The Tory leadership hopeful Matt Hancock has laid into his rival Boris Johnson for dismissing business warnings against a hard Brexit, saying: “To the people who say fuck business, I say fuck fuck business.”
Meanwhile, A Chakrabortty, normally a good critic, parrots at first the EU bewilderment at people in the UK actually wanting to leave the EU:
Barnier is shown briefing senior European parliamentarians. This latest breakdown is “more than weariness”, he tells them. “There is a very serious crisis in the UK which … isn’t linked to the text of Brexit and even less to the Irish backstop. It’s a much deeper crisis. An existential crisis.”
Small c conservative musings precede a hope for a better analysis:
We have just been through an election that saw Labour wiped out in Scotland, trounced in Wales, and under siege in London, while the party of government trailed behind the Greens. Between them, the two main parties took less than a quarter of all votes. We can enter more caveats than in any insurance contract – low turnout, protest vote, all the rest – but it hardly changes the bottom line. We are fast approaching the third anniversary of the Brexit referendum and Westminster has still barely bothered to respond to the grievances that drove a result campaigned against by the entirety of the political and economic establishment.... [failure to convince led to ] an elite paralysis. Meanwhile, the public has worked itself up into an impotent fury in which our party democracy is a sitting target.
...the time is filled with displacement activity. [Leadership candidates]...admit to having no actual ideas of their own. Forty years after Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street, her great-grandchildren are still squabbling over who can claim her ideas.
Chakrabortty cites R. Unger, a philosopher at Harvard:
“European politicians whether centre-left or centre-right are so used to the politics of splitting the difference. They are incapable of facing up to fundamental problems,” he said. “And that leaves a vast vacuum to be filled by any passing nationalist populism.” Except they too have no ideas, apart from buying a few more years for a busted economic model....Unger wants a radical transfer of power and money to people and places far from Westminster, so they can try their own social and economic experiments that will inform and revivify national politics. The guerrilla localism of Preston, in Lancashire, fits that brief, as does the Welsh government’s new focus on the foundational economy.
Let's hear it for UK Autonomism! It would be useful to explore the promise and eventual fate of Italian Autonomism but few in the UK have heard of it. Chakrabortty concludes:
What Brexit has shown again is our inability to think anew about what the state and the economy are for, to sketch out what a different future might look like
So sketch it out, fer fuck's sake!
No comments:
Post a Comment