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Category: Britain Page 3 of 9

UK Supreme Court Rules Prorogue Illegal

Queen Elizabeth II

News out of England continues to be important. The Supreme Court said that Johnson’s advice was “unlawful, void, and of no effect.”

Ouch.

This is a fantastically good thing. The use of proroguing to avoid oversight by Parliament is a great evil. Some years back it was used in Canada to avoid a vote of no-confidence that Prime Minister Harper knew he would lose.

I do think that the Queen, and the Queen’s representatives, need to be more willing to say, “No.” It was obvious what Johnson was doing.

As for Brexit, I want to point out something simple, that has been lost in the furor: It’s going to be settled by an election. Johnson has gotten rid of the anti-Brexit MPs. Even if he obeys the law and extends the leave period, there will then be an election. Who wins will determine what happens.

This is AS IT SHOULD BE. It is right to put this to an election. I prefer Corbyn’s position of negotiating a Brexit then putting it as a referendum, but an election fought over the issue is precisely what should happen in a democracy.

You either believe that legitimacy comes from the people, or you don’t.


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The Democratic Ethics of Brexit

The bottom line here is that there was a referendum, and “leave” won.

All my life, I have eaten election and referendum results I hated. I have done so because of democratic legitimacy: The people, even if I or anyone else think they are wrong, are the source of legitimate rule.

There was a referendum. Leave won. Brexit should, thus, be the policy of the government.

At the same time, like any policy, the idea is to do it right, and both May’s plan and Hard Brexit will be very bad for Britain.

When people voted, they voted to Leave without really knowing what it would mean.

So we have a situation where the parties policies are:

The Tory policy is to leave no matter what, even if it’s against the law, against parliament, and will be disastrous.

Lib-Dem’s policy is “Fuck the referendum, we should just stay.”

Labour’s policy is to negotiate a deal to leave, then put it to a referendum.

I don’t think Labour’s stance (which was re-affirmed today by the membership) is the best politics. But it is the path which maintains democratic legitimacy, the primacy of parliament, and tries to make sure that, if Brexit, happens it is not disastrous.

It is, to my mind, the actual right policy in ethical terms. Both the referendum and the parliament have legitimacy, and that legitimacy should be respected.


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Boris Johnson Prorogues Parliament

Queen Elizabeth II

I wrote and published a piece about this briefly, and I realized I was wrong, so I took it down.

Johnson has prorogued (suspended) Parliament from about the 11th of September. It’s clearly a maneuver intended to make Brexit more likely, and shady as hell.

Under the Westminster tradition, Parliament is supreme. Not the Prime Minister.

Some years ago in Canada, Prime Minister Harper prorogued to avoid a vote of no confidence (which would have toppled the government and triggered an election). That was clearly against the unwritten rules of the Westminster tradition. When the Queen’s representative, the Governor General allowed it, she failed her duty.

I originally thought the Queen had done the same thing, and if she had, I’d want her–and the royal family–gone. They have a duty, they need to do it.

But, as Parliament will be in session for long enough to allow a vote of no-confidence (if MPs want to do one), I find this act, while clearly shady and abusive, just barely on the right side, and I can understand why the Queen let it happen.

If Parliament doesn’t want this to happen, they have plenty of time to make sure it doesn’t. If they don’t prevent it, this means they aren’t willing to topple the Conservative government. That is on them, they know the consequences.

This is back in the hands of Parliament, where it should be.


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Deaths of Despair Soar in the UK

But hey, who can imagine why so many Britons were so angry at the status quo that they decided to chance Brexit?

Yes, yes, the EU is mostly not to blame for the misery of Britons. (The EU is still evil, as shown by their treatment of Greece, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Mostly it’s the Conservatives (though Labour, before Corbyn, often voted for Conservative austerity bills).

But when people are hurting, they turn against the current order. People in this much agony are rational like animals caught in traps. If they have to chew off their leg to escape, so be it.

The British have only one real chance, right now, to end the pain. Ending austerity is far more important than Brexit, far more to blame for Britain’s woes, and the only person who will end it is Corbyn.

If you’re British, and you vote against Labour/Corbyn in any riding where Labour can win, no matter what happens around Brexit, you are voting for increased misery (and for policies like taking away wheelchairs from cripples).

What people just don’t seem able to understand is that “more of the same” doesn’t offer any hope for people for whom “more of the same” is so unbearable, they may wind up deciding that killing themselves is better than being alive.

If your life sucks, and you have no hope for the future, you need change, and you’ll take a chance on almost any change.

Sigh.

But British elites demonize Corbyn (lying about him at least three-quarters of the time). Eventually, this is going to turn actually nasty, and, well, guillotine.jpg if they aren’t lucky.


