VIDEO: "How Brexit Snuck Up On Everyone"

 

With Brexit no deal now very likely, this insightful short video shows how since the moment the UK joined Europe (at least politically) there's always been a campaign to leave. 

Also focuses on UKIP's use of fear and national symbols.

"Remembering Pau Casals" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

The first Catalan name I ever (knowingly) heard was that of Pau Casals. I was around eight years old and listening to a Monty Python comedy record.

An English mock-commentator’s voice introduced “The Sonatino in E sharp by Antonio Vivaldi to be played by Pablo Casals during his 400 foot plunge into a bucket of boiling fat.” Next was the sound of a violin soloist playing a few bars, then a long scream followed by the sound you’d expect of someone falling through the air into a container of liquid.

This was very funny as a kid but, in fact, Casals was mainly a cello player and so much of this man’s life, his beliefs and practices, make Monty Python’s comedy sketches seem tame and dull in comparison.

Pau Casal’s mother Pilar (who was originally from Puerto Rico) had brought him up to treat everyone as an equal. He claims she openly breastfed his baby brother in front of the Spanish infanta (the sister of the king) on their first day at the royal palace in Madrid. The young cellist had gone there to audition for a scholarship from the queen but it turned out to be barely enough for the family of four to live on.

Fluent in seven languages, Casals became a public friend to many well-known figures in the arts, including Colonel George Picart, a hero of the infamous, anti-semitic Dreyfus case in Paris at the turn of the century.

Casals was full of contradictions, too. Adventurous by nature, he was also a creature of habit. He started more than 80 years of his life every day playing two preludes and fugues by Bach but somehow found new vitality in himself and the music every time he did so.

Rightly though, it is his musical genius that he is still remembered for.

His belief that intuition or instinct is the most important factor in the creation and performance of music was not then a popular opinion. He was also controversial in his development of radical methods of using his main instrument but understood the fundamental importance of “playing songs in the language of everyone.”

Listening to his interpretation of the old Catalan folk song (Casals says it is actually a Christmas carol) ‘El Cant del Ocells’, or Song of the Birds, brought tears flooding into my eyes and tugged at my heart strings in the first handful of notes he played. He seems to have the ability to drag you under the waves for a few wrenching seconds then within a few beats, thrust you up, blinking hard into the warmth of the sun.

My only criticism of this extraordinary man (who was also an accomplished orchestra conductor) is his mental and emotional blindspot towards the monarchy. Casals called himself a life-long Republican but his continually fawning attitude towards them was at odds with his stated attitude.

While he understandably felt indebted to the Spanish royals for early opportunities in his career, it seems to me that in his autobiography ‘Joys & Sorrows’ he exaggerated the “friendship” he had with King Alfonso XIII and Queen Maria Cristina who, as his supposed “second mother”, gave him decorative honours and jewels. Casals failed to state that their riches and position came at the expense of ordinary people such as his own family.

Just like his name Pau, Casals was essentially an international man of peace. Surely, this is partly because three major wars straddled his life, the same way he straddled the cello. He once said: “The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?” These are still important sentiments today, almost half a century after his death.

[THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN CATALONIA TODAY MAGAZINE,MARCH 2020.]

Nobody says it better...

   
I've never read anything that undestands what's behind support for Brexit or explains it better...

Definitely worth reading from start to finish.

A.A. Gill (Sunday Times journalist and food critic) writing about Brexit before his death in Dec 2016:

“It was the woman on [BBC] Question Time that really did it for me. She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school in every parish council in the country. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in-law. The camera closed in on her and she shouted: “All I want is my country back. Give me my country back.”
It was a heartfelt cry of real distress and the rest of the audience erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: “Back from what? Back from where?”

Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. Of course I know what they mean. We all know what they mean. They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles. Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to victoria sponge and 22 yards to a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and suffering in silence and patronising foreigners with pity.
We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.

The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy, the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.

And if you think that’s an exaggeration of the Brexit position, then just listen to the language they use: “We are a nation of inventors and entrepreneurs, we want to put the great back in Britain, the great engineers, the great manufacturers.” This is all the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird with his television, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.

