Marxist Moments

‘WHAT NEXT AS THE TORIES STRUGGLE TO DELIVER A MEANINGFUL BREXIT?’

 

          Jeremy Warner, along with his colleague Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, is one of the two most acute and farsighted economics writers for the Daily Telegraph. Mr Warner’s latest piece, title above, is for 26^th September 2018. In it he delivers a wide-ranging and frank appraisal of the May government’s dismal prospects regarding Brexit. Things don’t look too good.

          Be that as it may (no pun intended), Warner doesn’t exactly warm to the plans of Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell, enunciated in a major speech at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week. Mr McDonnell as we know is a bit of a Red though seemingly more of a potential political trimmer than his leader Jeremy Corbyn. Warner quotes McDonnell as follows: ‘The greater the mess we inherit, the more radical we will have to be. The greater the need for change, the greater the opportunity we have to create that change.’

          But Warner’s logic in this case appears to slip, so eager is he to get in a shot at McDonnell and Labour in an article meant to be aimed at the Conservatives. ‘This kind of stuff is straight out of the Leninist handbook,’ Warner comments, ‘which has it that to drive radical change, you must first create chaos.’ (Not a direct quote of Lenin.) This certainly bears no relation to anything said by McDonnell.

          I doubt if McDonnell has been combing through the pages of Lenin’s works to find his inspiration. In any case McDonnell is referring to the mess inherited from the Conservatives over the past few years: there is no plan here to ‘create chaos’ once in office. And I doubt if Lenin ever said this as a matter of record, since ‘creating chaos’ would not have gone down well as a programme of action with party associates let alone the masses. Nor were the Bolsheviks responsible for the ‘mess’ that the Kerensky government had got the country into. Political agitation only benefits from a chaos already there, as Lenin knew better than anyone.  Historically the Bolsheviks are usually condemned for bringing in too much order at the expense of democracy.

          The other slip in Warner’s reasoning is in regard to the so-called Canada Plus trade plan favoured by the extreme Brexiters in Parliament, with the slogan ‘Freedom to Flourish’. Warner says, ‘Personally I don’t doubt that what the report calls “Freedom to Flourish” could indeed bring significant economic positives, but first you have to create the political will and majority for it’, Warner’s assumption being that both these are embarrassingly lacking today.

          As against the tone of sober realism in most of the rest of Warner’s piece, this statement flies in the face of reality. After, with the rest of us, living through years of economic neoliberalism in conjunction with austerity, which has indeed brought lots of ‘freedom to flourish’ especially to the financial community, Mr Warner is in favour of maintaining economic free-for-all but sadly many others appear not to be – as a result of suffering from the self-same neoliberalism. It is ‘political will’ we need, however, to remedy that.

          Once again – and I have written this before – when economics writers are driven into a corner they blame politicians. As ‘hard-headed’ business is much more important than politics, the mostly tame politicians are irrelevant to it, until business gets us all in such a pickle that the politicos have to be brought back into the picture to play the role of Aunt Sallys.

          In fact I suggest that B. Johnson (also a Telegraph writer) has plenty of ‘political will’, if his sort is what is seen to be needed at this time.