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by American Dream » Sat Jul 02, 2016 9:17 am
In the absolute furore that has followed Britain’s decision to leave the EU, there is one clear issue that has emerged as the central concern: immigration. Those from across Europe, who chose to build lives and lay down roots here in the UK, have now been sent a clear message of hostility from this country. Indeed, anyone who appears foreign to Britons is now a possible target for racial abuse and assault in public, whilst property owned by supposed foreigners, such as the Polish Social and Cultural Association and Kashmir Meat and Poultry, a halal butcher in Walsall, have also come under attack.
All the while, the referendum has triggered multiple stages of official discussion over the lives of immigrants. Throughout the campaign, people were used as political bargaining chips, and now, whilst also suffering from an increase in racist harassment, continue to be fodder for negotiations between both parties at home and state leaders across Europe. It is difficult not to think that this will be used as an opportunity to tighten the nets of our immigration system more widely, affecting all those who rely on a precarious right to be in the country.
Whilst many are quick to point out that immigration wasn’t the motivating factor for everyone who voted Leave, this argument obscures the fact that immigration and racism have played a significant role in the Brexit discussion. It now feels inevitable that xenophobic ideas will gain in popularity, but they have not come out of nowhere and indeed are enforced by the state. The recent history of British immigration and border policies shows a longstanding willingness to divide people according to their usefulness to the nation. The official approach to immigration has always been keen to use popular racism as a weapon to meet its ends.
At a protest to defend migrants’ rights, called for the day of the referendum result, I spoke to Anna Pichieri from Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary, an independent migrant and civil rights movement. Asked why Movement for Justice had helped call the demonstration, Anna told me:We need to be clear about why this referendum was planned. This is the outcome of many different governments, on the right and on the left, using the racist scapegoating of immigrants to push through all their cuts and austerity measures and the widening of inequality that we have seen. All these measures yet they have no solutions, so both parties know that they have to use the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the stereotyping of immigrants, to make sure that they could push their cuts.
...Subjecting different groups to their own special intensity of exploitation has long created divisions amongst the working class. This animosity forms part of the violence of Whiteness, though it is important to reiterate that racism is also top-down from the powerful elites. Politicians act shocked at the upsurge in racism, as though they never imagined that decades of using hatred to justify their policies could turn into an actual violent revolt against people racialised in the UK.
Anti-racism faces two interlinked challenges: tackling popular participation in the racist structure of Whiteness and opposing the state’s racist laws. In recent years activists have concentrated on state violence, especially combatting immigration raids and supporting calls for justice for those killed in custody. We can see how these two concerns overlap in the case of Jimmy Mubenga, who was unlawfully killed by G4S guards on a deportation flight in 2010. Unfortunately, this referendum has now unleashed popular expressions of racism and it is tempting to concentrate on tackling this development. But the state is responsible for creating the conditions that popular racism flourishes, and we must tackle the state’s failures if we are to have any hope of impacting racism in Britain as a whole.
Brexit threatens us now, but it is preceded by a history of devaluing human life with borders. The left as much as anyone failed to address this and opted instead for quiet disapproval in favour of concentrating on issues seen as more urgent. Racism is and has been an urgent problem. It is time for its disastrous history to be undone before all that is left is the fascist face of Farage.
by Nordic » Sun Jul 03, 2016 5:11 am
by coffin_dodger » Sun Jul 03, 2016 8:34 am
It blows my mind that the vast mJority of people are still being led around by the nose by the media.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jul 03, 2016 8:42 am
Thom Hartmann: The American Revolution Was the Original Brexit (Video)
The author of "What Would Jefferson Do?" examines the circumstances that led to American independence.
By Alexandra Rosenmann / AlterNet July 1, 2016
Thom Hartmann wants to dispel the mythology of how America became independent from Great Britain 240 years ago.
“The story that I heard when I was in school was that the thing that really flipped everybody was the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Prior to the Boston Tea Party, Thomas Jefferson had written a pamphlet called 'A Summary View of the Rights of British Americans,' which was basically how to be a good British subject while living on the North American continent. ... The book [outlined] some of the rights British Americans had—and should have—but it wasn’t talking about separating from England," Hartmann explained.
At the same time, there was "substantial economic downturn—particularly in Europe—in [the] 1770[s]. These were basically major recession, minor depression years in the U.K., and the largest corporation in England was the British East India Company, and that corporation was really struggling... and the principal stockholders in the British East India Company were members of Parliament," Hartmann said.
These British Americans "quietly accept[ed] British rule until Parliament’s enactment of the Tea Act in 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a monopoly on the American tea trade," according to History.com, which, in turn, prompted rebellion.
In "A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party," which Hartmann reads in this segment, Josiah Quincy said on the night of the Boston Tea Party, Dec. 16,1773:
"Imagine not therefore, that you can bring this controversy to a happy conclusion without the most strenuous, the most arduous, the most terrible conflict; consider attentively the difficulty of the enterprise, and the uncertainty of the issue. Reflect and ponder, even ponder well, before you embrace the measures, which are to involve this country in the most perilous enterprise the world has ever witnessed."