All we need, their argument goes, is to be free of the humourless Germans and spoilsport French and all their collective liberalism and reality. There is a concomitant hope that if we manage to back out of Europe, then we’ll get back to the bowler-hatted 1950s and the Commonwealth will hold pageants, fireworks displays and beg to be back in the Queen Empress’s good books again. Then New Zealand will sacrifice a thousand lambs, Ghana will ask if it can go back to being called the Gold Coast and Britain will resume hand-making Land Rovers and top hats and Sheffield plate teapots.

There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.
The under-thirties want to be part of things, not aloof from them. They’re about being joined-up and counted. I imagine a phrase most outies identify with is “women’s liberation has gone too far”. Everything has gone too far for them, from political correctness — well, that’s gone mad, hasn’t it? — to health and safety and gender-neutral lavatories.

Those oldies, they don’t know if they’re coming or going, what with those newfangled mobile phones and kids on Tinder and Grindr. What happened to meeting Miss Joan Hunter Dunn at the tennis club? And don’t get them started on electric hand dryers, or something unrecognised in the bagging area, or Indian call centres , or the impertinent computer asking for a password that has both capitals and little letters and numbers and more than eight digits.

Brexit is the fond belief that Britain is worse now than at some point in the foggy past where we achieved peak Blighty.

We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re going to make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe insouciance that what they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your ex. They reckon they can get out of the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, take the kids out of school, stop the in-laws going to the doctor, get strict with the visiting rights, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see other people on the side.
Really, that’s their best offer? That’s the plan? To swagger into Brussels with Union Jack pants on and say: “ ’Ello luv, you’re looking nice today. Would you like some?”

When the rest of us ask how that’s really going to work, leavers reply, with Terry-Thomas smirks, that “they’re going to still really fancy us, honest, they’re gagging for us. Possibly not Merkel, but the bosses of Mercedes and those French vintners and cheesemakers, they can’t get enough of old John Bull. Of course they’re going to want to go on making the free market with two backs after we’ve got the decree nisi. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

Have no doubt, this is a divorce. It’s not just business, it’s not going to be all reason and goodwill. Like all divorces, leaving Europe would be ugly and mean and hurtful, and it would lead to a great deal of poisonous xenophobia and racism, all the niggling personal prejudice that dumped, betrayed and thwarted people are prey to. And the racism and prejudice are, of course, weak points for us.

The tortuous renegotiation with lawyers and courts will be bitter and vengeful, because divorces always are and, just in passing, this sovereignty thing we’re supposed to want back so badly, like Frodo’s ring, has nothing to do with you or me. We won’t notice it coming back, because we didn’t notice not having it in the first place.

Nine out of 10 economists say ‘remain in the EU’

You won’t wake up on June 24 and think: “Oh my word, my arthritis has gone! My teeth are suddenly whiter! Magically, I seem to know how to make a soufflé and I’m buff with the power of sovereignty.” This is something only politicians care about; it makes not a jot of difference to you or me if the Supreme Court is a bunch of strangely out-of-touch old gits in wigs in Westminster or a load of strangely out-of-touch old gits without wigs in Luxembourg. What matters is that we have as many judges as possible on the side of personal freedom.

Personally, I see nothing about our legislators in the UK that makes me feel I can confidently give them more power. The more checks and balances politicians have, the better for the rest of us. You can’t have too many wise heads and different opinions. If you’re really worried about red tape, by the way, it’s not just a European problem. We’re perfectly capable of coming up with our own rules and regulations and we have no shortage of jobsworths. Red tape may be annoying, but it is also there to protect your and my family from being lied to, poisoned and cheated.

The first “X” I ever put on a voting slip was to say yes to the EU. The first referendum was when I was 20 years old. This one will be in the week of my 62nd birthday. For nearly all my adult life, there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been pleased and proud to be part of this great collective. If you ask me for my nationality, the truth is I feel more European than anything else. I am part of this culture, this European civilisation. I can walk into any gallery on our continent and completely understand the images and the stories on the walls. These people are my people and they have been for thousands of years. I can read books on subjects from Ancient Greece to Dark Ages Scandinavia, from Renaissance Italy to 19th-century France, and I don’t need the context or the landscape explained to me. The music of Europe, from its scales and its instruments to its rhythms and religion, is my music. The Renaissance, the rococo, the Romantics, the impressionists, gothic, baroque, neoclassicism, realism, expressionism, futurism, fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism, postmodernism and kitsch were all European movements and none of them belongs to a single nation.