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Seven MPs Quit Britain’s Labour Party

Per the BBC:

Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Angela Smith, Mike Gapes, Gavin Shuker and Ann Coffey.

They claim it’s due to anti-semitism and Corbyn’s approach to Brexit. (The anti-semitism charges are, to my mind, essentially bogus. There is no more anti-semitism in Labour today than under Blair—-unless, of course, one thinks that criticizing Israel is anti-semitic.)

What’s interesting to me is simply that there are only seven and they aren’t starting a new party, but sitting as independents.

That means, frankly, that they’re almost certainly done: They’ll sit until the next election, when they will be replaced.

A LOT more than seven MPs supported the coup against Corbyn a year after he was first elected. A good two-thirds of Labour MPs did.

That this group could only find seven willing to leave the party means MP opposition to Corbyn, while it still exists, is no longer particularly serious. There was a point where people thought 30 MPs might leave. (Though I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a couple more leave, held back to extend news cycles.)

This makes headlines, but I think it’s more of a good thing than a bad one. These people were constantly attacking Corbyn, having them out of the party is good, and their replacements will almost certainly be loyal.

Whether Corbyn can win the next election remains to be seen. As for Brexit: He doesn’t have enough MPs to force anything. However, Europe has consistently said that it likes Labour’s ideas and would be willing to re-negotiate with it. Whether they’ll do so after Brexit, I don’t know, but there’s a better chance of Corbyn fixing things than May.

A good day’s work.


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What May’s Brexit Deal Tells Us About the EU and Britain’s Future

So, May has a Brexit deal. It’s a terrible deal, which makes the UK subject to many EU laws, and which doesn’t allow Britain to withdraw from the deal if the EU doesn’t want it to.

This has caused ministerial resignations, and Corbyn has come out against it.

But the interesting part is what the EU and May have negotiated. This clause, for example:

Corbyn’s policies include straight up re-nationalization of the railways, regulation of housing prices, and the government outright building vast numbers of flats, among many other similar policies.

In other words, Corbyn’s policies interfere with liberal market rules. They are, actually, forbidden by the EU–but on occasion exceptions are made.

Of course, retaining privileged access to the EU market was going to require some rule taking, but May has chosen to take more rules that are “no socialism” and less rules that are “treat your people decently.”

What May has done is negotiate a deal which ties Corbyn’s hands: He can’t implement his policies if he becomes Prime Minister, and he can’t leave the deal. (Well, in theory, and perhaps in practice.)

Of course, Britain can still leave the deal: Parliament is supreme, and one parliament cannot tie the hands of another parliament. Nonetheless, leaving the deal would be damaging to Britain’s relationship with the EU, to put it mildly.

These sorts of efforts to tie future government’s hands so that are forced to preserve neoliberal policies are common. The now-dead Canadian Chinese trade deal had a clause which required a 20-year withdrawal notice, for example. The Canadian-EU free trade deal forbids the Canadian government from many of the same sorts of policies that May rejected as well.

This is the great problem with the neoliberal world order: It is set up to force countries into a specific sort of economy, and to punish them if they resist or refuse. That would be somewhat okay–but only somewhat–if neoliberal economics worked, but they don’t.

What neoliberal economics does, instead, is impoverish large minorities, even pluralities, in the countries which adopt its policies. Those pluralities then become demagogue bait. (Hello, Trump!)

Meanwhile Macron has proposed an EU military, and Germany’s Merkel has said she supports the idea.

EU elites are absolutely convinced their way is best, and that anyone who is against it is wrong. They are not primarily concerned with democracy (the EU is run primarily by un-elected bureaucrats), and do not consider democratic legitimacy as primary. If people vote for the “wrong” thing, EU elites feel they have the right to override that. They have overseen what amount to coups in both Greece and Italy in the past ten years.

The funny thing is that orthodox neoliberal economic theory admits there will be losers to neoliberal policies and states that they must be compensated. The problem is that this has never been done, and indeed, with accelerating austerity, they’ve done just the opposite: At the same time as a plurality is impoverished, the social supports have been kicked out from under them.

Macron has been particularly pointed in this, gutting labor rights in the name of “labor market flexibility.”

Neoliberalism, in other words, creates the conditions of its own failure. It is failing around the world: In the US, (Trump does not believe in the multilateral, neoliberal order), in Europe, and so on.

Even in countries that “support” the EU, there are substantial minorities, pushing into plurality status, which don’t support neoliberalism.

So Europe needs an army. Because Eurocrats know best, and since neoliberalism isn’t working for enough people that things like Brexit happen; that Italy is ignoring rules, that the East is boiling over with right-wing xenophobia, well, force is going to be needed. A European military, with French nukes, is the core of a great power military. And soon countries won’t be able to leave.

