My thoughts on the EU referendum

Hey people i'll be on Channel 4 tonight debating the EU referendum with Paxman and all the rest... here are my basic thoughts ahead of time...

Some thoughts on the EU

Before I get into my own opinions on the
subject I would first like to note the astoundingly banal and generally poor
standard of debate from both sides in this campaign. Ranging from complete lies
and scaremongering to disregard for experts and their pesky little ‘facts’ to
half truths and outright racism and in the past few days some from both sides
attempting to marshal the murder of Jo Cox by a right wing terrorist (of course
our ‘free’ - read Murdoch - press refuses to call him that) to support their
respective positions before her body is even cold in the ground. Really
generally gutter stuff. When did we become this anti-intellectual, this
unconcerned with knowing actual facts and this easily duped by a political
class who will almost certainly still be rich a powerful on June the 24th
either way? Or were we always made of such stuff?

I also think the public should be deeply
suspicious as to why we are being asked our opinions on this particular issue
when we were not asked regarding austerity, the bankers bailout or Iraq, Libya,
Syria in fact clear and massive public opposition was actually actively ignored
as with countless other issues.

So whilst I am pro-remain, just about and
with great reservations and no illusions about what that actually means; it’s a
vote for the current neo-liberal status quo –I admit that this is a coke and
pepsi style choice, organic non-gmo orange juice is not an option. The British
Nation State is not some anti neo-liberal social alternative to the EU; in fact
the UK was the pioneer of neo-liberal economics in Europe and the city of
London remains the center of European finance.

There is of course a progressive people led
anti-austerity, anti corporatist, anti-imperialist case for leaving the EU and
if that strain of argument were even close to an audible voice in the campaign
and if our current political trajectory was not one of the most regressive in
the Union I may have well been swayed to join the leavers. But as it has played
out the leave lot have appealed to good old fashion fear of the ‘other’ to rile
up support for their cause at a time when the ‘others’ are being left to drown
in the sea in droves, sensitive humane stuff.

Some of the people of this island do have a
great tradition of pro people radical internationalist politics (anti apartheid
struggle, the suffragettes, chartists abolitionist movement etc.) but this
tradition has always been marginalized and oft persecuted by the state and it’s
certainly not that tradition that has been empowered in this ‘debate’.

And whilst I can recognize the political
achievement in bringing a continent that had constantly been at war with itself
to relative peace and stability the EU is indeed a corporatist, neo-colonial
entity, a subject to which we will return later. However legitimate criticisms
do not legitimise lies…

We have been told constantly by the leave
lot that the EU is undemocratic and that poor little bullied Britain is subject
to the random whims of Brussels. This is simply bullshit and anyone who can be
bothered to do an internet search on the structure of and relationship between
the European Council, The European Commission and the European Parliament would
realize that the EU is probably as ‘democratic’ in its decision making process
as the UK, with our House of Lords, our Monarchy and our City Of London
Corporation – to say nothing of the oil/arms industry lobbies - arguably more
so. In addition there are whole sectors of the EU arrangement that the British
Nation state has opted out of in a way no other member nation has been able to
such as the single currency, the Schengen no border zone and EU law on
migration and asylum. The British government has also repeatedly shown its
frustration with the EU rights for workers.

Which brings us on to one of the elephants
in the room that no one in this mess of a debate seems to have brought up.
Iraq. The Brexiters keep telling us that Britain’s ‘sovereignty’ is compromised
by being in the EU (this is just legally untrue by the way) and that Britain is
not free to make its own decisions blah, blah, blah. Perhaps these people were
in a coma during 2003 when several EU member states, much of the UN and of
course British public opinion (there was also that small matter of lack of
evidence for the very thing that the war was justified upon) were all against
invasion and yet the British elite and their US cronies went ahead anyway and
more recently the UK Government decided to drop bombs in Syria without so much
as parliamentary approval.

Does any of this sound like a small bullied
little victim of the dictates of Brussels?

Not really, it sounds more like one of the
most regressive states in the EU (yes us, the UK) by many factual indicators
(arms exports, prison population, child poverty, basic educational attainment etc.)
want to be ‘free’ to be even more regressive. ‘We’ – a certain section of
Britain - want our country back. I can almost hear them singing Britannia rules
the waves, bless them they think it’s 1851, when in the real world India has
just put a rocket on Mars for 10% of the cost NASA can with a whole bunch of
women scientists and while still technically a ‘third world’ country. The world
is complex and for people brought up to believe they are great simply because
they came out of their mothers womb on a particular patch of the earth it can
be hard to adjust to the reality that ‘greatness’ takes actual work.

