protect the rights of it's citizens ?
Some good points made, but an awful lot of waffle in there as well.
You keep banging on about this new migrant every 5 minutes as the root cause of overstretched services. It simply isn't the case, if it were then the baby born every 100 seconds would be destroying our essential services.
You keep banging on about this new migrant every 5 minutes as the root cause of overstretched services. It simply isn't the case, if it were then the baby born every 100 seconds would be destroying our essential services.
Exactly. So the birth rate, increased life expectancy and non-eu immigration are causing a much higher impact to the population so why focus on an area of great financial benefit to the UK?
Net immigration is falling and is actually zero when it comes to the EU8
Net migration is back to the 2014 levels. For EU citizens, that's one (net) permanent new UK resident every 5 minutes. Whether they come from EU8 or EU27 makes no difference to me.
In the main they are Polish so why don't you develop your theories about "proper checks" - perhaps a biometric ID card to be carried at all times. After all, a tattoo sounds a bit Nazi doesn't it?
No need post Brexit, the EU (Polish) passport will be stamped upon entry to the UK.
Vacancies are up by nearly 10% - thats 800,000 unfilled posts which could be supplying services, taxes and profits into the UK economy.
800,000 vacancies, but there is nowhere (generally) for new workers to live, and no guarantee that the vacancies exist in areas that have current housing capacity.
Some are obsessed by EU immigration - that is plain for all to see. There are 32 million people in employment in the UK. And yet just 7% of those people come from the EU. The reality is that net immigration from the EU27 will vapourize if we exit the EU without a trade deal.
The view propagated by IDS and Farage is that it's the rate of immigration is to blame for housing shortages, queues at the NHS and bulging class sizes. But how can just 7% of the population cause all these issues?
If you have approximately an extra 3.6 million people in front of you at A&E , I think you may have an issue. Ditto, the classroom and housing queue.
Did you see that message on the side of a bus?! And this goes for @Valiantphil too!
The reality is that the UK currently has fewer acute beds relative to its population than almost any other comparable health system - source Kingsfund. And it continues: research shows that initiatives to moderate demand for hospital care often struggle to succeed. Progress depends on having sufficient capacity to provide appropriate care outside hospital, yet evidence suggests that intermediate care capacity is currently only enough to meet around half of demand and cuts in funding have led to significant reductions in publicly funded social care.
Put another way the number of beds blocked per day has increased from 4,000 to 6,000 because there is simply nowhere to transfer patients due to cuts and austerity. Not immigrants and EU citizens. This article from the Telegraph explains the issue.
Telling these people that immigrants are okay is not going to change their feelings. Because those feelings are not rooted in reality, they are not susceptible to this kind of argument.
1. One new EU migrant arriving for long term residence in the UK every 5 minutes, is a reality, as are the housing shortage, overcrowded schools and public services. These problems stem from this island being overcrowded and the inability to build infrastructure to match this increased demand in matching time.
There is an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to dominate the world,
2. For me, I can't remember the last Brit I spoke to who wanted to "dominate the world"
On the one hand Brexit is fuelled by nostalgic fantasies of Empire 2.0, a reconstructed global trading empire in which the old colonies will be reconnected to the mother country.
3. For me, I can't remember the last Brit I spoke to who could even name the "old colonies" let alone wanted them "reconnected to the mother country". I hardly think buying a shipment of New Zealand lamb counts as "reconnecting to the mother country". This part of the article is tosh.
After the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, nation states lost confidence in their core mission of protecting and enabling the fundamental rights of their citizens to dignity, equality and security
4. What on earth does this mean - "lost confidence in their core mission of protecting the rights of their citizens to..."
Does the writer believe that the UK Gov't is not prepared to protect the rights of it's citizens ?
Some good points made, but an awful lot of waffle in there as well.
I cannot claim to be Fintan O'Toole, so this is, necessarily, my take on his comments - I may misconstrue them.
1. Parts of the island(s) comprising the United Kingdom may be overcrowded, but that is emphatically not the case for the country as a whole. In general, migration from within the EU is less likely to have the sort of impact on schools and public services, and even housing that you suggest, because of the age profile and marital status of many of the migrants.