“So in other words, they knew they were on the edge by taking on the East India Company, and thus, by proxy, the British government. They realized they were on the edge of a huge Brexit," Hartmann concludes.
Watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8bHgZs_90
by American Dream » Sun Jul 03, 2016 8:56 am
Brexit demonstrates the Left’s failure on Race issues
What really lies at the heart of the “Leave” campaign’s Brexit win?
In an article on race and British cultural studies, Roxy Harris noted that the field’s founders – E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams – ignored “the place of black and brown British subjects in the national polity”. Thompson’s classic 1968 study, The Making of the English Working Class, for example, while covering “topics such as the liberty of ‘the free-born Englishman’” was silent about “the part played by the Empire, the slaves, plantations, the East India Company and so on”.
These great theorists of British society were race-blind.
But it seems that little has been learned from this partial and parochial view of British social and economic history, especially in the writings of a small but vocal group from what we will refer to as “the white Left”.
Since last Friday’s #Brexit vote, where a referendum was held in the UK to determine whether Britain would exit the European Union (EU), Australian writers John Pilger and Jeff Sparrow wrote in New Matilda and Overland respectively that the vote to leave the EU was a knife in the back of neoliberalism (Pilger) and testimony to the success of participatory democracy (Sparrow).
These sentiments are in line with the crowing to be heard from the Left Exit (#Lexit) camp that #Brexit is a nail in the coffin of austerity-Europe. Admonishing those on the Left who voted to remain in the EU as out-of-touch, metropolitan, middle class elite who are comfortable with anti-working class government policy, this brave vanguard presented an analysis that was blind to the fact that Brexit was fought and won on a campaign of racism and xenophobia that played divide and rule with the actual black, brown and white working class.
Tacitly accepting this line, many voices from the white Left, such as that of sociologist and anti-austerity campaigner Lisa McKenzie, repeatedly claimed that to speak of racism was to deride the “real” concerns of ordinary British people. There is no remorse, despite the rapidly unfolding reports of post-Brexit attacks on Eastern Europeans and racialised minorities on the streets of the (dis)United Kingdom.
‘Whenever working-class people have tried to talk about the effects of immigration on their lives, shouting “backward” and “racist” has become a middle-class pastime,’ McKenzie writes in her Guardian opinion piece.
But we do not need to lay the blame for racism at the door of the white working class to nonetheless accept the fact that the cornerstone of Brexit was a fear of immigrants “taking our jobs”, and that “taking our country back” is a vision that never included those already excluded from the national story – that is, the descendants of Britain’s postcolonial immigrants and the more recent arrivals from eastern Europe.
The fact that immigration and multiculturalism were at the heart of a large majority of Leave voters’ concerns – as opposed to capitalist exploitation and democratic deficit – has been borne out. UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage, whose supporters David Cameron had been appeasing by calling the Referendum, quite clearly fought on these lines. In fact, it was Farage who, brazenly ignoring the assassination of Labour MP Jo Cox by a far right-wing activist, claimed victory “without a single bullet being fired“.
But on the Left too, the dog whistle of anti-immigration sentiment can be heard in the desperate attempt to turn the Brexit campaign to socialist advantage. John Pilger, for example, while admitting in his New Matilda article that today’s refugees were created by “invasions and imperial mayhem”, claims that “all this has now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony Blair and impoverishing and disempowering millions”. While refugees might not be responsible for their own plight, according to Pilger, they nonetheless impoverish and disempower Britons.
We share the sentiments behind the call to heed the utter desolation of the British working class, betrayed over and over by an elite in thrall to its own power and enrichment. But it must be noted that it is black and other racialised people who have lost out most as a result of the UK government’s cuts, and it was middle class voters in the least culturally diverse regions, with no interest in the fortunes of any part of the working class, who mainly voted to leave.
A failure to employ an intersectional analysis linking class and race in a reading of the referendum results is to fall into a racist trap: one that equates the working class with whiteness and conflates a pro-immigration stance with the support of big business interests over the interests of the “everyman”.
Despite years of anti-racist activism, to which they perversely lay claim, today’s white Left pundits are as race blind as Thompson and Williams were fifty years before them.
The reduction of racism to a distraction, or what Sparrow referred to as “identity politics”, is also a failure to take seriously the material capacity of racism, as though the processes of racism were but an abstraction from class politics rather than being productive and destructive in their own right. It is a reduction that implies the battle against racism is about winning back an injured image rather than a stolen country – as if anti-racism politics is about fending off an insult rather than an occupier.
Further, a reading of the Brexit results that explains away the racism of many Leave voters as an understandable reflex in the face of cuts and joblessness is one that is ignorant of the actual history of race. This is particularly galling from an Australian perspective, where it cannot be argued that anything like the European levels of post-2008 impoverishment exists. Nonetheless, deeply embedded systemic racism and visceral everyday racism are a durable feature of Australian public culture.
