Category Archives: BREXIT

Brexit and its Consequences (2016)

May 19, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

Brexit and its consequences

18th of May, 2020

Ann Pettifor
Political Economist and director of Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME)

This text is the conclusion of Ann Pettifor’s Essay ‘Brexit and its consequences’, which has been published in August of 2016. The full text can be read here.

I voted to Remain. I do not believe that Brexit is a wise decision. I fear its consequences in energising the Far Right both in Britain but also across both Europe and the US. I fear the break-up of the United Kingdom, and the political dominance of a small tribe of conservative ‘Little Englanders’. They will diminish this country’s great social, economic and political achievements.

But Britain’s ‘Brexit’ vote is but the latest manifestation of popular dissatisfaction with the economists’ globalized, marketised society. And if there should be any doubt that these movements are both nationalistic and protectionist, consider Donald Trump’s campaign threat to build a wall between Mexico and the US, to deter migrants, “gangs, drug traffickers and cartels” (Trump website). Trump’s plan for financing the wall involves the introduction of controls over the movement of capital. If the Mexican government resisted, argued Trump, the US would cut off the billions of dollars that undocumented Mexican immigrants working in the US send to their families annually. “Its an easy decision for Mexico” Trump wrote in a note to the Washington Post on 5th April, 2016. “Make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country every year.”

Nationalism, protectionism and populism are not confined to western nations. In India, a BJP MP, Subramanian Swamy fired a salvo at Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan that led to his resignation. Swamy made clear that “the governor should have known the “inevitable consequence of rising and high interest rate and (that) his policy was wilful and thus anti-national in intent”. (My emphasis). The RBI governor’s post Swamy added, “is very high in the Warrant of Precedence and requires a patriotic and unconditional commitment to our nation”.

Karl Polanyi predicted in The Great Transformation that no sooner will today’s utopians have institutionalized their ideal of a global economy, apparently detached from political, social and cultural relations, than powerful counter-movements – from the right no less than the left – would be mobilized (Polanyi, 2001). The Brexit vote was to my mind, just one manifestation of the expected resistance to market fundamentalism. The Brexit slogans “Take Back Control” “Take Back Our Country” “Britannia waives the rules” – represented an inchoate and incoherent attempt to subordinate unfettered, globalized markets in money, trade and labour to the interests of British society. Like the movement mobilized by Donald Trump in the US, the Five Star Alliance in Italy, Podemos in Spain, the Front National in France, the Corbyn phenomenon in the UK, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, Brexit represented the collective, if (to my mind) often misguided efforts of those ‘left behind’ in Britain to protect themselves from the predatory nature of market fundamentalism.

By doing so, they confirmed Polanyi’s firm prediction: that “the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society….Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way.” (Polanyi, 2001).

Brexit has endangered British society in yet another way, but the vote was, I contend, a form of social self-protection from self-regulating markets in money, trade and labour.

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

Brexit as a Double Movement?

April 30, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

Brexit as a Double Movement?

30th of April, 2020

Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum
University of Lancester

The Brexit referendum vote was just one symptom of a continuing organic crisis of the British state and society. This is rooted in a legitimacy crisis as successive neoliberal projects failed to deliver nationwide prosperity and also created conditions for fisco-financial crisis. This produced a loss of respect for the ruling classes (e.g., for corruption, cronyism, sleaze) and declining confidence among the ruling classes. This was accompanied by contestation over ‘British values’, disputed national and regional identities, north-south and other regional divides, the metropolitan orientation of intellectual strata, and generational splits. There was also a growing disconnection between the natural governing parties in Westminster, their members and their voters, which was reflected in support for Scottish Nationalism and the United Kingdom Independence Party. The legitimacy and representational crises were evident in the loss of control over public opinion, which is the hinge between political and civil society. This enabled the disaffected masses to enter politics as an autonomous force, whose demands for change were countered by populist appeals that, aided by the right-wing press, encouraged scapegoating xenophobia.

The background to this was the crisis of Atlantic Fordism. Whereas Atlantic Fordism sought to limit and/or compensate for uneven development, neoliberal regimes created policies and reorganized apparatuses to support sectoral and regional winners rather than to sustain losers or compensate sectors or regions that lose from the new neoliberal strategy. In Britain, neoliberal policies and public investment decisions benefitted London and the rest of the South-East – regions that actually cast more Brexit votes than did the ‘Labour heartlands’ in northern England. The best predictor of a pro-Brexit vote was seniority, next came the local economic impact of the North Atlantic financial crisis and the impact of uneven austerity cuts pursued in response to the financial crisis.

Polanyi recognized that society’s fightback against self-regulating markets is neither directed against market forces (or capitalism) as such nor is it a reaction of ‘society’ as such. His ‘double movement’ involved a complex series of reactions at many different points in social space to specific conflicts, crisis-tendencies, and contradictions associated with the unregulated extension of market forces and its uneven impact. This is what we see in the case of Brexit.

The Brexit conjuncture is not well explained through a simplistic reading of double movement. Society fighting back against neoliberalism does not reflect the multiple stakes and issues in contention. Brexit’s politics of hope/fear is contradictory and shaped by a territorial nostalgia for parliamentary sovereignty and a mistaken belief that nations competed on the basis of autarkic economies. This inspired a hope to regain national sovereignty, borders and control that rejected the pooled sovereignty in the European Union and the constraints imposed by global value chains. Insecurity mobilized a people suffering from neoliberal uneven development and fearing loss of control, declining status, and debtfare and directed anger against institutions/groups labelled as ‘foreign’ (e.g., EU as the symbolic enemy and immigrants taking jobs). It allowed the rise of illiberal democracy that is not entirely anti-neoliberal and tends to move towards a neoliberal authoritarian state.

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

Culture, Politics and the Economy

April 30, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

Culture, Politics and the Economy:
From a Happy to an Awkward Relationship

30th of April, 2020

Mikael Stigendal
Professor of Sociology, Malmo University

At the Albert Hall in London, the brass band from a mining town in Yorkshire has just won the national competition. The band leader is giving a speech but instead of being joyful, he turns political: “The last ten years this bloody government has destroyed an entire industry. Our industry! And not just our industry, but our communities, our homes, our lives! All in the name of progress.” The scene belongs to the film “Brassed Off” from 1996. The play at Albert Hall follows the closure, two weeks earlier, of the local pit. To understand Brexit and the historic loss of the Labour party in the December election 2019, it is necessary to go back to these times.

Before the miner’s strike in 1984, there were so many mining towns and communities across the UK. And as the film “Brassed Off” shows, they had their culture. The band in the film had existed since 1881. Music mattered. And so did the clubs, bingo nights, sausage rolls, football and a lot more. There was a richness in cultural life, supported by an economy with hard and unhealthy work, but also a high degree of labour process collectivity. By working in the pit, men became socialised into a collective which cultural life made meaningful. A social order existed implying that the class disciplined itself, which women also contributed to by, as mothers, being in control of the streets. The social order included a breeding ground for joint interests, which it was the role of politics to construct. Many of these communities were represented in parliament by miners, born and bred locally. This is what I mean with how culture, politics and the economy had a happy relationship.

The band leader in “Brassed Off” obviously knew about this. He knew that music did not matter without the pit. He understood that the closure of the pits in the 1980s and 90s destroyed not only an industry, but also communities and lives. The Thatcher government in the 1980s put in place another growth model, which made the City of London the main centre of finance capital, not by producing its own wealth but extracting it from others. People in the old working class communities did not get much of compensation, except for the gig-economy, brilliantly portrayed by Ken Loach in the recent film “Sorry we missed you”. In contrast to working in the pit, the gig-economy put workers into competition with each other. According to reports on Britain’s former mining communities, the consequences of the abandoned mining industry are still visible in the statistics of jobs, unemployment and health. The austerity policies during the last ten years have made it even much worse.

The relationship between culture, politics and the economy has thereby become awkward. Accordingly, Corbyn’s Labour could neither rely on favourable breeding grounds at the work places for the shaping of joint interests, nor a culture that could make such interests meaningful to people. Instead, those who deserted Labour acted like Joker in the Oscar award winning film from 2019 with the same title. We who in our youth got used to see Joker as the villain in the series about Batman and Robin are shown in the film how he became a villain. It is certainly not a cheerful story but characterized by poverty, violence, abuse and illness, i.e. the kind of life that many people live in today’s United Kingdom. Yet, Joker tries to follow the rules of the game but instead of getting respect, he is laughed at and mocked. That’s perhaps how many old Labour voters felt it when their own representatives, by not sticking clearly to the result of the referendum on Brexit, appeared to deprive them of the little democratic influence they believed they still had. If you are treated like a clown, why not become one, just like Joker, and vote for the biggest clown of them all, Boris Johnson?

What can be learnt from these entangled dynamics is that the Left has to get much more involved in the everyday life of ordinary people to understand their working and living conditions. This understanding should be created jointly with the people concerned, recognising their own experience, thinking and knowledge, thereby also empowering us all collectively. Such knowledge alliances [1] will be important in the development of knowledge on how contemporary wealth is produced as well as extracted, which in its turn constitutes the basis of power relations. Without that knowledge on the existing power relations and how to challenge them, we may produce long wish lists with ideas of how we would like society to be, but remain incapable of implementing them.

[1] Stigendal M and Novy A. (2018): Founding Transdisciplinary Knowledge production in critical realism. Implications and Benefits. Journal of Critical Realism 17(3): 203-220

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

Habitation vs. Improvement

April 30, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

The Conservative Party’s Impossible Brexit Politics
of ‘Habitation versus Improvement’

30th of April, 2020

Matthew Watson
Department of Politics and International Studies
University of Warwick

The Conservative Party has just managed to win a general election whilst breaking the first law of British electoral politics in being unsure of what it stands for economically. For thirty years now, the commentariat has speculated whether ‘Europe’ would follow the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and tariff reform in 1903 in splitting the Conservative Parliamentary Party over free trade. Boris Johnson has avoided such a split, but only by purging his party of parliamentary candidates who dissented from his vision of a Brexit Britain beyond the European single market and the EU’s customs union. The Conservative Party might no longer know itself when viewed historically, but it has just proved that it knows how to construct an electorally successful populist appeal to a nationalist politics of habitation.

Therein manifests the irony of ministers whose impulse will forever be as Thatcherite free market improvers resolutely championing anti-Thatcherite anti-free market habitation as a means of using regulatory independence to protect the interests of a native in-group. Johnson has successfully pulled the confidence trick that his Government is somehow to be seen as a habitation-oriented insurgent, as the antidote to the previous Conservative Government in whose ranks so many of its ministers also served. However, his first Cabinet appointments to the three great offices of state were all confirmed small-state Thatcherites, with two helping to co-author the infamous Britannia Unchained, a 2012 book dreaming of a Britain in which state support of everyday life is completely eliminated. During the Brexit referendum, Johnson himself argued alongside the most extreme free marketeers that the EU was a protectionist club that barred the way to the country fulfilling its laissez-faire destiny. Still the utopia exists in Conservative Party rhetoric of a buccaneering Global Britain as laissez-faire role model, where a nineteenth-century imperial throwback UK wins everyone over to its vision of universal free trade whilst it also eagerly embraces significant commercial frictions with its nearest trading partners.

If the Conservative Party no longer knows what it want to be, then it is hardly surprising that the rest of us are little the wiser. It is as if it is simultaneously planning for laissez faire and planning for planning. There is no straightforward Polanyian explanation for how it is possible to be in both camps at once. Yet that is what the Johnson Government’s chosen strategy for leaving the European Union implies. The whole world is now the Brexiteers’ economic oyster, we are told, but only above the din of them also insisting that the country must become a closed cultural space to secure from the incursions of EU membership the independence of its constitution and the sovereignty of its decision-making powers. Such a context is both clearly contradictory and also the new populist reality. It denies the left any easy Polanyian positioning in response. The Conservative Party has used Brexit as a habitation device to offer protection to communities whose currently unprotected status results directly from ten years of Conservative small-state policy.

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

Brexit in The Valley of the Crow

April 30, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

Brexit in the Valley of the crow

30th of April, 2020

Chris Hann
Director Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Students of economic anthropology are expected to be familiar with Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. But it is a long book, and some will only digest the comparative ethnographic materials in Chapter 4. For natives of Great Britain, however, the entire book is a gold mine. Polanyi derived his abstract theory of the “double movement” from the empirical details of British economic history. After leaving Red Vienna, his Christian socialism deepened during his years in England, when he lectured to workers rendered unemployed by the Great Depression. Polanyi was well aware that such workers could be mobilized for reactionary countermovements, including “jingoism” in the late nineteenth century, and Fascism in the twentieth. The “populist” mobilizations of the early twenty-first century would not surprise him at all. He would explain them with reference to renewed (neoliberal) marketization. It has become clear that major changes in the political landscape correlate closely with the loss of jobs in sectors such as mining and manufacturing (even if new jobs appear in other sectors, notably services). This pattern is common to West Virginia and postsocialist Brandenburg, to North-East France and Csepel island, Budapest. It is also manifest in Britain, where declining, deindustrialized regions voted strongly for Brexit in 2016 and then for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in the General Election of 2019.

When a Labour government decided after the Second World War to establish new towns in various locations around the United Kingdom, the main aim was to mitigate the consequences of earlier capitalist dislocation. Cwmbrân was an industrial village at the eastern edge of the South Wales coalfield, a region that had boomed for the best part of a century down to the 1920s, before everything fell apart during the Depression. The name means “valley of the crow” in Welsh. All of the place names in the valley of the Afon Llwd are recognizably Welsh, though the language disappeared some 200 years ago in the early throes of industrialization. In addition to coal, iron and steel, and later tin plate, formed the basis of strong nonconformist working-class communities. They demonstrated their political consciousness in the Chartist riots of 1839. In the twentieth century, like the rest of South Wales, Cwmbrân was a stronghold of the Labour Party (the Communist Party candidate also polled respectably until the 1970s).

The new town created around Cwmbrân (the only new town in Wales) provided jobs for a generation of newcomers, who found affordable rented housing in streets such as Shakespeare Road and Keats Close. During my childhood, the prosperity and security of the “Keynesian” era were reflected in the construction of a vast new shopping complex on a green field site. Nowadays this town centre still attracts shoppers from far and wide, but like the housing stock it was privatized in the decade of Margaret Thatcher. One by one, the large factories that had guaranteed employment closed down (like most of the nonconformist chapels). Formerly an exemplar of how interventionist policies can create and sustain community, Cwmbrân has been profoundly affected by neoliberal deindustrialization.

People used to joke that you could nominate a donkey to represent this valley and, if it had the endorsement of the Labour Party, it would be elected. When Harold Wilson called an election in 1966, local support for Labour was 77%. But in the election of December 2019, the Labour candidate (a graduate of Oxford University called Nicholas Thomas-Symonds) polled below 42%. Had a candidate of the Brexit Party not divided the anti-EU vote, a Conservative might have been elected. The election manifesto of which Jeremy Corbyn was so proud did not earn him much credibility in the valley of the crow. Scurrilous reporting in newspapers like The Sun and the Daily Mail resonated better as an anti-establishment countermovement than Labour’s educated cosmopolitanism. As Samuel Strong has shown in his study of the neighbouring valley of Blainau Gwent, EU membership has done nothing to improve the poverty statistics; non-productive investments decorated with the EU flag are emblematic of the disconnect.[1] Blaenau Gwent used to be represented in Westminster by Neil Kinnock, the last Labour Party leader of working-class origin (who was trounced at the polls by Margaret Thatcher in 1987, when the lurch to neoliberalism was already in full swing).

[1] Samuel Robert Strong: The Production of Poverty: Politics, Place and Social Abandonment in Blaenau Gwent, Wales. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cambridge University (2017).

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

Post Pandemic Brexit

April 30, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

Post Pandemic Brexit

30th of April, 2020

Kevin Morgan
Professor of Governance and Development, School of Geography ans Planning, Cardiff University

Having dominated British politics ad nauseam for nearly 4 years, Brexit has suddenly disappeared from public life. The issues which brought it political success – first in the 2016 EU referendum and then in the 2019 General Election that propelled Boris Johnson into office – have also largely vanished from the public agenda, particularly the issue of immigration.

Although the UK is still scheduled to quit the EU at the end of this year, COVID-19 has totally displaced Brexit in the public mind. So much so that the most important political question in the UK right now – apart from when the societal lockdown will be lifted – is what kind of legacy will the pandemic bequeath.

Will it be a return to neoliberal “normality”, the hallmarks of which were austerity, outsourcing public sector activity and shrinking the state, or will it be a tipping point for society to view and value things anew and embed the new habits of solidarity acquired during the crisis?

Past experience suggests that the powers-that-be will strive to return to some form of “normality” as soon as possible, which is precisely what happened after the 2008 financial crisis. Many things need to come together to prevent a return to neoliberal “normality”.

Let’s mention two of these things: (a) the Conservative government needs to be exposed for its astonishingly inept handling of the pandemic and (b) progressive forces need a compelling vision to show that another world is possible and the alliances, in civil society and among political parties, to enact that vision.

Even before the pandemic struck, the Johnson government was forced to adopt some very unusual policies for a Conservative government. It was forced to nationalise some railways and it felt compelled to adopt a new regional policy to support the former Labour areas in the north and midlands. Its COVID-19 rescue plan shocked its supporters, such was the scale of state financial support.

Launching the rescue package, the new Chancellor famously said that “this is not a time for ideology”; but what he meant was not a time for neoliberal ideology. The Johnson government was seen to be adopting the language of the left – by calling for social solidarity and extolling the need for an agile public sector, a sector that had been eviscerated by a decade of Tory austerity. While these things are necessary, they may be outweighed in the public mind by the inept handling of the pandemic, the most poignant sign of which is that health workers have to work without enough protective equipment.

Turning to the progressive forces, the key questions are do they have a compelling vision and do they have the necessary alliances for change? A core part of the vision now exists in the form of the Foundational Economy, arguably the most important spatial development strategy to have emerged in the UK in the past fifty years. In contrast to traditional spatial policies like Foreign Direct Investment, which are zero sum games between places, the Foundational Economy concept signals a positive sum game in the sense that foundational flourishing in one place does not preclude other places from also flourishing (see https://foundationaleconomy.com for details).

Post-pandemic Britain may look and feel very different to the political environment which spawned Brexit. Social solidarity, civic activism and key workers – many of them based in the Foundational sectors of health, social care and food provisioning – are the qualities helping the country to cope with the ravages of the pandemic. One hopes that progressive forces can ensure that these qualities and habits are part of the enduring legacy of the pandemic and not the ephemera of the crisis.

Kevin Morgan
Professor of Governance and Development
School of Geography and Planning
Cardiff University
MorganKJ@cardiff.ac.uk

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

Debate on Brexit

Brexit and its consequences

Ann Pettifor

Debate on Brexit

Brexit as a Double Movement?

Bob Jessop

Ngai-Ling Sum

Debate on Brexit

Culture, Politics and the Economy: From a Happy to an Awkward Relationship

Mikael Stigendal

Debate on Brexit

The Conservative Party’s Impossible Brexit Politics of ‘Habitation versus Improvement’

Matthew Watson

Debate on Brexit

Brexit in the Valley of the crow

Chris Hann

Debate on Brexit

Post Pandemic Brexit

Culture, Politics and the Economy:
From a Happy to an Awkward Relationship

The Conservative Party’s Impossible Brexit Politics
of ‘Habitation versus Improvement’