Generally speaking, EU migrants are young and able, often with skills that are no longer valued or learnt by UK nationals (a classic example of this is the hospitality industry). In common with other migrant groups, there is a tendency towards chain migration - so that you find people go to places where they know people - and also towards multiple occupancy of properties. This, and the reaction of some towards the migrant group, is exactly the same as has happened with West Indians, Irish, Asians, Dutch, etc., etc. What is different in terms of EU migrants is that, within the EU, migration did not feel like a permanent decision. Some came and stayed, but many did not, it did not have the same feeling of permanence as, for example, going to Australia or the USA.
There are families with children in school, obviously, even in the sunlit uplands of Northern Ireland - but these children (not all) have a habit (as do lots of migrant children, possibly because they are multilingual) of being high academic achievers in school in comparison to the native born students. This means two things, firstly teachers do not have to work as hard with these pupils and, secondly, like many of the children of Asian immigrants, if they stay they are likely to provide a larger proportion of the next generation of professionals in the UK.
2. There clearly is an imperial nationalism (the history of the British Empire, the US's "manifest destiny", and virtually everything that Vladimir Putin does, would seem to prove the point). Like you, I have not met anyone seeking to take over the World (assuming that Pinky and The Brain doesn't count), but there have been more than a few who have expressed, for example, a belief that Ireland should give up its independence and become part of a new United Kingdom. And there are many who look back with approval to a time when the Commonwealth was a less independent body than today (I will almost gloss over people like Liam Fox, who suggest a return to the buccaneering "trading" of people like Sir Francis Drake).
3. No, perhaps, after all, I may have to introduce you to the wonders of Liam Fox, and a number of leading lights in the Conservative Party that have made very clear that, despite having abandoned the Commonwealth to its own devices before, and the discrete economic interests of its member states, that this precisely what they would like to see happen. Apparently, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, et al, are just queuing up to offer supremely preferential trading arrangements....
4. I think Fintan O'Toole is suggesting that Thatcherism and Reaganomics fundamentally undermined the social contract that existed, or was at least implied, within Western democratic systems. They were revolutionary, tearing down the old order and replacing an essentially communitarian outlook in government and society with an individualistic and selfish one. There are many, I am sure, that will say this is only natural, a Darwinian impulse (I, on the other hand, have a degree of nervousness about people seeking to bring Darwin's theory into the political sphere).
What Fintan O'Toole is suggesting is not that the UK Government cannot protect, or is incapable of protecting, the rights of citizens to dignity, equality and security, rather that, in common with other administrations begat by Ronnie and Maggie, they choose not to.
I think I understand May's strategy now. She will keep repeating "we want a deep and meaningful relationship", "we want a deep and meaningful relationship ", "we want a deep and meaningful relationship ", again and again and again until the EU cave into her demands just to get her to shut the fuck up!. It is all based on her "strong and stable" , "strong and stable", master plan.
Comments
Come Xmas you will be dancing to cliff all morning lol
Live on the edge that's me
All we need is for the really difficult negotiations to start.....
Then, once the Cabinet has agreed on a common approach, the Government can begin attempting to agree the broad outlines of any deal (Free Trade Agreement) as part of the Article 50 negotiations.
Then, assuming that a Brexit deal can be ratified, trade negotiations on what can be agreed, and I'm not sure that the EU will be that keen on Canada+, between the EU and the UK as a third party country can begin.
I don't expect this to gain any traction at this point in time but it shows the direction certain Tory MP's are looking to take the UK in post-Brexit.
One of the reasons I want to stay in the EU (get ready to scoff brexiters) is the extra layer of EU protective democracy against the dictatorial instincts of politicians like Johnson, for whom power for the sake of power is their motivation.
He's nice like that...
Fintan O’Toole: UK voted for Brexit because citizens feel their country is ‘broken’. It can be fixed.
Decades of demonisation made the EU a natural fit in the search for an 'oppressor' to revolt against.
The wave of reactionary resentment that has swept across Europe and the United States is generally filed under the vague and often inaccurate label of populism. But if progressive politics is to respond effectively it has to start from a more subtle analysis.
If we look in particular at Brexit we can see that there are actually two distinct phenomena at work: the sore tooth and the broken umbrella. The first will be very hard to deal with. The second is where hope lies.
