Capitalists for the EU

Quite a good speculative analysis of the divided interests of capital in this GHuardina piece today:

If any prime minister in the past had shown such a determined ignorance of the dynamics of global capitalism, the massed ranks of British capital would have stepped in to force a change of direction....the Tories now represent the interests of a small section of capitalists who actually fund the party. An extreme version of this argument was floated by the prime minister’s sister, Rachel, and the former chancellor Philip Hammond – both of whom suggested that hard Brexit is being driven by a corrupt relationship between the prime minister and his hedge-fund donors, who have shorted the pound and the whole economy. This is very unlikely to be correct [damn!],  but it may point to a more disconcerting truth.

the capitalists who do support Brexit tend to be very loosely tied to the British economy....Sir James Dyson, who no longer produces in the UK. The owners of several Brexiter newspapers are foreign, or tax resident abroad – as is the pro-Brexit billionaire Sir James Ratcliffe of Ineos.... much of the capital in Britain is not British and not linked to the Conservative party...the Conservative party was without question the party of capital and property, one which stood against the party of organised labour....[Post-War] the Tories represented an increasingly national capitalism, protected by import controls, and closely tied to an interventionist and technocratic state that wanted to increase exports of British designed and made goods. A company like Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) saw itself, and indeed was, a national champion. British industry, public and private, was a national enterprise....

Today there is no such thing as British national capitalism. London is a place where world capitalism does business...Everywhere in the UK there are foreign-owned enterprises, many of them nationalised industries...Most of these foreign-owned businesses, not surprisingly, are hostile to Brexit  

So foreign-owned international capital located in Britain dislikes Brexit. So doesn't that support the view that Brexit might weaken or regulate this appalling global colonisation? No:

The modern British state has distanced itself from the productive economy and is barely able to take an expert view of the complexities of modern capitalism. This was painfully clear in the Brexit impact sectoral reports the government was forced to publish – they were internet cut-and-paste jobs....The state can no longer undertake the radical planning and intervention that might make Brexit work...Brexit is a promise without a plan. But in the real world Brexit does mean Brexit, and no deal means no deal.

Then it gets rather like a 'ruse of reason', not dissimilar to Marx's attempt to explain the anachronistic rise of Napoleon III  -- it still supported his analysis because it was really a necessary modification of capitalism:

Brexit is a necessary crisis, and has provided a long overdue audit of British realities. It exposes the nature of the economy, the new relations of capitalism to politics and the weakness of the state. ..

Even so, all is not quite lost:

From a new understanding, a new politics of national improvement might come; without it we will remain stuck in the delusional, revivalist politics of a banana monarchy.