Peers and MPs receiving millions in EU farm subsidies
Analysis by Guardian and Friends of the Earth raises questions about impartiality in post-Brexit reform
All the politicians concerned declared their receipt of money, apparently. There are clearly risks of stoking hostility to an already unpopular EU policy , but there are other interesting features of the story. The GUrdnia clearly has allies among Friends of the Earth as well as Remainers. There must be some split loyalites, as there are in all single-issue alliances.
Secondly, the sting of this story might be that it stokes hostility to one of the targets of the new petit-bourgeoisie -- the aristocracy, despised almost as much as the proletariat.
The largest single payment – £473,000 – was paid to a Sussex farming firm run by the 18th Duke of Norfolk, a large landowner whose estate dates from the middle ages...Conservative MP Richard Drax, descendant of a 19th-century slave-owner and current resident of the family ancestral seat of Charborough House in Dorset, owns a farm that received £411,000.
Thirdly, there is a surprising note of resignation -- this article discusses what happens when the UK leaves the EU, not if. If the Remain cause is lost, maybe the old ones need reviving in the interests of future distanciation?
Elsewhere,it is Graun business as usual. J Harris denounces the racism and intolerance of the English ( mostly the working class English). It all sounds so reasonable at first:
It’s time we started building a new England – one that is modern, diverse and open...To use a phrase habitually deployed by the prime minister herself, what kind of country do we want to be? Put another way, who are we?
But before long it is the same old same old:
England [Celts are forgiven as usual --see below] has come to be understood as a country awash with furies and resentments. Politicians have seen that a significant part of its population apparently thinks that immigration is inherently problematic and ought to be the focus of endless crackdowns, and that supposed benefit “cheats” deserve the same treatment.
There is the usual sort of 'evidence':
When I am out reporting, it usually seems that most of us remain essentially mild, moderate people, seemingly open to compromise. But everyday examples of the worst of the Brexit spirit are easy to find...[as when you talk to staff in a language-learning company, rather than English proles themselves]...staff who had moved to the UK from across Europe, and who had recently started to experience a mixture of discomfort and estrangement.
There might be something in economic determinism, Harris thinks, but then:
why do much the same Brexit-ish instincts and opinions run so deep among affluent people with no obvious axe to grind? What students of Marxism would call economic determinism has its place, but it risks constant denial of the fact that politics has long since slipped free of the old simplicities of class and economic complaint. Culture matters. The political right understood this a long time ago, selling a brand of Englishness replete with the reactionary instincts that exploded in June 2016. In his brilliant Brexit book The Lure of Greatness, the writer and activist Anthony Barnett [of course -- a writer].
Back to an earlier Graun enthusiasm for Scots Nattery, at least at the petit-bourgeois cultural level:
Five years ago I watched a grassroots movement in Scotland lead a conversation about leaving the UK behind, and moving on from an old, patriarchal, hidebound view of their own country....after long years of groundwork, the conversation about a new Scotland had been updated by a coalition of organisations that stood well apart from party politics, known at the time as “the third Scotland”, because of its distance from both the SNP and the Labour party.
If only the nice people of England would rise up:
As against imperial delusions and English exceptionalism, it is time we talked about the realities of our past and a future that necessarily involves being part of Europe – and the fact that in the 21st century, the movement of people is a basic fact of life. I know what a modern, open, accepting, diverse vision of my country looks like: I see it not just in Bristol, Manchester, Leicester, Leeds, and Birmingham [on Remainer demos? Writing workshops?] , but in endless small kindnesses in places that are too often either ignored or reduced to a Brexit-supporting caricature [by him among others] . We need to seize on such examples and make the case for a new England.
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