No time for walls: the best of Europe, from its music and food to IM Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, depends on an easy collision of cultures

There is a reason why the Chinese are making fake Italian handbags and the Italians aren’t making fake Chinese ones. This European culture, without question or argument, is the greatest, most inventive, subtle, profound, beautiful and powerful genius that was ever contrived anywhere by anyone and it belongs to us. Just look at my day job — food. The change in food culture and pleasure has been enormous since we joined the EU, and that’s no coincidence. What we eat, the ingredients, the recipes, may come from around the world, but it is the collective to and fro of European interests, expertise and imagination that has made it all so very appetising and exciting.

The restaurant was a European invention, naturally. The first one in Paris was called The London Bridge.

Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of creators, producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive lovers. You can’t dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a place that encourages it and you can truncate it. You can make it harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can build walls, but why on earth would you? This collective culture, this golden civilisation grown on this continent over thousands of years, has made everything we have and everything we are, why would you not want to be part of it?

I understand that if we leave we don’t have to hand back our library ticket for European civilisation, but why would we even think about it? In fact, the only ones who would are those old, philistine scared gits. Look at them, too frightened to join in.”

"Spain’s New Left[-ish] Government"

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A 19 year-old friend of my son's was crying with relief and happiness when he found out about the new government plans for welfare the other day. 

It's difficult to know how progressive the new left coalition will be, given the Socialist party's previous move to the right but there are some encouraging signs already...

"Today Spain elected its first left-wing coalition since the civil war in the 1930s. Already, it is under siege from the country's elite - but if it succeeds, it can improve the lives of millions...

Before last weekend, it had been decades since the Spanish parliament had seen such a powerful challenge to the rhetoric of “defending the homeland.” Countering the rising politics of nationalism, Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias told a heated Congress that the real “betrayal” of Spain was “attacking workers’ rights, selling off public housing to vulture funds, and privatising the welfare state and public services.”

For the far-right forces whom Iglesias was addressing, he and his allies were simply a band of “communists, populists” and regional nationalists run amok. In the view of Spanish-nationalist parties like Vox, the Podemos leader is figurehead of an “anti-Spanish” rabble, entertained by a power-hungry “sociopath” in the form of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

At the heart of this debate was the prospect of a historic coalition agreement between Sánchez’s centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE) and Iglesias’s Unidas Podemos — on January 7 sworn in as Spain’s new government. Supported by Catalan and Basque regionalists, along with a mishmash of independents, after years of false starts the two parties are finally forming what they call a “progressive coalition” — for its critics, a “Frankenstein’s government.”

Such an arrangement is long overdue, after a decade of post-crash austerity and Spain’s most serious constitutional crisis since the 1970s transition to democracy. Since Podemos smashed open the two-party system almost five years ago, no such coalition with the PSOE has proven possible, even when the parliamentary arithmetic allowed it.

Yet all this changed with the November 2019 general election. As the left-wing parties dropped some 1.5 million votes (with the PSOE itself losing 800,000) Sánchez found himself unable to make a deal to his right, and was finally forced to commit to the “progressive” agenda he had hitherto only gestured toward.

After the previous general election in April 2019, the long summer of coalition talks between the PSOE and Podemos were polarised and often conducted in bad faith by Sánchez’s party. Yet November’s electoral setbacks for both the PSOE and Podemos — in a climate of rising nationalist tensions, fed by the Catalan issue — instead rapidly drew them into a coalition.

In a period of retreat for the European left, this government will arguably constitute the most left-wing administration across the entire continent. Yet, beyond its lack of international allies, this administration will also be forced to work within the challenging confines imposed by Spain’s constitutional crisis, EU budget rules, and the virulent opposition not only of the Right but also Spain’s major economic and media powers.

