(Most of this was written before Boris Johnson ran off with his tail between his legs, so the names may have changed but the subject remains the same.)
Edit 2019: Boris is back and my views on Jeremy Corbyn have changed considerably…
I’ve written this blog post (my first ever!) in response to all the calls I’ve seen on social media since the referendum for us to all join hands and smile, and come together to make the best of things, and to explain why, for me personally, that is too much to ask. I was very emotionally invested in the referendum vote, not just because of the touchpaper issues like immigration, xenophobia, the lies of Nigel Farage, and so on, but because I had done a lot of research in previous years about EU regulation in the context of TTIP.
I spent 2014 and much of 2015 fighting TTIP. Those of you who knew me during that time will have had repeated calls from me to sign petitions and read articles about it. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is a trade deal being worked on between Europe and the United States. The idea is that both sides have their own safety regulations and testing mechanisms, and to facilitate trade, these regulations need to be ‘harmonised’ so that costly compliance doesn’t need to be done twice in order for products to be sold across the water. Sounds eminently reasonable, but in fact the talks have, from the beginning, been ambushed by corporate lobbyists on both sides whose idea of ‘harmonising’ is to water down and even remove the safety regulations that protect us and the environment and get in the way of their profits.
In addition, there is a clause in it (ISDS) which allows International corporations to sue individual governments for enacting laws that will curtail their profits, be they health regulations, minimum wage increase, the right to unionise, protection for the environment and so on. Arbitration would not take place in the courts of the country involved but in closed arbitration in New York done by corporate lawyers. This clause is already in effect in other TIPs around the world and has been invoked repeatedly, and it has even been shown that the mere threat of being sued has caused governments to change their policy.
So if the trade deal had gone ahead, we would have ended up with a shift away from consumer protection and towards corporate profit and a further divide in the wealth gap between rich and poor. I know we are still supposed to believe in Margaret Thatcher’s trickle-down effect which means that a profit for the wealthy means a profit for all of us, but it’s just not happening is it? Corporations are evading billions in taxes, London is being bought up by the super-rich, and meanwhile the poor are getting poorer, the government is cutting the wages of junior doctors and selling off it’s assets (including the land registry, national park land, RBS at a loss – don’t even get me started on that, bits of the NHS etc) to make money to spend on public services. The EU regulation that these trade negotiations were trying to dismantle is actually protecting ordinary people from corporate exploitation. The idea that staying in Europe only benefits the wealthy elite, whereas the leave vote would help to put more money in the pockets of the less well off is an absolute fallacy. Leaving Europe will only hand more power to the Conservatives whose policies have done so much to increase the wealth gap in this country, and it’s so sad that leave voters were unable to differentiate between the two.
The more I researched it, the more horrified I became by the implications and the detail of the trade deal, and more crucially discovered just how much EU regulation does to protect all of us. I won’t go into specifics because you can find out more on my TTIP website, and if that isn’t enough for you, I can email you my information pack. Essentially all those ‘opaque’ EU regulations are making our products, services, environment and rights far safer than those in the US. On the other hand after the bankers caused a global recession, the US enacted regulation to control the activities of their merchant banks – something that we have failed to do.
I have always had a problem with the rallying cry of Freedom! used by Republicans in the US, which sets personal liberty against federalism, and the interference of law in their lives, wanting to make government smaller, and keep regulation to a minimum. (Incidentally there is a fabulous article in the New Yorker which traces the genesis of this idea to two unscrupulous PR execs in 1933). The rule of law is what allows us to live together in groups, and the more of us there are, the more law we need. Why don’t you kill someone who has pissed you off? There’s a law against it. Why don’t you rape that voluptuous young hottie along the street? There’s a law to protect her. Pretty self-evident, but as our societies get bigger and bigger (global now) and as the population explodes, we need laws that you and I wouldn’t even begin to think we might need to protect us. For example, why don’t you rear pork with growth hormones that have a negative effect on the human body for faster profit (ractopamine) because in the EU, at least, there is a law against it. Yes the volume of law needed is immense, and can seem opaque if you don’t bother to investigate it, but it is absolutely fundamental to our safety. For years I’ve sneered at the stupid American rednecks and their insular anti-government attitudes. God, we in the UK love to laugh at their politicians. George Dubya, Sarah Palin, and then Donald Trump had us in hysterics. And now the UK has done the same thing. Voted against regulation, and for xenophobia. Against reasoned argument and for ranting fascists. I see little now to differentiate us, and nothing to be proud of.