The sore tooth
Nationalist fervour is like having a sore tooth. The tooth is a very small part of the body, and a sense of national identity is actually a very small part of most people’s lives. But a person with a sore tooth finds it hard to think about anything else. There is a pain there that will not stop until it is somehow assuaged – the ache of collective resentment, the nagging feeling that “we” have somehow been done down by “them”.
The problem is that the pain is not necessarily rational – and therefore it may be very difficult to alleviate. It feeds on feelings of loss and on resentment at slights that may or may not be real. And indeed it doesn’t much matter whether they are real or not: the effects are the same either way.
One of the most striking aspects of, for example, the resentment of immigrants that is at the heart of so much of the current wave of nationalism in Europe and the United States is that anti-immigrant sentiment tends to be strongest in places where there are fewest immigrants. The sense of being “swamped” is often most potent in places where in fact the demographic tide is going out.
Telling these people that immigrants are okay is not going to change their feelings. Because those feelings are not rooted in reality, they are not susceptible to this kind of argument.
Brexit is driven above all by a force that was gathering itself in the shadows: English nationalism. The problem with this English nationalism is not that it exists. It has a very long history, and indeed England can be seen as one of the first movers in the formation of the modern nation state.
The English have as much right to a collective political identity as the Irish or the Scots (and indeed as the Germans or the French) have. But for centuries English nationalism has been buried in two larger constructs: the United Kingdom and the British Empire. The gradual construction of the UK, with the inclusion first of Scotland and then of Ireland, gave England stability and control in its own part of the world and allowed it to dominate much of the rest of the world through the empire. Britishness didn’t threaten Englishness; it amplified it.
But now the empire is gone, and the UK is slipping out of England’s control. Britain’s pretensions to be a global military power petered out in the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan. The claim on Northern Ireland has been ceded, and Scotland, although not yet ready for independence, increasingly looks and sounds like another country.
In retrospect it is not surprising that the reaction to these developments has created a reversion to an English, rather than a British, allegiance. In the 2011 census 32.4 million people (57.7 percent of the population of England and Wales) chose “English” as their sole identity, while just 10.7 million people (19.1 percent) associated themselves with a British identity only. But there are few positive democratic expressions of this English identity.
The sore tooth is being felt by millions of tongues, but those tongues were not able to give it expression until Brexit came along.
As a nationalist revolution, however, Brexit is doomed to failure because it is radically incoherent. It does not know what kind of nationalism it wants to articulate. Crudely, passionate nationalism has taken two forms. There is an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to dominate the world, the other to throw off such dominance. The incoherence of the new English nationalism is that it wants to be both.
On the one hand Brexit is fuelled by nostalgic fantasies of Empire 2.0, a reconstructed global trading empire in which the old colonies will be reconnected to the mother country. On the other it is an insurgency and therefore needs an oppressor to revolt against. As England doesn’t actually have an oppressor it was necessary to invent one.
Decades of demonisation by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and by the enormously influential Daily Mail made the European Union a natural fit for the job. But these contradictory impulses cannot be made to work together: throwing off a nonexistent yoke cannot lead to Empire 2.0.
Thus the oddest thing about the political turn this English nationalist revolt has taken since the Brexit referendum: it is very, very French. It is pure Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the “general will” of the people has been expressed once and for all on referendum day, and therefore anyone who seeks to question that popular will is a traitor.
Theresa May, in reality an old-fashioned Home Counties conservative, thought the way to gain and consolidate power was to embrace a phoney populism in which the narrow and ambiguous majority who voted for Brexit under false pretences are to be reimagined as “the people”.
May’s allies in the Daily Mail using the language of the French revolutionary terror characterise recalcitrant judges and parliamentarians as “enemies of the people” and “saboteurs”, and even the Daily Telegraph, which used to be a quality conservative paper, published a wanted-poster-style front page with mugshots of dissident Tory MPs under the headline “The Brexit mutineers”.
In their feverish imaginations the hard Brexiteers can hear the tumbrils squeaking over the cobblestones and the knitting needles of the old ladies waiting by the guillotine clicking away as they wait for the renegade heads to roll.