Race developed in tandem with the expropriation of the majority of the world by Europeans, and is inextricable from the project of dividing the deserving from the undeserving, the desirable from the undesirable. It was a pseudo-scientific taxonomy invented to justify European wealth and domination over the globe. It may play out through situations of deprivation and exploitation in the postcolonial world, but it is not reducible to ‘understandable reactions’ of the have-nots, constantly undercut by Schrodinger’s immigrant. Against the backdrop of such a history, the leftist dismissal of racism as a distraction is a post-racial continuation of that same taxonomy; again justifying European decisions that overwhelmingly impact – and kill – today’s undesirables.
It is here that the abject failure of the white Left discloses itself: in failing to address racism, or reducing it to a diversion from the ‘real’ (and ‘separate’) issue of class exploitation, they once again ignore ‘the place of black and brown British subjects in the national polity’. They might justify it as a necessary cost of some lofty, deferred ideal – The Movement, The Impending Revolution, The People – but outside and against the buy-in of those most affected by the decision, such a gesture is little more than a sacrifice of (predominately) brown bodies for white ideals.
Hardly the materialist politics such groups applaud themselves for.
by American Dream » Mon Jul 04, 2016 11:13 am
by American Dream » Mon Jul 04, 2016 11:30 am
Back in the mid-1990s, racism in Britain meant the racism born of colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. It was directed at immigrants from those parts of the world and their British-born descendants. But it faced strong opposition from grassroots movements led by people of color, especially families of Black and South Asian young people who had been killed in racist attacks. In response, Britain’s culture of racism adjusted itself to new circumstances. The search for new enemies after the Cold War suggested Islam as a new racial threat, while the fall of the Berlin Wall pointed to migration from the east of Europe.
When Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined the EU in 2004, Britain’s most popular newspapers warned that hordes of Gypsies would be coming to scrounge welfare benefits. Earlier a small number of Gypsies had settled in Dover on England’s south coast, fleeing neo-Nazi gangs in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The best-selling Sun newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, called them “Slovak Spongers” and “Giro Czechs” (a pun on a common term for welfare payments) and suggested “teaching the gipsies two words, the second one being off.” The Daily Express ran the headline “1.6 million gipsies ready to flood in” on its front cover, accompanied by graphics depicting a foreign invasion. An editorial stated Gypsies were “heading to Britain to leech on us.” Thereafter, eastern European immigrants were white enough to provide an alibi against accusations of racism but not white enough to be welcomed.
Britain’s liberals – enamored with Tony Blair’s celebration of a vapid consumerist multiculturalism – paid little attention to this openly racist campaign waged on the pages of newspapers they never read. But the movement against Britain’s membership of the EU did notice. It had found its perfect populist weapon. The preposterously-named UK Independence Party (UKIP) – formed to campaign for a referendum on EU membership – made opposition to eastern European immigration central to its campaign. Conservative Party leader William Hague had already claimed in an election speech in March 2001 that Britain was now a “foreign land” due to immigration and membership of the EU.
Rupert Murdoch and Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, who between them dominate the British press and set the agenda for the rest of the media, were both opposed to EU membership and used their media power to associate the EU with excessive immigration. Impoverished eastern European migrants were increasingly framed by their newspapers as threats to a British way of life that had actually been destroyed by the Thatcherism the same papers had earlier hailed. Few pointed out that public provisions, such as benefits and social housing, were reduced, not because of immigration, but because the Thatcherism of the 1980s broke the old post-war social democratic consensus which had earlier legitimized the welfare system.
The ten years of Tony Blair’s Labour government, beginning in 1997, did little to reverse this. Worse, in its efforts to gentrify itself, the Labour Party left working-class communities without a political voice. Predictably, various strains of far-Right politics entered the spaces opened up by Labour’s flight to middle England. But middle England was also on the march: in the early 2000s, tens of thousands of not-in-my-backyard protesters opposed the construction of reception centers for refugees in the affluent counties surrounding London. By 2010, when David Cameron’s austerity policies stripped away even more of the social safety net, and real wages and job security plummeted further, it had become fully acceptable in the mainstream to hold “mass immigration” responsible for all manner of evil.
As I wrote at the time in my book The End of Tolerance, newspapers and politicians were blaming immigrants “for the spread of TB, AIDS, and SARS; for failing schools and hospitals; for falling house prices and for rising house prices; for low wages, rising crime, prostitution and road accidents. They were even to blame for the dwindling number of fish in Britain’s rivers, the declining number of swans and the disappearance of donkeys.” They had “not only achieved all this but also held onto a reputation for laziness.”
Britain has indeed experienced relatively high levels of immigration for two decades, both from within and without the EU. However, the driving force of this increased migration is not freedom of movement within the EU. After all, this increase began in the 1990s, before the EU’s eastward expansion. Rather, the migration increase is the result of the ongoing casualization of Britain’s labour market.
