THE QUAGMIRE
Students of the relationship between
the economic base and the political superstructure should be finding these
interesting times – even if the rest of us are hiding under our beds. Whether or
not we are witnessing the death of the Conservative Party we are certainly
seeing a rift among sections of ruling class, at the very least over the
details. While the dominant financial side may be optimistic over the latest ‘deal’
proposed by Mrs May which effectively leaves us where we were before if not
somewhat disempowered here and there (plus the prospect of a four-year
stalemate), there are other levels of business as represented roughly by Tory ‘rebels’
that reckon a cleaner break with the EU will mean wholesale elimination of
regulations and the freedom to impose such conditions on a labour market as
will render higher profits: to them ‘Brexit’ means a ‘business’ Britain of the
more buccaneering kind not seen in this country for perhaps a hundred years and
more, and perhaps not since Sir Francis Drake. At the same time, whatever the
views on immigration made clear by the ‘Tommy Robinson’ end of the Tory Party,
agricultural interests worry at the prospect of a drain on cheap imported
labour to pick the fruit, etc. (gone are the days when the urban working class
was transported en masse to the
countryside for picking ‘holidays’), retail outlets facing for example a severe
shortage of better-class chefs, while higher education is confronted by penury
without a steady stream of EU (‘foreign’) and well-paying students. On the Labour
side, the Right is fearful of the return of a ‘garrison state’ mentality if the
Left continues to be determined to have the freedom to nationalise this and
that through deficit spending, which cannot be done under increasingly
neoliberalised EU law: the former clamours for a dubious ‘people’s vote’ while
the latter holds to the referendum long since determining a decisive vote for
Leaving: that showed us the ‘people’s will’ truly enough. Not only would a second referendum conform to the
EU practice to force countries to keep holding referenda until the ‘correct’
voting takes place (and there is a view that a second referendum will require a
third in time, and so on), but polls indicate that a second referendum might
well produce much the same result as the first. At the same time, how practical
is the creation of ‘socialism in one country’: how long would it last, how deep
would it penetrate our society of capitalism in the long run? A Labour
government could – and is likely to - renationalise the Bank of England but it
can’t nationalise Goldman Sachs, or (e.g.) Facebook. The Irish ‘problem’ is
actually a British one, as it always was. The border question only shows
further that a Northern Irish statelet was always a death-trap anomaly and that
Ireland as a whole should be a different country. Apparently most British (non-Unionist)
voters are almost entirely indifferent to the fate of Northern Ireland and
would be glad to be rid of it if it meant a workable settlement overall. As for
Northern Irish voters, they voted in the majority (not wanting a hard border)
to Remain, as did the Scots, whose interest lies in an EU connection for a
semi- or even (possibly in time) Scottish independence.
Britain is facing the consequences of
a nation that sort of ‘growed’ like Topsy whose unity was kept in being by
absolutism, later by empire and by a large economy that embraced a country also
sustained in spirit by foreign threats of conquest from Philip II, Napoleon,
the Axis powers, and possibly the Soviet Union during the Cold War. National
unity is cossetted along by a continuing strange obsession over 1940 and the
image of Winston Churchill with cigar and tommy-gun, along with Royalty
worship, while revivifying the Cold War with Russia today is plainly an attempt
by British leadership to prop up national unity in the face of increasingly
formidable odds. Faced with world recession and the fact that large parts of
Britain are on the wrong side of what is happening globally, with a government
either entirely indifferent to domestic massive poverty and hunger or else keen
to see through a broken-backed working class, the country is actually crumbling
before our eyes like a slow-motion landslide. And, by the way, Spain and Italy
are also crumbling, in more spectacular fashion. Not all nation-states were
meant to be, or not forever! Pot was calling the kettle black when this week
Spain – with Catalonia on its hands – suggested there was no reason why
Scotland should not become independent! And Germany has been a fractured
country since 1989.
One plausible scenario is that London
should be in reality what it is de facto: in other words, instead of dragging
an unwanted country behind it, London should form its own state in which it
could be a more free-market version of wealthy Singapore, another breakaway
entity. I think this is rather a good idea in some ways. London weighs on
England like a stone. Apart from anything else, its ‘independence’ would give Birmingham
and Manchester elbow-room to become again the dynamic cities they once were,
this time assuming the leadership of at least much of the rest of Britain
outside London. Indeed, we could make a packet in negotiated trade relations
with London instead of being sucked in by her. All that finance funnelled into a native
British economy instead of being whisked off abroad (and even worse, into tax
havens – though the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are that as well!) – at
least, up to a point. Scotland would become a natural ally to the non-London
English. I don’t think Scotland hates England. I think it hates London. Indeed the
British map could come to resemble something like a map of this isle at the
time of Alfred the Great (leaving aside the later impact of the Industrial
Revolution). Am I joking? Perhaps. If only now were the time for jokes. But something
along these lines is serious. We are
already well familiar with the term ‘devolution’ and there could well be a
build-up of steam behind the idea like nothing seen before, leading to
something well beyond it. Major political configurations have been changed in
response to recalcitrant circumstances in the past. Although perhaps in many
ways an unfortunate example, it remains true that Versailles in 1919 altered
the maps of Europe and the Middle East, with lasting effects.
Socialism in a country that no longer has
any purpose or unity is likely to be a nonstarter. Imagine trying to bring
socialism about in the similarly nostalgic and obsolete Austro-Hungarian
Empire! But given more localised sovereign entities built on popular loyalty
(and immigrant groups are as loyal to their communities as the rest), the
possibility of socialism from the ground up and connecting with that of other
such sovereign entities around the world is not unthinkable if one sees that
socialism, like previous modes, works its way forward in dialectical stages of
one kind or another. Marxists need to think out politics more – in relation to
economics. This is just a mischievous stab if you like.
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