But actually England was never ready for a French revolution. Its democratic traditions are suspicious of monolithic power and rooted in the idea that dissent and deliberation are both necessary and legitimate. May’s demands for an overwhelming parliamentary majority that could command obedience to the Brexit revolution were decisively rejected in the unnecessary general election she called.
Contd....
The broken umbrella
The whole project of Brexit as a national liberation movement fell apart and cannot be put back together. Ein Volk, ein Theresa, ein Brexit does not work for Britain as a whole, and it doesn’t even work in England. Part of the reason for this is that there is another force in the rise of nationalism in England and elsewhere. It is not just the sore tooth. It is also the broken umbrella.
For all the incoherent resentment that expresses itself in a negative identity politics, there is another, entirely rational side to allegiance to the nation state. People look to the nation state as a shelter, an umbrella that will shield them from the worst effects of economic and cultural globalisation.
The umbrella is not a bad image of this expectation, for people know that an umbrella doesn’t change the weather or even keep you entirely dry. It just makes your exposure more bearable.
People know that nation states can’t protect them from the immense forces of global change; they just think they should be able to offer them some shelter from the storms that make their lives more and more precarious.
The problem is that the umbrella is broken. After the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, nation states lost confidence in their core mission of protecting and enabling the fundamental rights of their citizens to dignity, equality and security – rights that are steadily eroded by the so-called free market.
After the second World War and the Holocaust the nation state in Europe and, to a large extent, in North America became the welfare state. The potential for the sore tooth may always have been there, but the body politic could feel its other limbs: educational opportunity, public housing, national health systems, a steady shift towards economic equality.
The gamble of the centre right (and eventually of the centre left, too) was that the erosion of the welfare state, and with it the concrete, practical attachment of citizens to the nation state, could be somehow made okay by the European project. Never mind that the umbrella is broken, here’s a much bigger umbrella.
But however much the EU has indeed sought to protect social rights, it has not had the power – and its dominant orthodoxy has not had the desire – to create a European welfare state.
The disillusion that many people feel with the European project is because it has not been able to live up to the implicit promise that we could replace the broken umbrella of eroded national welfare states with the shiny new umbrella of a postnationalist cosmopolitanism in which all the sore teeth will be painlessly extracted.
The worst political upheavals come when the person with the sore tooth is standing in the gales of globalisation under a broken umbrella. The power of a force like Brexit is that it combines the irrational energies of incoherent resentment and unarticulated nationalism with an entirely rational fear of the loss of the welfare state.
And in trying to respond to Brexit and to the other ethnic nationalisms, including Donald Trump’s, progressives have to weaken these forces by decoupling them.
First we have to recognise that the broken tooth will not easily be extracted; the inchoate resentments will not go away anytime soon. Brexit’s French revolutionary moment has passed and its appeal to an imagined, unified “people” has completely failed. It is no longer a credible national project. But that does not mean that it will cease to be potent.
Indeed the more it recedes as a practical proposition the more its focus will shift into blame and betrayal. Brexit is doomed to be a national resurrection that would always have been glorious – if only it had not been stabbed in the back.
As Brexit fails, the sore tooth will get angrier and its poison will become even more toxic. There is nothing much any of us can do about that: England is going to have find its own version of a nationalism that expresses its best, not its worst, traditions.
But there is a great deal that Europe can do nonetheless. It can get on with fixing the umbrella. It can urgently re-create a European narrative of equality, dignity and protection. What we’ve learnt in the past two years is that two well-known phrases are tautologies. One of them is “social Europe” and the other is “social democracy”.
There is no Europe that is not social Europe. If the European project is not animated by the urgent imperative of social justice it will die a horrible death. And there is no democracy if it is not social democracy. Democracy cannot withstand for very long the inequality, insecurity and indignity that are produced by neoliberal globalisation.
We are fortunate to have been given these lessons while there is still time to learn them.
One new EU migrant arriving for long term residence in the UK every 5 minutes, is a reality, as are the housing shortage, overcrowded schools and public services. These problems stem from this island being overcrowded and the inability to build infrastructure to match this increased demand in matching time.
There is an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to dominate the world,
For me, I can't remember the last Brit I spoke to who wanted to "dominate the world"
On the one hand Brexit is fuelled by nostalgic fantasies of Empire 2.0, a reconstructed global trading empire in which the old colonies will be reconnected to the mother country.