From the 1990s, the lower levels of Britain’s economy became increasingly centred upon short-term, non-binding, sub-contracted, peripatetic workforces that could be hired and fired at will and were constantly threatened with replacement by cheaper labor from elsewhere. This transformation of Britain’s labor market, which led to increased demand for rightless migrant workers to exploit, occurred at the same time as free-market globalization generated the conditions for large-scale emigration from many regions of the world, throwing up the migrant populations needed in post-industrial economies like Britain.
The lie of anti-immigrant campaigns is that these deeper structural processes can be overturned through more heavily policed borders. But the only outcome of tightening border controls is the immiseration of the immigrant worker, not a reduction in their number. These circumstances in turn foster the conspiratorial thinking that “cosmopolitan” politicians have abandoned the national interest and given up on controlling immigration; hence the demand to “take back control” – the slogan that won the Brexit vote.
It is also true that the impacts of immigration have not been distributed evenly in Britain. The rich have accrued the economic gains while the poor have faced the social fallout. The burdens on public services of an increasing population have been over-stated but there are some neighborhoods where strains are real. So too in some sectors of the labor market has wage inflation been kept down through the exploitation of new workforces in eastern Europe, whether through immigration or capital flight. The problem is not immigration per se but the way it becomes a focal point for deeper processes of dispossession.
At the same time, institutions that should have enabled such tensions to be worked through and negotiated instead pitted against each other the poor and the still poorer. The BBC’s mandate for public service broadcasting ought to have made it a bulwark against the calumny of tabloid racism. But having patronized or ignored working-class political life since the 1980s, it discovered in the new century a shallow fascination with the “white working class,” whose self-appointed representatives got air time so long as they fitted the stereotype of the uneducated bigot.
A similar dynamic plagued the Labour Party. Unable to offer much of a political programme to the Party’s working-class base, its leaders instead substituted crude nationalist slogans. Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke of “British jobs for British workers,” borrowing a line from the far Right that he knew was meaningless. His successor as party leader Ed Miliband raised money for the 2015 general election campaign by selling mugs with the slogan, “Controls on immigration.”
Britain’s liberal elites assumed that the best way to respond to the anti-immigrant mobilization was to absorb a little of its energy. This tactic, dressed up as responding to “legitimate concerns” on immigration, seemed eminently pragmatic but was strategically counter-productive. It tried to make a distinction between a rational anti-immigrant sentiment and an irrational racism, the former to be absorbed into the mainstream, the latter to be marginalized. In fact, no such distinction existed and acting as if it did had the effect of further legitimizing racism in the political mainstream. To believe the anti-immigrant mobilization, aided by the power of the right-wing press and politicians, could be mollified with sprinklings of liberal “reassurance” was wishful thinking. Instead, its appetite grew stronger the more it was fed.
By 2015, when David Cameron pledged to hold a referendum on EU membership, the stage was set for a populist upsurge. That, combined with the prime minister’s 2010 pledge to reduce net immigration to the “tens of thousands,” sealed his fate. He utterly failed to lower immigration to anywhere near his target. Indeed, there was no way he could have done so without stemming the demand for docile migrant workers at the bottom of the economy, which was impossible to achieve within the free-market consensus. But the Leave the EU campaign argued, with a superficial plausibility, that free movement across the EU, a condition of membership, was the real reason Cameron had failed to reduce immigration. Inevitably, the dominant theme in the referendum contest was whether withdrawal from the EU would be necessary to reduce the number of immigrants entering Britain.
In the last few weeks before the vote, the Leave campaign stepped up its focus on immigration, especially from the Middle East, garnering itself a bump in the polls. Defence minister Penny Mordaunt went on the main Sunday morning political TV show to warn that Turkey was set to join the EU and would present a “security risk” because of its “problems with gangs and terror cells” and its “land border with Syria, Iraq and Iran.” The intended implication was clear: only by leaving the EU could Britain avoid millions of refugees and migrants arriving from the Middle East.
The official Leave campaign backed this message with an online video entitled “Paving The Road From Ankara,” which showed invading arrows tracing a path across Europe from Turkey to Britain. Meanwhile Justice Secretary Michael Gove claimed that staying in the EU would overwhelm public services with migrants from Turkey. Gove, a key figure in the Leave campaign, is a committed neoconservative and close ally of Rupert Murdoch, and is now in a strong position to replace Cameron as prime minister.
A week before the vote, it fell to UKIP leader Nigel Farage to present the Leave message without its veneer of civility, with the launch of an Islamophobic poster showing a crowd of desperate Middle Eastern refugees emblazoned with the slogan, “Breaking point.” The pro-EU camp countered with vague clichés about immigration bringing economic prosperity – a claim that would have sounded hollow to anyone struggling under austerity. But the anti-EU message proved as attractive in leafy, affluent small towns such as Aylesbury and Chichester as it did in former industrial northern and Welsh towns that had been wasted by Thatcherism, making possible a cross-class nativist victory.