Back to the EU it is not the liberal,
harmless, beacon of human rights that its most ardent supporters purport it to
be. It is an imperialist behemoth that collectively imposes grossly
asymmetrical trade relationships on Europe’s former colonies and it has immense
collective amnesia about how it came to be so wealthy. This neo-colonial
economic relationship with the Global South massively contributes to the
poverty, instability, conflict (and of course resultant migration) of large
parts of the globe, whilst the EU poses as the worlds shining light for
spreading democratic ideals. Interestingly I have not seen any of the main
voices for Brexit raise this continued economic exploitation of the South as an
issue, much less as a reason for leaving. It does not seem to even be on their
radar.

Back to how it seems Brexit under the
current circumstances would affect everyday people. Lets just deal with the facts;
most economists of many school of economic thought are against Brexit. Legal
experts, (I am being told that UK law firms are already re-registering as Irish
in case of Brexit) the majority of scientists all seem to think it a bad idea
and I would agree with Mr. Gove that we should ignore the well paid experts if
we had a great national moral conviction that we were leaving for moral, humane
reasons that would genuinely better the planet, but that’s not what we have.

Even far from the political mainstream
prominent activist/lawyer/reparationists like Esther Stanford-Xosei are clear
that the EU for all its imperialist unity and actually partly because of that
unity (Berlin 1884 anyone?) is a better structure within which national
minority groups can wage their respective human and peoples (group) rights
struggles than an isolated British nation state at this point in time.

So where does this leave us? With the big I
world, immigration, immigration, immigration. We can try and deconstruct all of
the other arguments as intellectually as we like but this debate has been so
visibly dominated by this omnipotent fear of the other coming over here ‘stealing
our jobs and taking our women’ that we must address it. People are to be heard
claiming that 500 million people now have a British passport as if the red book
was inherently superior to its Swedish, Italian and German counterparts which
we as British Citizens also - by the same logic - have.

The Brexit lot is so desperate they are
even claiming that being free of the EU will leave ‘us’ to look toward parts of
the world Britain has long neglected like the Commonwealth! I mean really. This
is post empire melancholia at its finest. Can you imagine a group of people so
intellectually bereft of ideas that they expect us to believe that British
multinationals are suddenly going to start dealing with the non white parts of
the Commonwealth as business partners rather than as pools of cheap labor and
un-processed resources the moment we leave the EU? You’ll pardon me while I
laugh…

Britain and or private ‘British’ entities like
the East India Company ruled most of the Commonwealth for a couple centuries
before the EU existed and decided not to build any significant infrastructure
and or industrial development other than in those parts of the empire where
they thought white people would settle and live - under apartheid - forever
more. So when I hear members of the same class, who have never show any signs
of global south solidarity before invoke the well being of our homelands as a
reason for leaving the EU, I am very suspicious. No in fact I just plain don’t
trust a word they say.

The experts are telling us that there will
be at least a decade of re-negotiating trade deals, very serious economic
downturn and loss of business, the potential for the UK to adopt regressive
human rights legislation (many of the right have made it clear they’d like to
bring back the death penalty for instance) loss of our own free movement across
Europe and all of the retired gangsters from the ends having to return from
Spain but this is all worth it to regain some outdated imperial notion of sovereignty
(a sovereignty which Britain still legally has) and just in case the Turks join
the EU in 20 years, essentially. Of course its highly unlikely that Turkey will
ever join, given that all EU member states get a veto on new members but the
mere threat is enough for some people.

I can imagine some of the critics ‘from the
left’ reading this thus far screaming but but but. I hear you and whilst
rallying against TTIP or for workers rights or any of the other left leaning
reasons that have been stated (and I acknowledge in principle) for leaving the
EU sounds really cool, I think this position is naïve. Britain is already by
many indices as pointed out above one of and in some cases the most Neo-Liberal
state in Europe - we imprison our population at roughly double the rate the
Germans do, despite them taking a much more politically progressive approach to
migrants and refuges, for example. The City of London after all is the center
of European finance, to think Westminster will stop governing in favor of big
banks post Brexit just because the big banks are in favor of remain seems an
odd conclusion to me but happy to hear more about how that would actually work?

