BREXIT DISASTER - WHO’S SORRY NOW?
With the benefit of hindsight and after four years of chaos and fiasco, can the decision by many to vote for Brexit in 2016 now be considered a mistake?
The Brexit agenda was always a project of the hard right, and its success helped propel one of the UK’s most right wing ever governments into power. The fall-out from the 2019 election result has been a disastrous response to the Covid outbreak, a lost year in terms of dealing with the climate crisis, the ramping up of state racism, attacks on parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, attacks on devolution, endemic jingoism, a huge increase in the military budget, vast handouts to Tory cronies, HS2, a huge road building program, wage cuts, higher unemployment and hunger, and further private inroads into the NHS.
And this is even before Brexit has fully come into being. Whether it is a bad deal or no deal, it is the working class in the firing line and that is most unlikely to change on January 1st. There is every indication that things could get worse.
The Brexit agenda was one of the three main political factors that combined to defeat Labour in the general election and the subsequent removal of Jeremy Corbyn as its leader (the other two being the unresisted Zionist offensive and the Labour support for Unionism in Scotland). Instead of seeing Brexit for what it was, the British component of the international right-wing surge, the working-class base of the Labour Party was not sufficiently educated about its dangerous nationalism and racism. Instead of posing an internationalist and (eco) socialist response to the right-wing demagogues, the muddled response from the labour movement leadership handed over many disillusioned working-class people to the Tory right and the likes of Farage.
With a different response, the Remain base of the Labour Party could have been mobilised and augmented sufficiently to overcome the rigging of the referendum (for example the exclusion from the vote of the millions of people living in the country who would be most affected, EU citizens).
However, as it turned out, the Brexit offensive was enough to inflict a massive defeat on the labour movement.
The Brexit agenda now promises more deregulation, such as with Sunak’s Freeports, a jingoistic Brexit celebration jamboree costing million that could have gone towards feeding the hungry, and a potential destabilising of the Irish situation. The higher food prices and job losses associated with Brexit will add more misery to an already poverty and disease-ridden, vastly unequal, population.
The West Midlands is a region that has higher than average unemployment (and affecting minorities even more) and a very much higher than average employment in manufacturing than the other regions of the UK. Both indicators mean that in the event of no agreement on tariffs being reached this region will be more severely affected than other regions of the UK.
The next stage of victory of the Brexit project on January 1st, will further encourage insular nationalism and bigotry. For the hard core Brexiter racists, what is there not to like about that? However, for the labour movement, for the working class, and for the oppressed, it will be a very different story.
Therefore, the question has to be asked again –
With the benefit of hindsight and after four years of chaos and fiasco, can the decision by many to vote for Brexit in 2016 now be considered a mistake?
SELF: Brexit folly can only be blamed on wrong judgements being made by our politicians. More expense, so more waste of our capital of natural resources and, ultimately, and I hope later rather than sooner, the eventual death knell of us so 'intelligent' humans!!
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