That, at any rate, is where things are headed. We’ll see if the EU cracks up first.

In the meantime, May’s Brexit deal really is worse than no deal, and in no way should be passed. In fact, if I’m Corbyn, and it’s been passed, if I became PM, I’d get rid of it. Because it either goes or he’ll have to substantially break all of his most important electoral promises.

The EU is loathsome. I won’t say it’s done no good, but it’s now doing more harm than good (indeed it has been for at least a decade). As with the US, because the EU is misusing its power, it needs to lose it. That process will be ugly, as a lot of those who are rising to challenge it are right-wing assholes (because the left has abandoned sovereignty).

You simply can’t fail pluralities of your population and stay stable without being a police state and holding yourself together with brutal force.

Those are the EU’s two most likely futures: brutal police state or crackup.

Pity, but that’s what EUcrats, with their insistence on neoliberal rules and hatred of democracy have made damn near inevitable.


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Britain’s Conservative Government on Verge of Breakup

So, the expected has happened. Prime Minister May’s minority government has been unable to deliver a Brexit which keeps her MPs happy. Two senior ministers have resigned, and should there be a confidence vote over Brexit, it is likely that May will not muster a majority and her government will fall.

The figures who have jumped ship are hard Brexiteers, but the tightrope for May is that many of her own MPs want a soft Brexit. With almost no margin in the commons, she cannot please everyone, and likely cannot stand.

If the UK government falls, there will be a new election. Its outcome is uncertain. Both Labour and the Conservatives are pro-Brexit, with only the Lib-Dems as anti-Brexit, but the Lib-Dems, after their coalition government with the Conservatives, are unpopular and distrusted.

Brexit has been bungled from the beginning: May’s third option was never going to fly, neither enough of her party nor the EU want it. There are only two real options: Something close to Norway’s arrangement, in which Britain will have to pay for access to the common market, or a hard Brexit and reliance on World Trade Organization norms and enforcement.

I personally hope Corbyn wins. I believe he is the best chance for Britain. Various claims otherwise, being in the EU does compromise what an actual left-wing government can do in terms of unions, re-nationalization, and many other issues. The European Union, as it is right now, is a neoliberal organization and its laws and regulations enshrine neoliberal economic relations. That it is also socially liberal obscures this point.

We’ll see how this plays out, but it’s important. Remember that the current world order started in Britain, not the US, with the election of Thatcher. Britain is a bellwether for the Anglo world.


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The Left-wing Case for Brexit

Jacobin recently had an excellent article on left-wing Brexit, which I suggest you read. But this is the graf I want to focus on:

for a Corbyn-led Labour government, not being a member of the European Union “solves more problems than it creates,” as Weeks notes. He is referring to the fact that many aspects of Corbyn’s manifesto — such as the renationalization of mail, rail, and energy firms and developmental support to specific companies — or other policies that a future Labour government may decide to implement, such as the adoption of capital controls, would be hard to implement under EU law and would almost certainly be challenged by the European Commission and European Court of Justice. After all, the EU was created with the precise intention of permanently outlawing such “radical” policies.

That is why Corbyn must resist the pressure from all quarters — first and foremost within his own party — to back a “soft Brexit.”

This is the issue. As Jacobin’s European editor wrote:

I have pointed this out multiple times before. The European Union, in its current form (post-Maastricht) is neoliberal at its core. The Euro (which Britain at least did not adopt) was also intended to break local labor power and gut wages.

Watching the EU break Greece upon the wheel to bail out German bankers indirectly, so that they wouldn’t be seen to directly bail them out ought to have been the corpse on everyone’s doorstep that alerted people to the fact that the people running the EU, are, in certain ways, really, really bad people.

The main reason to fear Brexit isn’t “economic apocalypse,” it’s that the EU elites will do everything they can to make Britain pay to send a message.

In other words, mafia logic: “Once you’re part of the family, you don’t ever leave.”

I agree with Jacobin: Britain’s best hope of an economy which works for most Britons is Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister and instituting the policies he has said he would. Moreover, having this work is the best hope for the left in a world where all major multinational institutions and treaties are coercively neoliberal–intended to take economic decision-making out of the hands of voters and to enable free movement of capital above all other considerations.

None of this is to say that Brexit will be without some dangers and costs, but those dangers are mostly of the “save us from ourselves” variety: Tories and Blairite Labour MPs are even nastier than EU elites. And the loss of the ability to work freely on the continent, or for continentals to work freely in Britain is also a loss (though one that need not be inevitable).

But equally, the EU makes it impossible to pursue a lot of actual left-wing policies.

You can have the EU, or you can move to the left.

It’s that simple.


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