For years, these same forces have succeeded in blocking a PSOE-Podemos coalition. Today, we can be sure they will waste little time in looking to neutralise — if not do away entirely — with this government and its paper-thin majority.

Yet despite the clear challenges that lie ahead, there are also positive signs. This administration will also see Pablo Iglesias’s formation assume cabinet positions — the government posts it has long believed necessary if it is to hold the flip-flopping PSOE to its promises of social reform and democratic renewal.

Beyond Iglesias’s own appointment as Deputy Prime Minister, there will also be substantial portfolios for Podemos’s Yolanda Díaz as Labor Minister and Irene Montero as Minister for Equality. Izquierda Unida (United Left) leader Alberto Garzón will be its Consumer Minister — the country’s first Communist minister in over eighty years. This weekend it was also announced that renowned sociologist and social-movement theorist Manuel Castells will become the fledgling government’s Universities Minister, after being put forward for the role by Podemos’s Catalan affiliate, En Comú Podem.

Read more from source here

"How to Lose a Country, in 7 Steps -- A Conversation with Ece Temelkuran"

" “I am one of the early birds…” Ece Temelkuran told me, “I saw democracy collapse in Turkey and tried to warn the United States, European Countries and Britain about this.  

I’ve been telling people that what you think is normal, or a passing phase, is part of a bigger phenomenon that affects us all.  Somehow though, European democracies feel they’re exceptional – and too mature to be affected by neofascist currents.”

Ece has seen this all before.  In her incredible 2019 book How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, she notes, “We have learned over time that coups in Turkey end the same way regardless of who initiated them. 

It’s like the rueful quote from the former England footballer turned TV pundit Gary Lineker, that football is a simple game played for 120 minutes, and at the end the Germans win on penalties. In Turkey, coups are played out over forty-eight-hour curfews, and the leftists are locked up at the end. Then afterwards, of course, another generation of progressives is rooted out, leaving the country’s soul even more barren than it was before.”

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and political commentator, whose journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Der Spiegel. She has been twice recognised as Turkey’s most-read political columnist, and twice rated as one of the ten most influential people in social media (with three million twitter followers). In this exclusive interview, we discuss the dangers of populism, authoritarianism and fascism, and why we need to act now.

Q: What are populism and nationalism?

[Ece Temelkuran]:  Today, there is less time to understand the differences between nationalism, populism and authoritarianism.  In Britain, democracy is literally crumbling at the hands of a strange guy with funny hair!  People simply aren’t recognising the dangers that lay ahead, so there’s not enough time to get into definitions

One truth is that you cannot really know what populism is until you experience it.  Populism is the act of politicising and mobilising ignorance to the point of political and moral insanity.  Nationalism as we know, comes from the phenomena of nation-states – and it’s quite ironic therefore that we are now talking more and more about the failure of nation states and the failure of supranational and international institutions as well… and meanwhile neo-nationalism is on the rise." "

Read more from source here.

"Jokerman" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

  

[Photo: EFE]

Unlike this summer’s extreme weather, which came to Europe then went, extreme conservative governments have also recently come but unfortunately don’t seem to be going.

In the UK, the latest incarnation of this threat to the average person is the new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson (or simply ‘Boris,’ as plenty of his fellow media personalities call him.) 

But there is only one important question to be asked about him. Who will he and his Conservative Party govern for?

The answer is already clear. If we ignore all his populist, nationalistic public language and ignore his long history of incompetence, his almost continual episodes of self-serving immorality and if we also ignore his continuing catalogue of lies and vile racist and homophobic insults, there is still something much more important than all that staring us in the face.

The fact is that Boris Johnson has always represented no-one else other than the exact same kind of young males who he is pictured alongside in the ‘Wall of Fame’ at Eton, the school where only Britain’s wealthiest families send their children.

In other words, Boris Johnson will continue to act only for the richest part of the social spectrum. His first policy announcement after he declared he would run for the party’s leadership was calculated to let the rich know that he was still well and truly on their side. He stated he would give tax cuts to 3 million higher income earners.

