Why I don’t care about Brexit

So here we are: after nearly three years of ‘profound soul searching’ and ‘agonising’ discussions, the British nation is no closer to leaving the EU and the British people are sick to the back teeth of talking about it. I have noticed two things I thought worth writing about.

The Cambridge Analytica Hobby-Horse, part 1: manipulating elections

Recently while travelling in Northern Europe, I found myself, against my better judgment, inside a ‘street food’ market. There I witnessed and then joined in with a debate between the chef at one of the stalls and a cleaner. The cleaner maintained that he did not watch the news because ‘none of it is real’. ‘America, Russia,’ he said, ‘it’s all lies.’ This, evidently was his hobby-horse. The chef, however, thought that you should follow the news because you needed to know things. If you did not know things, he argued, you might think, for example, that Africa is a terrible place full of poverty and war but if you ask someone who has been there then you would know that it’s not like that at all. The hobby-horse he was riding was also quite evident.

I am, with Lawrence Sterne, a great admirer of a hobby-horse. ‘So long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway,’ he writes in his rambling genius of an 18^th century novel, Tristram Shandy, ‘and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, —- pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?’

Why a Corbyn-led Labour Government would be better for nearly everyone, even the radical left. Part 1b: Race and Immigration, questions for the radical left

This is Part 1b of a series of articles around the UK General Election. You can find the introduction to the series here.

The Left has basically won on the question of Austerity. It has managed to convince people that the stripping back of state provision and selling off of state assets was not done to reduce the deficit but rather out of political considerations: to enrich the rich, transferring wealth upwards. Under the Conservatives, the deficit has increased and they are not in the least bit concerned because that was never their aim in the first place. Despite some fluctuations, Britain’s external borrowing (debt owed to creditors outside the UK) remains above 6,000,000 million pounds, up by another 500,000 million pounds since the Tories came to power.[13]

However, on the question of immigration, the Left has still to find an answer that can convince the population. “No borders”, is more than a political slogan, it is the only ethical position on the subject. To assert the right to residency of some people but not others has no moral basis other than a fascist-style racial supremacy that posits an arbitrary ‘ethnicity’ (either ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘white’) as the basis of belonging or a feudal-style ‘right of conquest’. ‘We were here first’, runs the latter argument.

Why a Corbyn-led Labour Government would be better for nearly everyone, even the radical left. Part 1: Race and Immigration

This is Part 1 of a series of articles around the UK General Election. You can find the introduction to the series here.

If you are an actual bricks-through-windows racist, pro-marital rape misogynist or a castrate-the-gays homophobe, than Corbyn is not the one for you. But nor are any other of the parliamentary parties, so we can leave that little unpleasant band of brothers to their own nasty devices.  For the rest of the population, fed on a diet of slanted, and sometimes entirely fictitious media stories, there are a few who are concerned about immigrants destroying British values and traditions. One might wonder who really has time to mourn the decline of Morris dancing, Sunday school and suet pudding, but beneath this apparently empty debate about abstractions there are real concerns. Many link immigration with a loss of jobs and there is a reality that standards of living for much of the population has seen a real decline since the 1980s. This decline accelerated after the financial crash of 2007/08, meaning that “between 2007 and 2015 in the UK, real wages – income from work adjusted for inflation – fell by 10.4%.”[1] making Britain, Portugal and Greece the only three of twenty-nine countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to see a wage decrease. Coupling this with an erosion of welfare provision has produced increases in homelessness[2], temporary accommodation[3], foodbanks[4] and suicide[5].

“When will 2016 end?”

Social media transmits news and fixes mass opinion at an unprecedented rate. Richard Dawkins’s memes[1] – self-replicating ideas – evolved into cat pictures with captions, and those pictures were spread around millions of people. The blogsphere/twitterati/instafam soon hits on a trend and runs with it until new ones emerge and the old ones are forgotten. Our ‘hive mind’ quickly selects phrases, jokes and attitudes; tags people with labels of hero and villain; and chooses trends, news and fashion which then pass into what might be termed ‘common sense’.

This year it became the fashion to bemoan the year itself. 2016’s favourite enemy was 2016. The calendar year became to modern people what the various devils, dibbuks, duppies, djinns, incubi, faeries and etc. had been to people of pre-Enlightenment civilisations. “Oh 2016, why have you taken from us yet another most precious member of our tribe?” wailed the tweeters and posters from their sackcloth toilet seats, virtually tearing their hair and beating their breasts in mourning.

After the Referendum, the Coup.

An astonishing moment in British politics and the attempted coup is underway. David Cameron is gone and the knives are out and sharp for Jeremy Corbyn. Now, more than ever, do we need that man to stay as Labour leader, hoping that he can forge a coalition with SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens and that we have a progressive, decent government after the next election. With a whole load of vacant jobs in the shadow cabinet and a vote of no confidence underway, there is potential either for our last hope to be crushed or for something to be reborn that could re-ignite progressive movements in the UK. The vote of no confidence was set in motion by an MP who is blaming Corbyn for not “getting a clear message” to Labour voters on the EU referendum. This is Margaret Hodge, MP for Labour-run Barking, where 63% voted to leave EU – as opposed to a YouGov survey results that suggested a national trend of 69% of Labour voters voting to remain.[1] How much more could Corbyn or any other Labour really have done?