Of course, the motives of those who voted for Brexit were complex and varied. Racism, Islamophobia, or anti-immigrant sentiment were not the only reasons to vote to leave the EU. But the Brexit campaign anchored itself on the claim that English life is being destroyed by immigration. It was a fantasy but it had its kernel of truth. The post-war social fabric was indeed being destroyed.
In fact, the culprits were not Muslim or eastern European immigrants and their alleged enablers in Brussels. The real responsibility lay with Britain’s ruling political and economic class, who had imposed thirty years of Thatcherism and thereby tied English society to the whims of global capitalism. Alas, instead of rebelling against the globalization of capital, Britain rebelled against the globalization of labor, finding in the immigrant a suitable object of displaced resentment. Following the Brexit vote, that resentment released itself through a celebratory racism – with abuse and violence against migrants and anyone not white at levels not seen since the 1990s.
The far-right has realized its fantasy of a British “Independence Day” and has proven powerful enough to shake the world. The country has been plunged into its deepest political crisis since World War Two. The collapsing United Kingdom now stands as an example of what can befall any society trapped in a free-market economy flailing in its death throes. In the US presidential election this year, Donald Trump will rely on exactly the same energies that powered the Brexit victory.
The lesson for the US is that right-wing populism cannot be fought by trying to shore up a discredited political center ground or by conceding to nativism and Islamophobia. Nor will a purely economic appeal work in societies where race is a deep part of the social structure.
Instead, we must reject the free-market Reagan-Thatcher consensus as forcefully as the far-right appears to do, while demanding in its place a genuinely radical social and political alternative. As the free-market model continues to unravel, it will be replaced either by new visions of social progress or by new forms of racism and authoritarianism. The words uttered a century ago by Rosa Luxemburg resonate as strongly as ever: “Socialism or barbarism.”
by semper occultus » Mon Jul 04, 2016 12:41 pm
“The story that I heard when I was in school was that the thing that really flipped everybody was the Boston Tea Party in 1773.
by MacCruiskeen » Mon Jul 04, 2016 1:13 pm
by American Dream » Mon Jul 04, 2016 1:24 pm
Farage, who perfected racist dog-whistling as a martial art, followed up on the Brexit vote by hurling ad hominems at the European Parliament while grinning like a constipated turtle.
Highlights of Farage's career in the EU include billing the taxpayer for £2M in expenses, as well as putting his wife on the payroll as a "personal secretary."
by MacCruiskeen » Mon Jul 04, 2016 1:43 pm
by MacCruiskeen » Mon Jul 04, 2016 4:12 pm
Splendid Isolation
Whatever shall we talk about this week in a newsletter dedicated to geopolitics and economics? What’s in the news on the very day of the first All Red Line, in the very week I 'exited' Britain?
That other Brexit. (Funny how these things turn out, eh?)
My official position all along has been very pro-Brexit and I have just spent a pleasing few hours watching liberal Twitter absolutely shit the bed as the results came in.
But then, I was very pro Scottish independence too, until they announced they wanted to join the EU. This is really simple.
Centralisation: Bad.
Decentralisation: Good.
And you cannot get more centralised than an unelected superstructure literally modelled on Martin Bormann’s plans for a pan-European Reich. Never confuse being pro-Europe with pro-Brussels. I am hugely pro-Europe and Brussels is not. How anyone can possibly claim that the EU has the best interest of Europeans at heart when it has -just off the top of my head-
Crushed the life out of the Greek economy
Given levels of youth unemployment in Southern Europe that have previously triggered revolutions
Supported a fascist coup in the Ukraine
It is amazing how no one professing to be pro-EU can begin to describe its actual governance structure. They seem to be far more interested in virtue signalling and straw men arguments.
The actual arguments for leaving are quite sober. Read some of them here.
Also read Martin Armstrong's series of articles about Brexit, his experience with the EU and his experience of Britain.
You will also want to read about the Five Presidents here.
As for its actual foundation, as Dr Farrell said in this week's vidchat, “those of you who are familiar with the historical roots of the EU know what’s going on.” You may want to pick up his book, The Third Way, if you are interested in finding out more.
Archonology Model: War in Heaven Still in Play
Moving forward, the model predicts further rocky decentralisation, accompanied by fearporn from the unelected elites who are being decentralised away. As Catherine Fitts mentions -paraphrasing Tina Turner- we can either do this nice or rough. Rough it is, then. Let Taleb sing you home:
There is something further going on here. The management layer of the AngloAmerican elites -which includes the EU, the Prime Minister, the German Chancellor, etc- are splitting from their super-elite paymasters. Witness the flip-flops on the refugee crisis or American hostility toward Russia. It is too early to tell if this split is because they have worked out they are being downsized (which the Saudis have worked out) or because they remain 'true believers' in their nightmarish technocratic dystopia while Europe's secret powers have decided to go down a far cheaper and more militarised road.