As well as that he is arguing for further cuts to business tax, even though UK corporation tax rates are “one of the lowest...among developed economies, with successive reductions taking it from 28% in 2008 to 19% now.”

The great problem with schools like Eton where Johnson (and 20 other former UK Prime Ministers) went, is that, according to Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, it is a major part of “an archaic system that teaches those who belong to it that they are destined for the kind of greatness that others cannot reach.”

The idea of a personal destiny is appealing to people like Johnson because as adults it means they believe that they never have to show ability. “Preparatory” boarding schools such as Eton brainwash their young at a time in their lives when they are highly impressionable, being away from their families for almost the entire academic year. In essence, they instill the value of ultimate self-confidence as superior to expertise. 

This is exactly the root cause of Britain’s wider mediocrity in much of it’s politics and business; it comes from a social class system that virtually insists on taking nothing at all too seriously.

Johnson’s public image as a mumbling, bumbling, patriotic jokester is initially easy to like. He has a light-hearted charm which works with Anglo people who don’t like anyone to be earnest for very long. Comedy is good entertainment, they’d say. 

This tone of amusement was also something Johnson used in his earlier career in journalism and writing. Astonishingly, he wrote a sexist and offensive novel titled Seventy-Two Virgins – A Comedy of Errors (published in 2004) where the main character, obviously entirely based on Johnson, becomes a hero during a terrorist attack. The hand of destiny again.

Ultimately, Johnson is hellbent on “delivering” Brexit at any cost to the middle and working class people of his country. The irony here is that as recently as 2013 he wrote a newspaper article that advised his fellow cabinet ministers “to stop blaming Brussels for all our problems.”

Now though, we have him and his Brexit to more accurately blame. Johnson’s jokes are all the more hollow and the saddest joke is on us.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2019.]

"Nationalists Fail to Join Forces in European Parliament"

PHOTO: ARIS OIKONOMOU/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

 "The Brexit Party won more seats than either Ms. Le Pen’s or Mr. Salvini’s parties, potentially giving Mr. Farage a claim to lead a united group. However, French and Italian euroskeptics feared that if Britain leaves the EU this year, Brexit would leave their group in disarray because U.K. lawmakers will automatically lose their seats..."

Read more from source here.

"The moment Britain changed" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Who do you think said these words three days after the 2016 UK Brexit Referendum, in an attempt to explain the result? “Waves of migration and globalised culture washed among us, eroding our sense of self. Whole communities changed colour and language, leaving older people cut off...but the self-confidently multi-ethnic, liberal, urban class… barely noticed.” It’s more than a bit surprising but the person who spoke these words looking directly down the camera on public television is not a candidate for an ultra right wing political party. His name is Andrew Marr and since 2005 he has been the host of his own hour-long BBC TV news and current affairs interview show. In fact, his program has long been a part of my family’s Sunday morning routine. (We are usually eating my wife’s wonderful, home cooked crepes at some point when his show is on.) Like almost all of the entrenched British Establishment, Marr is a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge universities.He has the general appearance of a quite shy and usually polite man, especially so when speaking to royalty and Hollywood film stars. Recently though he has seemed increasingly excitable at times. I recently saw his post-Brexit piece-to-camera again and realised that his excitement was genuine this time. What viewers originally saw back then on this particular edition of his show was a man taking sides after a profound event. The words he used were deliberate and showed up his true allegiance. Marr was siding with the conservative racists, some of whom are clearly new-style fascists. In other words, he was lining up with those who are -- underneath all the polished British smiles -- in love with power. They are power worshipers: one accurate definition of a fascist. The most important element in their outlook is having someone to hate and this is always a minority group. Even better if the minority is easily recognised in public places. Historically, these lovers of power have come from all social sections of society but have always favoured supporting the strong over the weak, the poor, the disabled, the unemployed. In the UK, they have always trumpeted the ‘Parliament and rule of law’ argument as a fundamental ‘British value’ then ignored it or broken it when it suits them. Of course, in modern Britain and the wider world today (and probably for a long time in the past) there is no law. There is only power. This is what George Orwell said about totalitarian societies like the one he imagined in his novel ‘1984’. In my opinion, it is phrase that perfectly describes our time. The law does not exist, except the ability to enforce it. Andrew Marr knows this. He is a frightened man. So am I. I am frightened of the exact same thing as him: a rule of brute force in Europe. In Britain now, the rule of law has been shown to be a hollow claim. Rule by those with the ability to compel others to their will, by force, has now begun. The courts and prisons are more than full. Police numbers are now so shrunken by conservative government funding cuts and station closures that they are at times unable to defend one person or group against another. The peaceful are being attacked by the violent, some of whom are fascist criminals, others are just criminals. Broadcast all across the nation, watching Andrew Marr’s rant almost three years later, I realised something critically important. This wasn’t the moment Britain changed. It was the moment I realised it had started to completely change. [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2019.]

