It’s the Perfect Storm for a Carnival of Reaction

It’s the Perfect Storm for a Carnival of Reaction – or why we must Vote Remain and Stay in Europe to Change Europe!

A few weeks ago I started writing about the importance of the outcome of the EU referendum for housing campaigners

– about how the lack of affordable housing and the ultra-rich’s unoccupied luxury apartments blighting our inner cities had nothing to do with the European Union or migrants and everything to do with successive governments refusing to adequately plan population shifts and growth, and to prefer to pander to property speculators, finance capitalists and the myth of home ownership rather than build and maintain affordable public housing where it was needed and wanted

– how the Blair/Brown governments’ insistence that council housing be transferred away from local authority control before it could be renovated paved the way for property developers to muscle their way into local authority decision making, thus leading to the current obsession with demolishing and semi-privatising estates in the name of regeneration

– how closing borders would not change the Housing Act’s destruction of social housing and social cleansing

– how EU rules and regulations did not prevent rent controls, and

– how it would only be through a radical change of government to one which supported and encouraged public housing would we even begin to see a change.

But I was busy organising campaigning for an IN vote and didn’t get very far with that, so I then started writing about how not talking about the Wars was one of the elephants in the referendum debate and that there were lots of Wars we should be talking about, starting with the Second World War, and

– how it was in the aftermath of that bloody conflagration that six countries had first come together to declare Never Again! and find ways to regulate trade between themselves

– how capitalism thrives on conflict and competition and war and, yes, the EU is a bosses’ club, a capitalist cartel, a bourgeois institution, but that nevertheless it had found a way for a continent of nation states which throughout their existence had been at near continuous war to cohabit the same space without throwing punches – or firing missiles – at each other for over half a century

– how, while that had not prevented intranational independence struggles such as the Six Counties’ Troubles or the Basque conflict or demands for Catalan autonomy, or bloody wars on its borders such as those which erupted as the former Yugoslavia disintegrated and, more currently, Ukraine, it was something we needed to recognise and appreciate and talk about, not shrug our shoulders and assume peace was inevitable

– how the ending of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, had allowed right wing governments to rapidly absorb the assets, resources and people of the former Stalinist states of Eastern Europe into the EU, enriching themselves and their favoured oligarchs through the wholesale expropriation of whole countries’ assets, and how their beloved free movement of capital by necessity has to be accompanied by the free movement of labour and that it has only been where trade unions and the labour movement is strong, and where it can come together across nation boundaries, that capital will be restricted from exploiting that labour to the extent it otherwise would

– how together we are stronger

– how Bush and Blair’s Wars opened the door for the current conflagrations across the Middle East and consequential refugee and migrant crises

– how people do not risk all to reach the comparative safety of EU countries unless they are desperate and fleeing for their lives

– how migration is a normal part of human existence and needs to be recognised and planned for, not blocked and banned

– how Fortress Europe policies have not just caused untold human misery and death but encouraged the growth of right wing movements across every country

– how migrants and refugees are human beings with needs and desires and rights….

And then I thought I couldn’t write about Wars without writing about the Class War….

But Janine Booth, the left’s wonderful poet, has put that far more succinctly than I can –

REFERENDUM GUIDANCE

Finding your decision tough?

Remember where the war is.

Don’t blame migrants for the stuff

That’s mostly caused by Tories

So, while I wasn’t getting very far with my writing (described the other day as not just slow, but glacial) I was talking, and I was talking about

– democracy and the lack of it in the UK and climate change having no borders and how the EU’s redistribution from the richer to the poorer regions should be supported (we do not want our money back!) and human rights and workers’ rights and how there was no Exit Left, no Lexit, that it was an illusion that somehow leaving the EU would open up opportunities for the Left, that Boris and Gove and Farage were not the Lenin, Trotsky and Mao of our time and would not do what groups like the SWP and the SP and the CP had singularly failed to do over the last however many years they’ve been fighting Labourism and trying to get the British working class to rise up and follow their particular vanguardist sect

– and about how my enthusiasm for campaigning for an IN vote wasn’t just about the positives but also about the negatives and how we need to change Europe and the world for the better

– but most fundamentally it was about how the way this debate wasn’t actually about the EU at all, but about migration and immigration and benefit scroungers, and that if the UK voted to leave the EU then that would mean that a majority of the people of this country had been conned by a nasty, right-wing, racist campaign based on falsehoods and downright lies, which could lead to one of the most hard right governments we had ever seen in this country

– how the Leave campaign and their friends in the right-wing press were capitalising on working class disillusionment and alienation, in particular in those areas deindustrialised by Thatcher and neglected by the neo-liberal policies pursued by both Labour and Tory governments for the last 30 odd years, which had been exacerbated since the 2008 crash by Tory austerity leading amongst other things to a massive shift of wealth from the poor to the already rich and enormously increased inequality, and whipping up resentment towards, not the rich, but those who could be characterised as ‘alien’, ‘the other’, ‘different’. As Yanis Varoufakis has said:

“Lest we forget, turning the native poor against the migrants is a variant of the old divide-and-rule trick that the British establishment honed ages ago to dominate the empire. Today it uses the same strategy to dominate the domestic “natives”, hide austerity’s effects, and deflect anger toward the other – the foreigner, the migrant”

– how during its years in government Labour lost touch with its heartlands, first in Scotland and now across swathes of the north, by failing to defend or be perceived to be on the side of the working class, and

– how the UK leaving the EU will have implications across Europe not just in terms of the future of the EU but because it will signal the legitimacy and acceptance of far right policies which will be rapidly taken up by those forces already on the march across the continent.

