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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
4 4 October 2016
L
et’s sack the electorate and appoint a new one:
this is the demand made by MPs, lawyers and
the four million people who have signed the
petition calling for a second referendum. It’s a
cry of pain, and therefore understandable, but
it’s also bad politics and bad democracy. Reduced to its
essence, it amounts to graduates telling non-graduates
“we reject your democratic choice”.
Were this vote to be annulled (it won’t be), the
result would be a full-scale class and culture
war, riots and perhaps worse, pitching
middle class progressives against those
on whose behalf they’ve claimed to
speak, permanently alienating people
who have spent their lives feeling
voiceless and powerless.
Yes, the Brexit vote has empowered
the most gruesome collection of schem-
ers, misfits, liars, extremists and puppets
British politics has produced in the modern
era. It threatens to invoke a new age of dema-
goguery, a threat sharpened by the thought that if this
can happen, so can Donald Trump. It has provoked a
resurgence of racism and an economic crisis whose
dimensions remain unknown. It jeopardises the living
world, the NHS, peace in Ireland and the rest of the Euro-
pean Union. It promotes what the billionaire Peter
Hargreaves gleefully anticipated as “fantastic
insecurity”.
But we’re stuck with it. There isn’t another option,
unless you favour the years of limbo and chaos that
would ensue from a continued failure to trigger Article
50. It’s not just that we have no choice but to accept the
result. We should embrace it and make of it what we can.
It’s not as if the system that’s now crashing around us
was functioning. The vote could be seen as a self-
inflicted wound, or it could be seen as the eruption of an
internal wound, inflicted over many years by an eco-
nomic oligarchy on the poor and the forgotten.
The bogus theories on which our politics
and economics are founded were going
to collide with reality one day; the only
questions were how and when.
Yes, the Brexit campaign was led by
a political elite, funded by an eco-
nomic elite and fueled by a media elite.
Yes, popular anger was channelled
towards undeserving targets – immi
-
grants. But the vote was also a howl of rage
against exclusion, alienation and remote
authority. That is why the slogan “take back control”
resonated. If the left can’t work with this, what are we
for?
So here is where we find ourselves. The economic
system is not working, except for the likes of Philip
Green. Neoliberalism has not delivered the meritocratic
nirvana its theorists promised, but a rentiers’ paradise,
offering staggering returns to whoever grabs the castle
Leaving the EU will be a disaster,
but also an unprecedented radical
opportunity for the Left
If the left can’t
work with this,
what are we
for?
October 2016 4 5
first while leaving productive workers on the
wrong side of the moat. The age of enterprise
has become the age of unearned income; the age
of the market, the age of market failure; the age
of opportunity, a steel cage of zero-hour con-
tracts, precarity and surveillance.
The political system is not working. Wheover
you vote for, the same people win, because
where power claims to be is not where power is.
Parliaments and councils embody paralysed
force, gesture without motion, as the real deci-
sions are taken elsewhere: by the money, for the
money. Governments have actively conspired in
this shift, negotiating fake trade treaties behind
their voters’ backs to prevent democracy from
controlling corporate capital. Unreformed politi-
cal funding ensures that parties have to listen to
the rustle of notes before the bustle of votes. In
Britain, these problems are compounded by an
electoral system that ensures most votes don’t
count. This is why a referendum is almost the
only means by which people can be heard, and
why attempting to override it is a terrible idea.
Culture is not working. A worldview which
insists that both people and place are fungible
is inherently hostile to the need for belonging.
For years we have been told that we do not
belong, that we should shift out without com-
plaint while others are shifted in to take our
place. When the peculiarities of community and
place are swept away by the tides of capital, all
that’s left is a globalised shopping culture, in
which we engage with glazed passivity. Man was
born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.
In all these crises is opportunity. Opportuni
-
ties to reject, connect and erect: to build from
these ruins a system that works for the people
of this country, rather than for an offshored elite
that preys on insecurity. If it is true that Britain
will have to renegotiate its trade treaties, is this
not the best chance we’ve had in decades to con-
tain corporate power? Of insisting that
companies which operate here must offer proper
contracts, share their profits, cut their emissions
and pay their taxes? Is it not a chance to regain
control of the public services slipping from our
grasp?
How will politics in this sclerotised nation
change without a maelstrom? In this chaos we
can, if we are quick and clever, find a chance to
strike a new contract: proportional representa
-
tion, real devolution and a radical reform of
campaign finance to ensure that millionaires can
never again own our politics.
Remote authority has been rejected, so let’s
use this moment to root our politics in a common
celebration of place, to fight the epidemic of
loneliness and rekindle common purpose,
tran-
scending the
tensions between
recent and less-recent
immigrants (which means
everyone else). In doing so, we
might find a language in which liberal
graduates can talk with the alienated people
of Britain, rather than at them.
But most importantly, let’s address the task
that the left and centre have catastrophically
neglected: developing a political and economic
philosophy fit for the 21st Century, rather than
repeatedly microwaving the leftovers of the 20th
(neoliberalism and Keynesianism). If the history
of the last 80 years tells us anything, it’s that
little changes without a new and feracious
framework of thought. And when it arrives, eve-
rything changes. Much of my work over the next
few months will be to assess what’s on offer and
try to identify and promote the best ideas.
So yes, despair and rage and curse: there are
reasons enough to do so. But then raise your
eyes to where hope lies.
This article first appeared in the Guardian
www.monbiot.com
When the peculiarities
of community and place are
swept away by the tides of capital, all
that’s left is a globalised shopping culture