"Brexit blues" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Protesters in London, January 2019. EFE] 

My wife and I are just a few weeks away from being what amounts to illegals in a country (in fact, an entire continent) where we have lived for the last 4,600 days.

Both of us having a British parent has meant that we’ve been able to have most of the rights and responsibilities of a European citizen and our (Australian only) teenage son has had no legal problem either.

With Brexit this is all soon to change for us and an estimated 308,000 Brits in Spain.

Another million or so across the rest of the European Union are set to face the same uncertain status unless the British government finally delivers on its promise to fully safeguard its passport holders living in the EU. 

Quite simply, there is growing alarm, anger and feelings of abandonment across this very disparate group of individuals.

But how and why did we get to this point in the first place?

It’s worth remembering that the cause of Brexit was an advisory referendum. 

It was a public vote called by former Conservative prime minister David Cameron more than two years ago. 

He made the referendum happen purely (in his mind) to prevent the growing popularity of UKIP (right-wing anti-Europeans) and to shore up his own leadership in a party with a range of strong opinions on Britain being an EU member.

Cameron did not design this referendum because of public pressure in the United Kingdom. 

In fact, only 37% of the voting population ended up choosing to cast their vote in favour of leaving, though this was almost 52% of the total vote.

As senior EU officials have in fact recently confirmed, Cameron believed that his then coalition partner, the Liberal-Democrats, wouldn’t agree to an in/out Brexit referendum. 

When Cameron won an election and then found himself governing without the Lib-Dems, his hand was forced by powerful elements in his party and the business sector, despite Cameron being publicly pro-Europe. Also mistakenly, he expected a victory anyway.

So, the awful mess we are in now was started by the Conservatives and is being continued to this day by the Conservatives. I am not going to talk about those who promoted Brexit with, what Donald Tusk rightly called “not even a sketch of a plan to carry it through safely.” 

I am not going to talk about the countless thousands of working people who have already lost jobs to Brexit-era closures and relocations, or about a likely 750,000 more unemployed to come.

I am also not going to talk about the loss to UK schools, hospitals and service industries of EU nationals, forced out by a government pursuing a “hostile environment” policy toward immigrants. 

I could also mention those Europeans who felt it necessary to leave Britain because of the greatly increased bigotry and discrimination against many of them that Brexit has unleashed.

Instead, I am going to identify the single biggest reason why the pro-Leave forces won the referendum. Apart from blatant lies, scaremongering and running a campaign that spent illegally, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and others took clear advantage of their own government’s austerity policies.

Massive social welfare cuts, hospital privatisation, school budgets slashed, starving local councils of funding and large scale vital infrastructure being left in ruins. 

All this together created sections of the country who were itching to make a protest vote and punish the government, Europe, immigrants: these were who Leave leaders identified as being at fault for what was in reality the everyday results of the harshest forms of austerity. 

This was why Britain needed to “Take Back Control”. This finger-pointing was enough. That simple slogan.

And now today, look at the result.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2019.]

Video: "The politically abandoned"

 

As well as the above short film (with English subtitles) there is this fascinating and insightful study on right-wing strongholds in deprived populations across France and Germany that recently found...