I am going to make a very crude, imperfect
but philosophically interesting (in my opinion at least) historical parallel.
America. I think nobody will doubt (at least I hope) that the US is ‘the’
imperial power in the world today and that it was founded on racist
exploitation, slavery and genocide. Would the south leaving America after the
civil war have been positive for history? We’ll never know and whilst America
is 10,000 miles south of perfect I am still glad the North won and that the
racist imperial union was preserved, why? Because the realistic alternative at
the time was far worse; a Southern US where race based slavery and terrorism,
eugenics and serfdom for poor whites would in all likelihood have continued
until today. And whilst 2016 Britain is obviously not 1850’s Alabama I think
the principle remains the same, sometimes a shit version of power is better
than a shittier one. I am glad the allies won World War II despite their mass
murdering colonial rampages around the globe, because the Nazi’s were obviously
a worse alternative at the time for example. Any how I digress

I am not mystic meg I do not have a crystal
ball but I think if we leave the EU it’s the ‘hard right’ that have dominated
the narrative that will be empowered and the narrow nationalism (that both
leave and remain have invoked when it suits them) will again come to the fore
and push us further right. This is of course conjecture, but in a land where a
few million people do not think the current status quo is far right enough and
with a little knowledge of British history I’d like to think its an educated
guess.

I must stress though I could be wrong and
we genuinely might transform into Norway on the 24th June 2016
except I am not convinced that shape shifting is real.

But hey you might save your great grandkids
from having a Turk for a neighbor, but you’ll still have Bangladeshi and
Ghanaian born nurses cleaning your dying grandmothers shit and all in all it is
they, the poor and the ones not in power and definitely not the political class
that are the cause of all Britain’s problems isn’t it? It’s they who ushered in
austerity and bailed out the banks and it is they that used to hang poor people
at Tyburn too; it’s always (on this ISLAND) been the fault of the immigrants.

One of the last things Shakespeare ever
wrote was a soliloquy he put into the mouth of Thomas Moore telling the English
people to be kinder to those fleeing persecution and poverty in other lands (in
this case from northern Italy) apart from the archaic language it could have
been written last week. Sad really.

Which brings us onto Scotland. The SNP
despite all their many shortcomings and blind spots are easily the most
progressive of Britain’s mainstream parties on big issues like austerity, war
and immigration. They have also made it clear that if the UK leaves the EU that
would trigger a second referendum that the SNP would almost certainly win.
Where would this leave us in England, Wales and Northern Ireland? With a far
right Tory government, a few million UKIP supporters and the most politically
progressive part of the nation gone forever. To think that the Labor and Tory warmongers
will have any real opposition in an SNP-less Westminster seems fanciful to me.
But hey maybe Corbyn will be the next PM and large sections of the English
working class will rediscover that Polish plasterers are not their enemy, who
knows? I doubt it though.

So, strangely I find myself telling you
that I think a vote for the status quo – understanding what they actually means
- in this instance is actually the more sensible option because the realistic
alternative does, to me at least, seem that bleak.

Social justice groups will still have to
fight, things will still be shit, austerity will continue, the banks will still
run the world and be able to steal 500bn from the national economy after
fucking it up, the EU Plutocracy will still do its best to keep poor countries
of the south underdeveloped, all of that is true. But I honestly think that a
post Brexit Britain will be even more neo-liberal and nationalist than today
and for that reason with no illusions about what the status quo is, if you feel
to vote I would vote remain, just.

References

Professor
Michael Dougan on the EU

Brexit
as nostalgia for empire

http://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/06/19/brexit-nostalgia-empire/

What
would Brexit mean for Human rights

http://rightsinfo.org/brexit-mean-human-rights/

Employment
rights

http://www.solicitorsjournal.com/comment/employment-rights-unseen-iceberg-brexit-debate

The
EU is exporting UK Neo-Liberalism to the rest of Europe

http://www.ier.org.uk/blog/eu-exporting-uk-neoliberalism-rest-europe

The
EU and other Neo-Liberal nightmares

https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/enrico-tortolano/eu-and-other-neoliberal-nightmares