For my fellow Brits, the model also predicts improved economics in the medium term. The pain is the cure here.
Two things to bear in mind going forward:
- This will give tremendous confidence to the several dozen independence movements across Europe.
- A referendum is not binding upon a Prime Minister. However if he is told to weasel out of it by his paymasters then there will be civil unrest, both in the UK and on the Continent. This is Martin Armstrong's collapse in confidence in government.
Either way, the vampire has been staked. Celebrations are called for.
by American Dream » Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:59 pm
The Resistible Rise of Nigel Farage posted by Richard Seymour
"The world was almost won by such an ape!
The nations put him where his kind belong.
But don't rejoice too soon at your escape -
The womb he crawled from is still going strong."
― Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo UiNigel Farage has resigned. He has been, undeniably, the best leader that Ukip is ever likely to have. Imagine, if you can, Paul Nuttall or Godfrey Bloom pulling off his showmanship. As for Douglas Carswell, there is a Sherlock Holmes lookalike contest with his name on it - but he is too fundamentally principled to be an effective demagogue. And with its primary political objective achieved - a break with the European Union followed by a shift to the Atlanticist hard-right in the Conservative Party - the party is likely to begin a slow diminuendo.
This heteroclite assortment of racists, conspiracy theorists, eco-denialists, eugenicists, homophobes and closeted fascists has been the most dynamic force in British politics since 2013. It was the major force shaping the 2015 general election, pulling the agenda to the Right so that Cameron didn't have to. Farage did the job of any good outrider, by driving immigration up the agenda so as to keep the Labour leadership on the defensive. And even if he was condemned for campaigning against "foreigners with HIV" in the last weeks of the campaign, doing so helped harden up* his support base, and he gained 4 million votes for his trouble, or 12.6 per cent of the total.
Because many of those votes came from former Tories, BNPers and English Democrats in Labour heartlands - Ukip effectively becoming the official opposition in these areas - the geographical spread of its support prevented it from gaining much representation. However, it came second in 120 constituencies, and a proportional system would have awarded it some 83 seats. What Farage calls the Ukip "people's army," a coalition between the batshit, the blue-rinse, the bomber-jackets and the bores, was subsequently integral to winning the EU referendum campaign.
It is important to register just how improbable all of this is. Ukip began as a small group of random Tory defectors led by Alan Sked of the Bruges Group and the British American Project. The doctrine of this group was essentially that articulated by Thatcher in her Bruges speech in September 1988, ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level’. The 'Anti-Federalist League,' as the new group was initially called, was clearly pinioned to the hard-right, leaning on support from Enoch Powell and rousing old nationalist themes about Blighty being under threat from a new Hitler. In this embryonic phase, the AFL certainly adverted to a growing schism within Conservatism, but it was by far its least important manifestation. Generally polling fewer votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party, it had to relaunch as the UK Independence Party in 1993.
The terrain was not promising. While euroscepticism was as common as anti-migrant attitudes, Europe was way down the list of popular priorities, as was immigration. The Tories were cracking up in the post-Cold War world, their old unity against the militant left, the IRA, the ANC and Moscow having given way to a major strategic divide over Europe - but the Tories (and Ukip) were the only ones obsessing about this. Ukip thus sought to broaden its agenda, linking opposition to the EU to a range of traditionally rightist concerns, such as immigration controls and the promotion of a nationalist education system.
But it is the emergence of Nigel Farage as a key player that begins to change everything for Ukip. Farage was a former Conservative activist and City trader, who had something more of a feel for politics than the academic dogmatist, Sked. Farage was shrewd, and energetic. He was the only Ukipper to keep his deposit in the 1997 election, in which Ukip performed badly. He came to lead party's group of MEPs. And having played a canny and leading role in ousting the Sked leadership, he was central to Ukip's nuptials with Sir James Goldsmith's vehicle, the Referendum Party, which resulted in there being only one significant eurosceptic party in the UK. They were able to attract more members, more voters, a leading Tory donor named Paul Sykes, and a former Tory minister Roger Knapman, who became the party's leader in 2002. They adapted well to the 'war on terror' climate, somehow simultaneously playing off Islamophobia while positioning themselves as a 'libertarian' opponent of excessive New Labour authoritarianism.
The next episode in which Farage would play a key role was when Ukip recruited the betangoed broadcaster and Islamophobic columnist Robert Kilroy-Silk - a sort of Trump avant la lettre. Kilroy, with all of his customary subtlety, embarked on an attempt to depose the Knapman leadership and argued that Ukip should stand against all Conservative MPs whether eurosceptic or not. At this point, this struck experienced Ukippers as reckless adventurism: the idea had always been to convert the Conservative Party to euroscepticism. Farage and his allies saw him as a loose cannon, crushed the attempted coup and forced Kilroy's resignation. The short-term loss of membership and donor funding was vindicated when Kilroy's new group, Veritas, cruised to an undignified and terminal splat in 2008.
