A politics worth having must cope instead with the failure of the old wisdom that all that societies needed to prosper was for central banks to hold inflation down. It would have to explain how 21st-century countries will live with a greying population – not just with the healthcare costs but with the electoral power of the old to impose their priorities and prejudices on the young. It would need to grapple with the impact of digital technology on the privacy of the individual and on the ability of well-funded interest groups and hostile foreign powers to use big data to subvert free elections and referendums. Hard though they are, these are mere appetisers. To say we have no answers to mass migration, which global warming is likely to accelerate, and the future of work as robotics develops is to understate the case. We don’t even know the right questions to ask.
But the main target is 'fatalism' about this state of affairs. Oddly, not the fatalism of decades of There Is No Alternative covering austerity, globalization and the EU's part in it but rather the fatalism of those who see no alternative to Brexit. Are the millenials flaking?
First a bit of luvvie paranoia:
Huge efforts have been made to delegitimise opposition in Britain [does this man never watch BBC or C4 News,or listen to Radio 4 quiz programmes?] . The attacks on judges and civil servants as enemies of the people and on MPs as mutineers, and the threats of violence against politicians, always female politicians, of course, are our form of Putinism. It is a compliment to this country that the assault has not worked and was never going to work [so why get paranoid about it? While we are here, attacking Brexiteers as ignorant racists doesn't seem to have worked either].
Anyway, on to resisting fatalism. The main point is to argue for a PV. Remainers are getting increasingly worried about this option because it risks disorder and delegitimization of Parliamentary democracry -- and Leave might win again. They need to be rallied. On the first point:
A “people’s vote” will not be popular with everyone. Millions of real people, including people who voted Remain, will say: “We’ve already voted on this and even if we don’t like it, we must accept the result.” .To which the best reply is the true reply that Brexit will have forced a second referendum on the British.
Pretty bizarre reasoning there, with more to follow:
[Brexit] supporters had it all in June 2016. They controlled [!] the Conservative and Labour parties [!!] and had the popular mandate [oh --that small thing]. Just as they are responsible for the near breakdown of government and the economic, diplomatic and constitutional crisis, so they will be responsible for a second referendum. If they had united, they might have had Brexit and nothing you or I said would have mattered a damn. Among the many failures of journalism in 2016, the greatest was the failure to explain that the enemies of the EU could never agree among themselves what version of Brexit Britain should follow [nothing to do with the long campaign fought by Remainer MPs and civil servants to compromise as much as possible with an aggressive EC?]
Quite unlike the clarity of vision that unites the Remainers -- an entirely negative unity. Nothing positive in the rather Trot-sounding final suggestions (it is not a Trotskyite appeal to the fundamental sense of the working class, of course, but rather to that of the urban petit-bourgeoisie):
The very intensity of a war on two fronts against an opposition that won’t oppose and a government that can’t govern will force through new ideas and new leaders. You can see it now, as politicians from the Greens and the Labour and Tory backbenches become more important than ministers and shadow ministers as they try to save what they can from the wreckage.
Existing campaigns are not middle-classTrot enough:
It is for this reason, rather than because they have enough political baggage to fill a freight train, that Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson’s attempt to lead the People’s Vote campaign is doomed. They are not fighting in the arena against the Brexit right and far left simultaneously. They are not feeling the urgent need to develop new arguments and tactics that will eventually produce a new politics....Intellectuals like to believe that ideas emerge from a lecture hall and then converts struggle to implement them. More often, it’s the other way round and the struggle produces ideas. The fatalism of those who in their despair think the best course is to opt out and let events unfurl misses that it is in the act of fighting back that the future will be shaped.
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