For the hard right – who had already scored a victory by forcing the referendum in the first place – it has become the Perfect Storm

– with anti-immigrant and anti-migrant feelings running high across Europe (the Tories’ xenophobic London Mayoral campaign may not have worked in metropolitan London but it would have resonated elsewhere, and yesterday’s election of a Five Star Mayor in Rome has to be added to the mix),

– the government rapidly forcing through draconian anti-working class policies on housing, education, health and benefits as they seek to destroy the welfare state and privatise our public services,

– the EU in crisis over its panicked and cruel mishandling of the increasing number of desperate refugees running from bombs and hunger,

– the electorates of Spain and Portugal rejecting austerity in favour of newly emerging parties of the left,

– the failure of neo-liberal policies to protect Greece or create the growth needed to sustain the original social democratic project of a social Europe

– and here – the Labour Party’s opposition to all this weak and divided (sorry Jeremy!).

The hard right have been allowed to dictate the agenda and the terms of the debate.

They have been aided and abetted by the tabloids daily dose of front pages depicting marauding, swarming migrants and the rest of the media’s failure to challenge their lies. They have been aided and abetted by the BBC’s notion of ‘balance’ being to allow charlatans to challenge all and every statement about the EU (even to the extent of reputable academics being denigrated for receiving funding from the EU as though it’s some kind of mafia outfit) and to encourage a form of anti-intellectualism to permeate discussions under the guise of ‘anti-establishmentism’ – “kill all the experts!”. They have been aided and abetted by social media enabling them to spread their lies around the world before the truth has had time to even start looking for her knickers. They have been aided and abetted by a refusal from other politicians, with a very few honourable and unpublicised exceptions, to call them out on their racism and to support free movement and to welcome migrants and refugees. Xenophobia has become acceptable and a discussion that should be about humanity, decency, empathy has degenerated into a numbers game.

And then Jo Cox was murdered.

Killed by a fascist extremist.

A British Labour MP assassinated by a Nazi.

Now I can’t just write. I need to rant. I need to scream.

That Perfect Storm has whirled into a Carnival of Reaction before one vote has been counted.

The politicians have frozen. Campaigning suspended. Except it’s not. How can it be? The storm is rising still.

The lone wolf with ‘mental health issues’ (since when has epilepsy been a ‘mental health issue’? as my favourite person with epilepsy would say: “that really is fuckwittery gone mad”) is fast turning into the ‘Death to Traitors, Freedom for Britain’ neo-Nazi lone wolf with ‘mental health issues’ who may have held the occasional Britain First banner and may have been on Farage’s contact list, but “nuffink to do with us, guv”. Let’s lay a wreath and pretend nobody saw it coming. Pretend it’s the fault of the foreigners, the migrants. They’re the ones who whipped up the storm, not us, not the Sun, the Mail, the Express, with their daily headlines of thousands and thousands of migrants (not to forget the 75 million Turks) heading our way, not the Today programme, not Cameron smearing Sadiq Khan one week and crying crocodile tears the next. It’s their fault for trying to come here. “Nuffink to do with us, guv.”

Except it is. Because when hatred is preached, when bigotry is legitimised, then that gives permission for hate and bigotry to become commonplace, to become acceptable – and for murder and assassination to be carried out in their name.

Brendan Cox – in the midst of his grief – has beautifully articulated what is happening “Petrified by the rise of the populists, [mainstream politicians] try to neuter them by taking their ground and aping their rhetoric. Far from closing down the debates, these steps legitimise their views….” and “All this has meant that the populist right have shifted the politics and the public debate of the issue far more that their actual numbers dictate.” (Guardian, 18 June 2016)

Societal change can take place very quickly – after all, that’s what happens when there’s a revolution. But revolutions can come from the right, not just the left.

Voting on Thursday may not seem a big deal – after all, we’re only voting on whether or not this country should be part of a trading bloc, a capitalist trading bloc pursuing neo-liberal, austerity policies, a group of nation states which we’ve only ever been half-heartedly part of anyway, and about which there are lots of reasonable arguments either way – and it wouldn’t have been a big deal if we’d actually debated the pros and cons of EU membership in a reasonable way. But we haven’t. We haven’t had a debate. We’ve had an angry tirade of vitriol. We’ve had lies and exaggerations and threats. And, in response, we’ve had an incoherent splutter of rage.

As a consequence, the symbolism of what will be decided on Thursday is enormous. Victory for the Leavers will be the victory of racist reactionaries and those who want to divide us – it will mean a Carnival of Reaction.

Winning Remain even by the slightest margin won’t be a victory – the racists and reactionaries aren’t going to melt into thin air on Friday morning. But the fact that a majority – even a majority of one – have turned their backs on that Carnival of Reaction means we will have a way forward if we have the strength and determination to seize it. Please, please vote Remain on Thursday and support the fight for a better world, another Europe, a better Europe.