Farage was rewarded for his loyalty and ability when he won the leadership in 2006. This came at an opportune moment, as the Tories had just bet everything on a centrist, media-friendly leadership, thus accelerating the alienation of the party's traditional hard-right. Farage's leadership saw the party's rightist agenda broaden, with a focus on climate denial, tax cuts and support for traditional grammar schools. He began to attract a new layer of Tory donors and businessmen such as Stuart Wheeler and Lord Young. And it was under his leadership that Ukip began to consolidate itself into a party challenging for power, rather than a pressure group.
And yet. Farage, for reasons which remain obscure, chose this moment to step down from the leadership - supposedly to focus on contesting the Buckingham seat of the liberal Tory John Bercow. Whatever the reason, he ducked a punch with uncanny precision. The 2010 general election was a terrible one for Ukip. All the movement in that election was to the centre. Even the BNP, which had been surging for years, saw its first signs of decline in that election. Meanwhile, Ukip's standard 'free market' pitch was unappealing in the era of the credit crunch. Lord Pearson, an old Etonian of the Cold War Right, and a bit of an anti-Muslim obsessive, was an unlikely populist. Moreover, his willingness to campaign for eurosceptic Tories brought him into conflict with a lot of the party faithful, and with the official slogan which invited voters to 'Sod the Lot'.
When Farage returned in August 2010, he couldn't have anticipated the explosions that would create such a convivial atmosphere for Ukip. Certainly, the disintegration of other far right parties, above all the BNP, suggested that there would be plenty of spare votes for Ukip. But it was the authoritarian racism unleashed by the England riots which really broke the stalemate of post-credit crunch politics and demonstrated that all the anxious, pent up energies would be canalised to the racist Right. Ukip thus pounced on a series of moral panics with alacrity - the Rotherham paedophile rings in 2012, the anti-Romanian and anti-Bulgarian scare stories in 2013, the 'Operation Trojan Horse' conspiracy theory in 2014, the halal meat food scare and the Scottish threat to Britishness the same year, and so on. All of the fears that had been incubated in the previous era, in part thanks to New Labour's own policy thematics, exploded in this one. Farage smelled out the angles with appalling keenness of perception and a sociopathic lack of restraint: child abuse, he said, was a result of Labour's "sacrificing the innocence of children" on "the altar of multiculturalism". There, he invoked the classic racial trope of white childhood sullied by dark-skinned savagery, without explicitly mentioning race. Through interventions such as these, Ukip became the effective official opposition across a series of northern cities.
It has become a media mainstay to claim that Ukip assembled mainly the votes of white workers and those 'left behind' by globalisation. This was Farage's greatest spin. By claiming that he was parking his tanks on Labour's lawn, and that Ukip was not about right and left, but "right and wrong," he tapped into the worst fears and the dumbest electoral cliches of social democracy. With Miliband and his allies desperate to rebuild Labour's working class vote, and altogether too confident in their belief that workers are fundamentally a bit racist, the Farage offensive ensured that Labour would waste their time trying to placate anti-immigrant racism rather than challenging it. This is not to say that Ukip didn't win over a lot of Labour voters; it is to say that this wasn't their main source of support. It is also to say that Ukip's support, according to most research, is far more spread across classes than that of most parties, and certainly isn't restricted to the 'left behinds' of globalisation. But for Ukip to position itself as an 'anti-establishment' party, rather than as just a particularly hard-right Tory party, it was necessary that it should persuade the media and other political parties to talk about it in that way.
Farage's greatest achievement as party leader was his media persona. Unlike just about every other conceivable spokesperson, bar Carswell, he has managed to articulate Ukip-style bigotry with a pat 'frankness', and without so obviously reeking of old school racist battiness as to put off potential converts. He has positioned himself as a constant presence in the media, as an oppositional advocate, someone who speaks up for the rights of provincials and suburbanites and seaside dwellers to enjoy their traditional British racism without the condescension of metropolitan elites. He has willingly toned down his pro-privatisation, pro-market views where necessary, and even been willing to appear to attack Labour from the left on issues like NHS charges. And of course, as I have repeatedly argued elsewhere, he has very effectively turned the issue of immigration into a morality tale, one which expresses exactly how it is that the governing elites have been captured by a cosmopolitan, liberal, internationalist bureaucracy, remote from the common sense of the 'British people'. Restoring Britishness, beginning with a withdrawal from Europe and 'sending them back', would allow the people to 'take back control'. The reptilian cunning with which Farage consistently hit the racist sweet spot without ever losing his ability to connect to broader audiences is a tribute to his political marksmanship.
Ukip has always had a certain inherent fragility. The feuding between Farage and Carswell factions merely expresses in its own ways the ambiguous nature of a project that tries to be both populist and free market, both anti-politically correct while formally within the bounds of acceptable liberal-democratic politics, both pro- and anti-big business, both Thatcherite and somehow beyond left and right. Farage's abilities as a politician enabled Ukip to navigate these contradictions more or less efficiently. I'm not convinced that anyone else could have done that job. And so, he is an object-lesson in how much individual leadership can matter, particularly when the entire political terrain is structured around the spectacle, and when the traditionally dominant forces are in decline.
