Liberals spawned Brexit: What Gina Miller Doesn’t Understand
Miller, self-proclaimed steward and co-financier of Britain’s direction of travel, appeared on BBC Question Time recently and repeatedly professed to not understand things. Childish rhetorical flourishes targeted mostly at things she understands perfectly well but she represents a political class that really doesn’t, still, understand the big picture.
One of the things that Miller couldn’t understand was Trump’s flippant remark about his visit to Putin possibly being the easier of his three appointments in Europe. To people like Miller neo-liberal Capitalism is the only remaining possibility. The unfettered economic market draped with European ideas of liberal protections for the individual, as if these two things had no impact on each other, is for Miller the culmination of world history, an inevitable and immutable nature to which all society has previously been leading. These latter-day Fukujamas believe the clock has stopped and only two things remain to be done: make lots of money and extend the illusory liberal protections to more individuals. For Miller, the US president shouldn’t be friendly with the Russian leader because when the clock stopped there was a division between the US and Russia and so it must continue. Hardly a liberal sentiment but certainly one that reveals the contradiction in her assumptions.
What Miller, liberal intellectuals, the progressive main-stream media and the spectrum of single-issue progressive political movements have not understood and still do not understand is that their assumption of a benign, global market on to which they can hang their various causes, building an ever-more civilized world like an onion skin, is simply false and half the world knows it.
If the liberal model worked there would now be a female US president. There was an expectation, a sense, even of entitlement amongst Feminists, across the liberal democracies; we’ve had decades of progress, mindsets have changed, we’ve had a black president, women are half the electorate, on this basis this must happen. On that basis it should have happened but the vote wasn’t confined to that basis. The contest in which some 23 million women voted for a man who made clear his opposition to every liberal policy of post-war America took place in a world in which many people either had no onion to wrap or feared that is was about to be taken from them.
Gina Miller might pretend not to understand Trump but Trump himself made it very clear; to him Putin is neither friend nor enemy but a competitor. A statement that main-stream media ignored because it shone a light on their own incompetence and their futile, self-serving pursuit of the story they have created and fed and continue to peddle; Trump is an aberrational clown who can safely be ridiculed, sneered at and chastised for not doing things the right way, our way, the only way.
Miller says these things to try to shore up a discredited, crumbling idea. The idea that the system that makes people like her fabulously wealthy works for everyone. For all the racism cynically whipped up by the pro-Brexit drivers the vote was taken to leave because too many people know that the system does not work the same for everyone. Neither Brexit nor reversing Brexit is the answer to that.
Blaming people like Miller for Brexit is too easy, however, although her ideas are certainly responsible. Inviting people to embrace progressive ideas, to reject racism, sexism, homophobia, to extend ever wider the modes of oppression which we recognise and refuse to accept has no lasting credibility if there is one glaring omission; economic oppression. Clinton had nothing to say to those American workers most fearful of US decline, Trump spoke directly to them. The radical right understands what Miller does not, what Feminism does not, what New Labour did not; that history has not come to an end and all is to play for.
Those that are truly to blame for Brexit, for providing the space for the racists and the free-market fanatics are the centre-left, reformist parties in whom the labour movement placed it’s trust and who for decades peddled the myth of ethical Capitalism because it was easier than proposing an alternative. Those liberal entrists bear more responsibility than people like Miller because they disarmed the population politically. Before Kinnock’s purge of Socialists from the Labour Party in the 1980s, no worker in Britain would have listened to someone like Miller, a boss or Banks, a boss. In America we have to go further back but there was a time, in the early twentieth century, when Trump, a boss, would have had no traction with US workers. After decades of being told by the Blairs, Clintons, Kinnocks and Harmons of this world, to whom they were willing to listen, that any alternative was futile and that the best we could do was to make what we had more palatable, ideas of the left, including all the progressive, single-issue ideas about equality, have been discredited in the eyes of many workers.
As many as 40,000 people attended the women’s march against Trump in London on the 13th July 2018 (at least twice that number attended the main march). How many protested each time a Saudi royal, who make Trump look like a 1980s new man, had the red carpet rolled out for them by the British establishment ? The failure of liberal democracies to support Palestinian rights has led to a secular Palestinian politics becoming a far more conservative, clerical movement in which the very liberal ideas, particularly regarding the role of women, that liberals make their articles of faith, are greatly reduced in influence. Violence against women, particularly as a weapon of war, across the world has actually increased in the last 30 years as a result of destabilizing, imperialist intervention from the liberal democracies. These examples of liberal hypocricy illustrate how the economic imperatives, the strategic interests of nations and blocks of capital, ignored by liberals in their pantheon of equalities, far from being benign and separate are ultimately the cause of the very inequalities that are being included.
The reformist left has championed this failed approach and, as always, the failure of the left acts as the starting pistol for the right.
Not only has the liberal attempt to de-couple certain equalities from others been a failure and not only has it led to the very backlash that it now despairs of but liberalism continues to intellectually frustrate the ability of the labour movement worldwide to combat the resurgent right. Whilst looking down their noses at Trump might look good in the media it does nothing constructive to change anything. Parties of labour need to do one thing now; address the workers who put Trump into power, took a gamble on Brexit and call for walls to be built against their fellow workers.
Addressing does not mean appeasing. The Blairites made racism in Britain respectable again because their lazy, spineless, vote-harvesting response to UKIP was to tell British workers influenced by the age-old lie that immigration is responsible for low wages and poor conditions that they had a point and that New Labour was listening to them. Blairite MPs lined up to demand that we do more for women, gays and the disabled but hating people because of their skin colour was a grey area. If Corbyn’s Labour means anything it means confronting workers with the alternative argument: no immigrant ever arrives anywhere saying please pay me less and force me to accept inhuman conditions; unscrupulous bosses exploit vulnerable workers to make more profit and they will try to do it to you after Brexit. Indeed, the whole point of Brexit for the people who drove it is to reboot British capitalism for a world market by reducing wages and conditions of British workers.
On the London march some people carried placards reading Orange is the new Fascism. Those people are wrong. The danger of Fascism, as it always has been, is not the existence of a flamboyant individual with a gift for impressing people despite their actions but the failure of the left to provide a radical home for potential Fascists in their millions. The danger of Fascism is to be found in the left failing to find the right path between two disastrous extremes. In the 1930s Stalin, via the German Communist Party, disarmed German workers and helped hand power to Hitler by convincing them that the far right organizations could be ignored and that the only enemy were the liberals. Probably don’t need to worry about that one today. The other extreme to be avoided is the idea that the liberals are not the enemy of the labour movement, will not continue to do nothing, will not, in the end and in their impotence, embrace the radical right and can also be ignored.
What stands up to Fascism is a self-confident, self-conscious, ambitious workers’ movement oiled with it’s own ideas and intent on achieving it’s own goals.