"There is a considerable discrepancy between the issues that people view as the ‘biggest problems’ facing their country (which are immigration and the economy) and the challenges that they face in their everyday lives (precarious working conditions, worries about money and declining social infrastructure). 

Media and politics at the national level are criticised for not having properly adopted this ‘citizens’ agenda’. This problem also results in a sense of unfairness and disadvantage.

As such, when people in these regions devalue others, especially migrants, they do so as a reaction to their own experiences of devaluation (this follows the ‘logic of comparative devaluation’). Importantly, the interviews demonstrated no intrinsic patterns of xenophobia.

The central narratives employed by the populists are far less prevalent in their strongholds than is generally assumed. 

When people are asked to describe political contexts in their own words, issues such as Islamisation, Euroscepticism, sweeping criticism of the media and the emphasis on national identity hardly ever crop up. Instead, more often than not the European Union, for example, tends to be viewed as part of the solution, not the problem.

Nationalist clamouring or demands that include a ‘Germany first!’ approach, are ultimately based on the view that politics sets the wrong priorities and focuses on issues that do not reflect the realities of people’s everyday lives. 

However, the interviewees did not necessarily view measures aimed at tackling the refugee crisis, or foreign policy commitments, as fundamentally wrong. 

Nevertheless, the interviewees often believed that a focus on immigration and foreign policy tended to result in less investment and fewer policy measures at the local level that would help tackle the tangible challenges that these people face in their everyday lives. 

This includes increased economic pressure faced by people on low incomes and the gaps in public services. Finally, many interviewees believe that politics has withdrawn from certain social and geographical areas. Importantly, this feeling has led to a strong sense of abandonment.

Conclusions...

Areas now exist which are marked by ‘political abandonment’. 

To regain the trust of the people who live in these areas, it will be necessary to establish a local presence, provide recognition and resolve the problems that they face. 

This study outlines five relevant fields of action as a means of contributing towards this aim:

• solidarity with the resident population is essential if solidarity is to be expressed with newcomers;
• infrastructure as a means of promoting equal opportunities;
• strengthening structures through the presence of political parties at the local level;
• make structural change compatible with society;
• and confidence and assertiveness in the face of right-wing populist narratives."

To download the full study from Zentrum click here.

"Can Yanis Varoufakis Save Europe?"

[Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.]

'...he was one of those left-wing politicians critical of Europe’s economic institutions, though not necessarily of the idea of Europe itself. 

Even as a young man, Yanis Varoufakis had always been struck by the idea of a united Europe as a way to “forge bonds relying not on kin, language, ethnicity, [or] a common enemy, but on common values and humanist principles.” ' 

A well-written article on the leader of Europe's most exciting new political movement, DiEM25 here.

Video: "The truth about our national identity? It's made up."

"Nationality feels powerful, especially today. But the idea of identifying with millions of strangers just based on borders is relatively new. We explain why it was invented — and how it changed the world."

Watch video from the New York Times here.

“Catalonia is a European problem demanding a European solution” – Yanis Varoufakis

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"On Wednesday, at a press conference in Barcelona, [DiEM25] co-founder Yanis Varoufakis presented his proposal for a European response to the current crisis in Catalonia, and for similar crises in the EU.

Here’s Yanis’ full statement:

The EU’s response to the crisis in Catalonia has been hypocritical (it has intervened in the ‘internal affairs’ of Greece, Ireland, Italy etc.) and logically incoherent (by hiding behind the claim that it is a union of states, it motivates Catalan statehood). 

Moreover, the EU has been responsible for stoking the discontent that led to the current crisis in Catalonia – through austerity and large bankers’ bailouts. The time has come to Europeanise the solution to a problem that is European in both its nature and causes."

See source for a link to download the proposal here.

"We will vote"

  
 Above is  a Catalan cartoon that shows how the Spanish media's coverage is likely to continue to be in the coming week before the Catalan independence referendum on October 1. 

Shown on the left is a crowd of peaceful protesters holding signs that say "We will vote" while on the right the Spanish press focuses on a single act of destruction.

I would suggest that it is not only Spain's mainstream media that makes this mistake.

(Found via http://www.valeriecollinswriter.com/)