So back to TTIP and Europe. In the early part of 2016, the efforts of our campaigning were starting to pay off.
3 million people throughout Europe signed a petition to stop TTIP. But even better, President Hollande and the German agriculture minister had publicly stated that they will not go through with TTIP because of the refusal of the US to contemplate watering down the ISDS clause, or ‘harmonise’ regulation in any way closer to the EU precautionary principle. The EU was starting to demonstrate, slowly but surely, that it could put our rights above profit, and protect us from the corporate fast buck.
The EU has even protected us from our own government. I’ve frequently heard it said that The EU is against democracy because it is not elected by us, and we should take back control from Brussels and put lawmaking in the hands of our own MPs. Looked at from another perspective, the EU is free to make laws that benefit everyone because they don’t have to make promises to an ignorant and selfish electorate in order to gain power. For example, the environment. The EU is responsible for around 80% of the laws protecting the environment in the UK, while the current government ignores its own recommendations on protected habitats, eg. to bulldoze ancient woodland to build a quarry or motorway service station, demolish wildlife strongholds to build housing, ignore expert advice on the effectiveness of the badger cull, strip funding from clean energy initiatives, and so on, because, of course, the environment doesn’t win votes, but profit does. Never mind that our beaches are cleaner, and our air is less polluted.
Left to itself, the UK is likely to put climate change and the environment at the bottom of its priorities. Over the past year, the government has reversed a raft of green measures, and received warnings from both the EU and the Climate Change Committee that the UK is not on course to meet it’s targets for carbon emission reduction, in spite of the fact that at 15%, our target is lower than the EU-wide 20%. The UK government also blocked attempts by the EU to introduce regulations to stop fracking from polluting the environment or triggering too many earthquakes, and lobbied to remove the EU fuel quality directive which excluded the import of Canadian tar sand oil which produces 23% more emissions during the refining process.
Ditto workers rights, health and safety, equality for women, human rights, financial regulation etc.
And now for the UK that progress we campaigners made against the damaging trade deal has all gone. Post Brexit, Boris Johnson who has always been pro-TTIP will want to quickly negotiate bilateral trade deals with North America so that he’s got something to hold up to show that he was right, and does anyone seriously think that Boris will allow considerations of consumer protection to get in the way of investment and profit? During TTIP negotiations, the UK government opposed changes to the ISDS clause, and refused to demand exclusions for the NHS – exclusions which were granted to other European healthcare systems. Without the EU on our side, the Bullingdon Club Tories will have nothing to prevent a deal which is disastrous for anyone but investors.
Another aside here: I was at Oxford around the time George Osborne was a member of the Bullingdon Club, of which David Cameron and Boris Johnson were also both members. I don’t think I met any of them, but I do remember a story about it. The Bullingdon had hired out a restaurant and during the course of the evening completely trashed it. Completely. It wasn’t just because they were drunk at the time, it was to demonstrate that they had the money to pay off the owner and escape consequences, and because it was a point of pride that only people who had enough money to do things like this could be members of their exclusive club. And if you didn’t have enough money to be one of them they would happily trample on your livelihood to show how little they cared about anyone else. This seems to have been standard practice. We have, as far as I know, not one but three members of this club at the heart of the Conservative party. Even among other boarding school alumni at Oxford it was common to call anyone less privileged an oik. Even anyone from a boarding school that wasn’t Eton, Harrow, or possibly Winchester. Oxford exposed me to a class of people who had lived, and always would live in a bubble of elitism, from home to school to Oxford to Westminster. And now the Conservatives are supposedly the party of the working class. I can assure you that they despise the people they represent.
Even if we had a left-leaning government that did want to make sure that we aren’t going to end up stripped of workers rights, environmental protection and consumer law, what kind of bargaining position do you think we are in now that we have voted to leave Europe and our economy is plummeting? We may even end up with trade deals that include ISDS, against the advice of the LSE, because you know... pesky experts. It just makes me want to cry.
And now that we’ve voted to leave the EU, are we free of all that “opaque legislation”? Well, there’s nothing stopping us from starting from scratch on all our legislation – except of course if we want to trade with the EU, in which case anything made here will have to conform to all those horrid old safety regulations. We could have separate sets of regulations governing items made for export to Asia and North America, which would increase costs in terms of certification, production and packaging. And then of course, we’d have to spend millions of pounds in administration – you know all that bureaucracy that Farage and Boris have been so disparaging about – to do our own testing and certifications, and put our new standards into law. So no, either we stick with European regulations or we spend many years and a fortune making our own. Even if we stick with the bulk of the existing laws, there will be a huge admin cost to shifting mechanisms from abroad to the UK. On the other hand, we are now free to import products made abroad to standards which don’t conform to the safer EU regulations. So lose lose.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
So how did we get to a position where 52% of our country voted to leave the protection of the EU? Obviously the power of Murdoch’s scabrous media empire has been well-documented, the lies of that awful racist Farage, Boris’s irresponsible backing of the leave vote to gain personal popularity for a future push for PM, Cameron’s election promise of a referendum to stop people abandoning the Conservatives for UKIP, have all stoked a mistrust of the European Union, a fear of immigration and a misunderstanding of the real causes of pressures on our public services.
It’s widely agreed that the vote was a monumental two fingers up at ‘the establishment’ (again, wrong establishment, but never mind that now). We certainly came to the referendum after 10 depressing years for politics. We were still embroiled in the hugely unpopular Iraq war in 2008 when we were hit by the financial crisis, which resulted in massive bailouts for the banks, and subsequent cuts to spending in the public sector, with nothing in the way of punitive action and little in the way of regulation. The city was seen as untouchable, bankers’ obscene bonuses couldn’t be addressed in case the bankers moved elsewhere. (A cap to bankers bonuses, by the way was finally forced on the UK by the EU in 2013). The biggest change was the separation of retail and commercial banking, so that our private savings won’t be gambled but the bankers are still free to play with our economy. Meanwhile the cash-strapped electorate is having to bear the burden of public services.
Hot on the heels of the bailout of the banks came the MPs' expenses scandal which lasted 5 years and destroyed people’s faith in their elected representatives.
Against this background we have had two general elections run on a Conservative-led agenda of fear and austerity. During the first election after the financial crisis in 2010 the Conservatives blamed the previous Labour government for the global recession which was caused by the out of control financial sectors of the UK and US, and promising to get it under control with a program of reducing spending and introducing cuts to public services. An entirely false analogy to a household budget was widely disseminated, conflating macro and microeconomics in a way that was misleading but easy for voters to grasp. It was easy to persuade people already having to tighten their own belts that this was what the government needed to do, and much harder to sell the idea that reduced spending would result in a stagnant economy and worsen the recession. Not that Labour tried. Scare tactics paid off, the Tories were able to form a coalition government and Labour lost nearly 100 seats in parliament.
Then came the phone hacking scandal in which the Murdoch empire and the police were implicated and the prime minister was shown to have close ties with the News of the World. The MPs' expenses scandal continued to unearth sordid details. We had race-triggered riots which spread through the UK, and turned into organised looting and set cities on fire. Student protests which turned violent, Occupy London, and the extensive media coverage of tax-dodging corporations. In 2012 the government introduced the unpopular health and Social care act ‘restructuring’ the NHS designed to open it up to private tenders. The 2014 Scottish referendum split the nation and resulted in the decimation of Labour support in Scotland.
Throughout all of this, we saw the rise of UKIP, and a spittle-flecked Nigel Farage honing the dissatisfaction of the increasingly impoverished and miserable voters and directing the hatred at immigrants. It’s important to note here that although Germany and the UK both have a 13% immigrant population, in the UK 64% of people in the UK see immigration as a problem compared to 29% who see it as an opportunity. In Germany, where Angela Merkel held an immigration summit in 2014 welcoming migrants and refugees, those numbers are reversed, with just 32% seeing immigration as a problem compared to 62% viewing it as an opportunity. A clear demonstration that it’s not numbers of migrants producing xenophobia it’s the response of politicians and the press.
The 2015 election was even more depressing. 5 years of cuts to public spending had contributed to a shrinking economy and the almost-double dip recession in 2012 resulting in unprecedented numbers of people using food banks. In spite of all this, the Conservatives AGAIN ran on an austerity ticket, pointing to the growth of the economy from 2013 onwards, and saying that their policies had worked even though the economy only started to recover after the coalition stopped applying new austerity measures. In fact the austerity measures did a great deal of damage to the economy. Once again the Conservatives used scare tactics, saying that they shouldn’t trust the Labour government that caused the 2008 recession with the newly growing economy. It was outright fraud, but people were nervous about money, and in general people seem to have a core belief that the Tories will always be more reliable with their finances.
And, of course, to ward off the growing UKIP threat David Cameron had promised the EU referendum.
The most depressing thing from my point of view was that a lacklustre Labour presented no counter-argument. They were so hamstrung by fears of not appealing to the Middle England vote that they kept the election on the Tory platform of finance and austerity – to try to seem as though the country would be in safe hands – and only came off as Tory lite. They didn’t argue over whether spending cuts were the right strategy, just how much and where to cut. There was no alternative narrative provided, no hope or positive direction, no charisma, nothing to distinguish them from the Tories and consequently no traction with the electorate. Right up to the day of the election more people than ever before didn’t know how to vote, politicians were viewed as ‘all the same’, out of touch, unsympathetic. Unsurprisingly there was no revolution, the Tories even gained enough seats to form a majority government.
Labour, still sure that it should be trying to gain the centre ground by copying the Tories, blamed the election loss on Ed Miliband’s social skills, so he stepped down, and the dismal interim leadership was installed. Harriet Harman, in a further move to try to make the electorate believe that the Labour party could be trusted with the nation’s finances, encouraged Labour MPs to approve Tory cuts with disastrous results.
CORBYN
Then something amazing happens. Jeremy Corbyn stumbles into candidacy for Labour leader and something like a kernel of hope and optimism sweeps Labour party members. Here is someone relatively unknown, and therefore untouched by recent parliamentary shenanigans, someone who has never fiddled his expenses, who oozes integrity, wants to stand up to the corporations and make them pay taxes, who stood on an anti-austerity platform backed by prominent economists and the International Monetary Fund, promised to build council houses to stop the government haemorrhaging money on housing benefit, a thorough environmental policy, with an end to fossil fuels, an end to talks about fracking, promised to end the privatisation of the NHS, and increase funding for mental health, abolition of tuition fees, and so on. Finally someone was standing up for the electorate and not corporate profit or personal power.
Unsurprisingly, a Labour party depressed by the showing in the last two elections and desperate for some hope rushed to show their support . And not only the Labour party, the public imagination was captured by this scruffy man who had been thrust blinking into the spotlight. Social media memes portrayed him as Obi wan Kenobi and Jesus Christ. Scores of people rushed to pay the £3 fee so that they could vote for him in the leadership contest. Finally after so many long years of depression and voter apathy we had a brief moment when people were enthused by the democratic process, voting from hope rather than fear – and it was happening in the Labour party! Surely a sight to gladden the hearts of Labour MPs who had suffered heavy losses in Scotland following the referendum, and who had struggled to engage with the electorate through two miserable general elections? Apparently not. As soon as polls started to show that Jeremy Corbyn was winning, Labour rushed to stop the new £3 members from entering their vote. Even so, Corbyn won with 59% of the first preference votes – 3% more than Tony Blair. Extraordinary.
At this point, I remember going to a party and having a discussion with someone who had been part of the campaign of Liz Kendall (4%). I was high on the possibilities of what could be accomplished now. The Labour party had the opportunity to redefine itself as the party of integrity, compassion and justice, and carefully shift the rumbling resentment of the electorate towards self-serving, duplicitous, out of touch MPs away from itself and firmly lay it on the Conservatives. Corbyn’s policies were at this point almost irrelevant; it was so obvious that his appeal lay in something other than rail nationalisation, and we had 5 years til the next general election. 5 years is a long time in politics and we had 5 years to build and refine this movement, to keep the positivity and dispense with some of the less swallowable policies. I wasn’t even sure that in 5 years, Corbyn would still be leader of the party, but I imagined some gentle transition some way down the line, lots of support all round, joint press conferences, and eventually a party that would take us out of this mire of national misery in which voters believed that politicians weren’t listening to them, and would say anything to get their votes, then do exactly as they pleased.
So what happened? Immediately after the leadership contest the Labour party tore itself apart. Instead of eating a large slice of humble pie, realising that the way they had been doing things so far had been resoundingly rejected by their members, and trying to see what they could learn from it, and how they could benefit from this turn of events, there was a series of very public temper tantrums. Corbyn was ridiculed by his own party and the left-wing media; the Tories didn’t even have to lift a finger, they could sit back and watch with glee. The Labour membership was patronisingly told that they had got it wrong, that Jeremy Corbyn was unelectable and that the important thing was to say the right thing to get into power. *Headdesk* Ten years of voter apathy, miserable Labour engagement in the elections, fear campaigns, austerity, MPs' expenses scandals, increasing mistrust in our elected representatives, and this surge of bright hope and idealism is squashed by MPs whose primary concern is to appease Middle England to get into power. Of course it’s important to get into a position where you can change things, but to insist on power over principle at just this moment when a seedling of idealism had sprouted in the wasteland of British politics was utterly self-defeating.
I heard Middle England invoked so many times, it was easy to forget that ‘Middle England’ is just people with the same needs as everyone else: financial security of course, but also hope and pride and a feeling of being in control, and most crucially they aren’t some remote, unchanging god that requires obeisance, they have ears and minds and sense. Instead of saying whatever people want to hear to get elected, which as we have now seen, can have disastrous results, why not try campaigning on the things you actually believe, and educating people to see things differently? For years now UK politics has been lurching ever further to the right; and the middle ground has moved significantly. Instead of continuing to let the Tories and the Murdoch media set the agenda, and trying to play catch up, changing your policies to appease the fears they’ve gained from reading the Sun, why not change the conversation? We have laws against hate crime and discrimination for the individual but at a political level it has become normal to “listen to the concerns of people over immigration”; a disconnect I find staggering. And I mean normal for the Labour party of the middle ground as well as the Tories and UKIP. You can’t legitimise racism in this way at a national level and then expect individuals to be nice to their foreign neighbours. We should be educating people, not pandering to them. It’s so sad watching Labour squabble over who gets to lead the party in following at the heels of the Tories, picking up and defusing the bombs thrown at them, instead of developing their own arsenal and shifting the battlefield. For a brief moment in 2015, I thought we had found a new idealism, unformed and unprepared, but the beginnings of a real change to British democracy.
Jeremy Corbyn did two fantastic things in the first weeks of his leadership: he appointed a shadow cabinet that was 50% women, and he appointed a shadow minister for mental health. Both of these things were amazingly positive, and could have been yet more positivity for the Labour party, and yet they were lost in the clamour of vilification from the Labour party and the press. Labour MPs sulked and stormed and nursed their fragile egos, like toddlers arguing over a favourite toy. Corbyn was blamed for everything, and over the months that followed, the excitement about the possibility of a politics of integrity ebbed away, leaving a heavy sense of inevitability that still no-one in Westminster gave a shit about anything other than their own power and position. The assertion that Corbyn was unelectable went from theory to self-fulfilling prophecy.
I’d also like to say how irritated I am that Corbyn is being blamed for 30% of Labour supporters voting leave. The man had phenomenal popular support when he was elected, and has spent the intervening period herding cats. 8 months of a cohesive Labour coasting on the positivity of the leadership election instead of feeding on each other’s entrails might have encouraged more than 66% to vote remain. This current proposed vote of no-confidence is no-surprise. Scapegoats R us. I suspect he’ll go, and someone more Middle England -friendly will be elected and Westminster will carry on as before. But it doesn’t really matter in any case, the Labour party has squandered the advantage they were given. The enthusiasm is gone. Membership of the Labour party which had doubled after Corbyn became leader has started to ebb away and all that’s left of the phenomenon is the gentle, underprepared socialist. By spending so much time trying to throw out the baby, Labour has lost the bathwater.
There have been questions over Corbyn’s leadership during the referendum, but he was in the unenviable position of siding with an openly hostile Cameron – a difficult ask for any Labour MP, not long after the Labour-Conservative joint effort in Scotland lost so many Scottish Labour MPs. There have also been suggestions that his referendum campaigning was both underreported and sabotaged by his own office. His leadership qualities have been called into question, but you’d have to be a narcissist to come through the hammering he has received from his own party unscathed. If we don’t want to be governed by narcissists like Tony Blair, Farage and Boris Johnson, why don’t we start being a little kinder to the MPs on our own side who aren’t? Even so it shows enormous hypocrisy on the part of Labour MPs and the press to spend 8 months laying into him and then blaming him for not leading a united Labour. I’m not a Corbynista, I don’t think the man walks on water, but I do think he hasn’t had a chance.
So yes, 10 years of miserable political and financial scandals, two elections with campaigns fought on fear of economic instability rather than hope, UKIP feeding off that fear and turning it against immigrants, Conservative austerity policies driving people into poverty, you can see why large parts of the country wanted to take a stand. And then that fuckwit Cameron gave them the opportunity, the mainstream media treated it as Conservative brangling, and the ignorant voters shafted us all.
THE FALLOUT
So here we are, post-referendum, and Britain is a poorer place. I don’t just mean financially, although the pound has plummeted, the much-vaunted savings on EU contributions will have to be spent on the per-capita tariff if we want to trade with the EU (Norway pays about €800m), and we now won’t get any EU funding, etc etc. Racist attacks are on the increase, both of the main political parties are in meltdown, the nation is hurt and angry and divided. The Tories, now unhampered by the EU, are free to fuck the nation over as much as they like. Just as the EU announces its anti-tax avoidance directive to apply to all corporate taxpayers operating in the EU, George Osborne announces a corporate tax cut to 15%. We have lost so much and we are being asked to forgive and forget, to work together to make the best of things. “It’s done now, time to move on.”
Well, I’m afraid I can’t do that, and one reason is that I am really angry about the lack of effort that voters have put into this decision. It makes me furious to hear people saying “We were lied to”. Of course you were lied to, that’s what politicians do. You have the whole internet at your disposal to find things out if you want to, and if you’re making a momentous decision like this you SHOULD be finding out more about the implications of your vote. If you didn’t want to put in the hours yourself, there were many experts ready to give you their analysis of the result of leaving Europe. And if you can’t be bothered to find out the implications of your actions don’t take part in the decision!
On the subject of experts, Michael Gove’s dismissal of expert opinion found fertile ground where it should not have done, and I wonder if this partly originates with journalism. Back when Jeremy Paxman first laid into Michael Howard in the 90s, it was exciting seeing a journalist holding a politician to account, but now this adversarial style has been taken up by almost all interviewers to give the impression of journalistic integrity and gravitas, and experts can come off as badly as politicians. They are treated with mistrust, their answers are cut short, they are talked over, the point of the interview seems to be to stoke the anxieties of the baying mob, not to actually find out the truth. Sometimes it’s embarrassing to watch. It’s hardly surprising that this cynicism has rubbed off on us.
Another reason I can’t let it go is that so many people seem to have voted out of bigotry. I know that not all leave voters are racist, they aren’t all stupid, and that they do have genuine concerns about pressure on public services. However, it is pure laziness and xenophobia to ascribe these problems to immigration. Until recently I had a Facebook friend who had previously never voted in her life, age 45, insisting that she was not political. This same woman registered to vote in the referendum at the last minute, because she thought Katy Hopkins was making a lot of sense. In spite of having 4 children and at least 3 grandchildren of her own she thought that pressure on the NHS was caused by the small percentage of the UK population who are immigrants. This isn’t just ignorance its wilful ignorance, because it’s easier to blame the brown face or the person with the foreign accent than accept that our population and our greed are outgrowing our resources.
I have to say that ignorance isn’t confined to the uneducated. There is a great deal of reluctance to spend any time learning about the things that affect us. If we can’t get the gist in 140 characters and a funny picture it’s too much effort, and complex issues don’t boil down to a meme.
While fighting TTIP I campaigned in the streets, went to rallies, made a TTIP-for-beginners website, prepared a more detailed information pack which I sent on to clients and anyone interested, and the response even from my educated friends was underwhelming. “Oh it I can’t read that it’s too long” “It makes my head hurt” “Maybe you should let the Kurds have Parliament Square, it’s a much more important cause.” Lol.
So congratulations if you’ve got this far because it does involve reading words.
Do I think it’s ‘undemocratic’ to want to reverse this decision? Possibly, but a question this complex should never have been put to a public who have little understanding of the complexities of international relations. And once a calamitous mistake has been made you should admit the folly and try to undo the damage rather than stubbornly digging yourself in deeper on principle.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Fingers crossed not out of the European Union to start with. Then what? We can’t continue to have our country’s agenda set by Rupert Murdoch. We can’t ban him, so just as education is the key to helping young people put the nastier side of porn into context, perhaps we need to start teaching politics in schools. I know that the theory is that children should be allowed to form their own political opinions free from influence by any one teacher, but surely putting politics on the national curriculum is better than leaving their minds unprepared for the barage of hateful rhetoric from the likes of Nigel Farage and Katy Hopkins? At least give them the tools to think, and teach them that politics is for EVERYONE so that no-one would go 30 years without voting.
More responsible, less sensationalist journalism perhaps? I don’t just mean the tabloids here, as a nation we have become addicted to scandal and conflict. Nigel Farage has had a lot more air time than he should have had over the years because he’s a colourful figure and we love to be shocked. Everything is dealt with in the most alarmist, viewer-grabbing way - and we are surprised when people vote out of fear.
From a long term perspective this is going to keep happening. Global populations are growing exponentially, and competition for resources is intensifying. Climate change will destabilise one region after another leading to wars and mass migration. This is already happening: the Syrian conflict was at least partially caused by 6 years of drought prompting hungry farmers to move to cities. As food, water and wealth become less abundant per capita people will scale down their concept of community to fit what they feel supplies can support, and intolerance will grow. We are already seeing the fragmentation of Europe and the United Kingdom, and a rise in racism. Other forms of prejudice and discrimination will follow. Even if we could, as an island, effectively control our borders and prevent people from arriving for a short while, we wouldn’t be able to keep the world out forever.
Instead of trying to pull the covers over our heads and ignoring the problem we should be trying to unite to tackle the root causes: climate change and population growth. These are global problems that need cooperation not isolationism. By constantly fixing the economy with short-term solutions, and measuring success annually by GDP we’re creating long term problems that no amount of corporate tax relief will fix. I’d limit birthrates around the world to one per couple for a start. That would ease pressure on the NHS! Force much more strict laws on investing in renewable energy and have much more stringent and faster targets for carbon emissions. I don’t know, I haven’t thought this bit through, the moral outrage part is easier.