At the end of my Socialist Register article about Ukip last year, I pointed out that Ukip's chances of success had a certain time limitation on them. "as a disproportionately ageing, white, male party, Ukip has the disadvantage of being associated with a generation and a bevy of values that are on the decline. It also finds a natural opponent in a younger generation that is socially egalitarian. ... Whatever ‘Britishness’ means to them, it doesn’t mean cultural and demographic autarky." The EU referendum result was probably their last hurrah. There have been, since the outcome, numerous large and almost spontaneous protests against Brexit. At the base of this is a pro-immigrant, anti-racist, anti-Tory politics. Those carrying pro-EU signs, however much one may regret their enthusiasm for the institution, were not demonstrating for Angela Merkel and continent-wide austerity. And they are probably the Britain of ten years hence. It is not necessary to collapse into demographic determinism to understand how difficult it will be to sustain these forms of politics over a long period of time.
So in the short-term, Britain is likely to be an increasingly nasty and hateful place to live, thanks in no small part to Farage's accomplishments as a politician; in the long-term, Farage was very much a product of his moment, that spasm of backlash on the part of declining socio-demographic layers still steeped in a colonial culture, which is unlikely to be repeated. With Farage at its helm, Ukip operated adroitly on the accumulating dysfunctions and crises of British politics, finally convoking a popular bulwark that pulled Britain further to the right than it has been since the 1970s. And in the next few years, the reactionaries will seek to use their victory to achieve maximum damage, maximum reversal on all fronts. And there will be other sources of reaction in the coming decades. Yet, Farage's resignation signals the looming end of this end of the pier show. Even if Britain survives as such, this Britain is finished.
*polysemy intentional.
by SonicG » Mon Jul 04, 2016 8:23 pm
MacCruiskeen » Tue Jul 05, 2016 3:12 am wrote:By Gordon White of Rune Soup, from his new, subscribers-only - but free - newsletter, The All Red Line (links in the original):
- I should add that I barely know Taleb and that I know Martin Armstrong's work not at all -
Splendid Isolation
Whatever shall we talk about this week in a newsletter dedicated to geopolitics and economics? What’s in the news on the very day of the first All Red Line, in the very week I 'exited' Britain?
That other Brexit. (Funny how these things turn out, eh?)
My official position all along has been very pro-Brexit and I have just spent a pleasing few hours watching liberal Twitter absolutely shit the bed as the results came in.
But then, I was very pro Scottish independence too, until they announced they wanted to join the EU. This is really simple.
Centralisation: Bad.
Decentralisation: Good.
And you cannot get more centralised than an unelected superstructure literally modelled on Martin Bormann’s plans for a pan-European Reich. Never confuse being pro-Europe with pro-Brussels. I am hugely pro-Europe and Brussels is not. How anyone can possibly claim that the EU has the best interest of Europeans at heart when it has -just off the top of my head-
Crushed the life out of the Greek economy
Given levels of youth unemployment in Southern Europe that have previously triggered revolutions
Supported a fascist coup in the Ukraine
It is amazing how no one professing to be pro-EU can begin to describe its actual governance structure. They seem to be far more interested in virtue signalling and straw men arguments.
The actual arguments for leaving are quite sober. Read some of them here.
Also read Martin Armstrong's series of articles about Brexit, his experience with the EU and his experience of Britain.
You will also want to read about the Five Presidents here.
As for its actual foundation, as Dr Farrell said in this week's vidchat, “those of you who are familiar with the historical roots of the EU know what’s going on.” You may want to pick up his book, The Third Way, if you are interested in finding out more.
Archonology Model: War in Heaven Still in Play
Moving forward, the model predicts further rocky decentralisation, accompanied by fearporn from the unelected elites who are being decentralised away. As Catherine Fitts mentions -paraphrasing Tina Turner- we can either do this nice or rough. Rough it is, then. Let Taleb sing you home:
There is something further going on here. The management layer of the AngloAmerican elites -which includes the EU, the Prime Minister, the German Chancellor, etc- are splitting from their super-elite paymasters. Witness the flip-flops on the refugee crisis or American hostility toward Russia. It is too early to tell if this split is because they have worked out they are being downsized (which the Saudis have worked out) or because they remain 'true believers' in their nightmarish technocratic dystopia while Europe's secret powers have decided to go down a far cheaper and more militarised road.
For my fellow Brits, the model also predicts improved economics in the medium term. The pain is the cure here.
Two things to bear in mind going forward:
- This will give tremendous confidence to the several dozen independence movements across Europe.
- A referendum is not binding upon a Prime Minister. However if he is told to weasel out of it by his paymasters then there will be civil unrest, both in the UK and on the Continent. This is Martin Armstrong's collapse in confidence in government.
Either way, the vampire has been staked. Celebrations are called for.
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