For me, I can't remember the last Brit I spoke to who could even name the "old colonies" let alone wanted them "reconnected to the mother country". I hardly think buying a shipment of New Zealand lamb counts as "reconnecting to the mother country". This part of the article is tosh.
After the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, nation states lost confidence in their core mission of protecting and enabling the fundamental rights of their citizens to dignity, equality and security
What on earth does this mean - "lost confidence in their core mission of protecting the rights of their citizens to ........"
Does the writer believe that the UK Gov't is not prepared to protect the rights of it's citizens ?
Some good points made, but an awful lot of waffle in there as well.
The reality is that the UK currently has fewer acute beds relative to its population than almost any other comparable health system - source Kingsfund. And it continues: research shows that initiatives to moderate demand for hospital care often struggle to succeed. Progress depends on having sufficient capacity to provide appropriate care outside hospital, yet evidence suggests that intermediate care capacity is currently only enough to meet around half of demand and cuts in funding have led to significant reductions in publicly funded social care.
Put another way the number of beds blocked per day has increased from 4,000 to 6,000 because there is simply nowhere to transfer patients due to cuts and austerity. Not immigrants and EU citizens. This article from the Telegraph explains the issue.
1. Parts of the island(s) comprising the United Kingdom may be overcrowded, but that is emphatically not the case for the country as a whole. In general, migration from within the EU is less likely to have the sort of impact on schools and public services, and even housing that you suggest, because of the age profile and marital status of many of the migrants.
Generally speaking, EU migrants are young and able, often with skills that are no longer valued or learnt by UK nationals (a classic example of this is the hospitality industry). In common with other migrant groups, there is a tendency towards chain migration - so that you find people go to places where they know people - and also towards multiple occupancy of properties. This, and the reaction of some towards the migrant group, is exactly the same as has happened with West Indians, Irish, Asians, Dutch, etc., etc. What is different in terms of EU migrants is that, within the EU, migration did not feel like a permanent decision. Some came and stayed, but many did not, it did not have the same feeling of permanence as, for example, going to Australia or the USA.
There are families with children in school, obviously, even in the sunlit uplands of Northern Ireland - but these children (not all) have a habit (as do lots of migrant children, possibly because they are multilingual) of being high academic achievers in school in comparison to the native born students. This means two things, firstly teachers do not have to work as hard with these pupils and, secondly, like many of the children of Asian immigrants, if they stay they are likely to provide a larger proportion of the next generation of professionals in the UK.
2. There clearly is an imperial nationalism (the history of the British Empire, the US's "manifest destiny", and virtually everything that Vladimir Putin does, would seem to prove the point). Like you, I have not met anyone seeking to take over the World (assuming that Pinky and The Brain doesn't count), but there have been more than a few who have expressed, for example, a belief that Ireland should give up its independence and become part of a new United Kingdom. And there are many who look back with approval to a time when the Commonwealth was a less independent body than today (I will almost gloss over people like Liam Fox, who suggest a return to the buccaneering "trading" of people like Sir Francis Drake).
3. No, perhaps, after all, I may have to introduce you to the wonders of Liam Fox, and a number of leading lights in the Conservative Party that have made very clear that, despite having abandoned the Commonwealth to its own devices before, and the discrete economic interests of its member states, that this precisely what they would like to see happen. Apparently, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, et al, are just queuing up to offer supremely preferential trading arrangements....
4. I think Fintan O'Toole is suggesting that Thatcherism and Reaganomics fundamentally undermined the social contract that existed, or was at least implied, within Western democratic systems. They were revolutionary, tearing down the old order and replacing an essentially communitarian outlook in government and society with an individualistic and selfish one. There are many, I am sure, that will say this is only natural, a Darwinian impulse (I, on the other hand, have a degree of nervousness about people seeking to bring Darwin's theory into the political sphere).
What Fintan O'Toole is suggesting is not that the UK Government cannot protect, or is incapable of protecting, the rights of citizens to dignity, equality and security, rather that, in common with other administrations begat by Ronnie and Maggie, they choose not to.
Perhaps, like me, he's a dangerous lefty.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/18/uk-cannot-have-a-special-deal-for-the-city-says-eu-brexit-negotiator-barnier?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard