Brexit, No Exit by Denis MacShane

Author:Denis MacShane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

wrote Oliver Goldsmith in ‘The Deserted Village’ 250 years ago. Britain’s greatest historian of postwar Europe, Tony Judt, used part of those lines for the title of his great deathbed essay – Ill Fares the Land – attacking the meretricious Britain that came into being this century as the gap between have and have-not Britain grew ever wider.

According to a McKinsey Global Institute report published in July 2016 the era of slow growth – what the US economist and former US treasury secretary Larry Summers calls secular stagnation – means that 70 per cent of the UK population is an income bracket with flat or declining incomes in the decade since 2006. They feel their lives and those of their children are getting no better and would like to pin the blame on someone, something.

Immigrants have been a scapegoat since time immemorial for a nation’s worries and lack of direction. The question of the EU and the question of immigrants fused into one target and it was singled out to the exclusion of nearly all other themes by the Leave populists.

The same McKinsey report argues that only 20 per cent of Swedes have flat or declining income, even though Sweden has a higher percentage of foreign-born residents – 18.3 per cent compared to the UK’s 13.4 per cent. In other words, it is not immigrants per se that make a nation poorer but the organisation of labour markets, access to public services and affordable or social housing and fair pay. In Sweden 68 per cent of the workforce is in a trade union, compared to 25 per cent in Britain.

Yet when the Swedes did hold a referendum on joining the euro in 2003 the answer was ‘No’. If the method of consultation is a plebiscite and the question on the ballot paper has Europe on it then in today’s slow-growth economy winning a majority appears mission impossible. So to see the issue as just a question of the masses versus the elites is too simple. As noted earlier, the anti-Europe elite establishment was more present and more focused than the pro-EU politicians.

There was a paradox in liberal elite commentators for establishment papers like the Financial Times and The Economist bemoaning the fact that the political class was so out of touch with ‘ordinary’ people. Yet both those papers, despite their pro-EU stance, were part of the London elite establishment that supported fiscal, labour-market and social policies that created mass resentment amongst the very people they hoped would vote in favour of David Cameron and George Osborne’s appeal to stay in Europe.

Dislike of a prime minister is part of British democratic politics. The referendum allowed that dislike to be channelled into a vote against David Cameron. His friend and chancellor George Osborne produced a budget in March 2016 that proposed cuts in social payments to severely disabled people. It was widely seen as unfair and had to be withdrawn, as it was clear even Tory MPs would vote it down. It

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.