Rolling Brexit Links/UK politics in the neo-Weimar era

Don't know that that's unique to them, in fairness.

until recently i wd have said it had died out nearly entirely in the UK (except for paisleyism and the DUP, which is a throwback to it, there's a couple of good essays by tom paulin on this)

clearly it survives in the US -- and i suppose my argument wd have been that the US had become the harbour for ppl who thought this way when it was Further West Britain (ie 1660s-1770s), and that it largely migrated away from here (except for isolated cranks like william blake)

of course ukipism does take some of its inspiration from US quasi-libertarian anti-stateism (falange on the gun laws for example)

yeah I wonder if the country ideology has been imported back over here from the new world, sounding weirdly familiar, like afro-cuban music being a hit in the congo. I always thought the mass internal migrations since the industrial revolution marked a decisive rupture with earlier radical politics but maybe not. idk if you could argue it got mixed in with anti-urban, arts&crafts-type movements. all this stuff seems very paranoid but you have to balance that against how profoundly-entrenched some of the class power they're against is

arts&crafts movements was mostly a late 19th C top-down middleclass escape from encroaching industrialisation -- it was well meaning but moneyed, and while it did rescue a handful of working class artisans and their skills, and also set up a next generation of apprentices, this was almost always at cost of genuine in-family transmission of knowledge, and the line was broken again by the 1970s

the project i'm working on (the book abt the birth of the uk rock press from the underground press in the 60s) repeatedly returns to the idea that the underground press was basically "libertarian" (ie very focused on individual rights): definitely there was an upsurge of hippie counterstate attitude then, and there WAS a little bit of an overlap between brown pots and self-made furniture arts-and-crafts tail-enders with brown rice & macrame self-sufficiency, which *may* in turn i suppose link a little into sovereign freemen stuff -- but there's no largescale continuity (and the brown pots thing was very much a quietist retreat from the world)

(Watched an old "Mana Alive" or "Everyman" documentary doing called "Where Have All The Flowers Gone" on the iplayer this week which looked at various hippies ten years on. Although very much of-its-time in its style was really interesting in respect of the routes out of the hippie idealist moment - Vashti Bunyan was living in the country, sourcing antiques to sell to Texans; Felix Dennis was in the first flush the success of his media empire; Jerry Rubin heavily into ca$h and making lots of money in NYC through selling self-realisation techniques or somesuch; a fellow whose name I have forgotten had left his cult-commune and was learning computer programming; Mick Farren was busily being Mick Farren. Vashti aside it was hard to see any trace of the Arts and Crafts in any of them really.)

Having said that, most of the remaining hippie 'idealists' (Nigel Weymouth, Joe Boyd, Nick Sand etc) seemed to have been at the V&A (Museum of the decorative arts founded in 1852) over the weekend - so maybe there are still obscure links to arts & crafts.

there's always a mixture of classes when these things come anywhere near critical mass, finding lower common denominators and distrust of elites is a good bet whether its rotten boroughs or straight bananas or duck houses. given that now any (possible) freemen types have common cause with garden city england it makes me wonder

also interesting to see role of church in these demographics. not sure if the general christian tendency to plump for brexit is just generational, there's prob a anglican/non conformist divide but there's also the giles fraser-style anti-market england of parishes which is self consciously yearning for the past and sits in the middle of this

curious what people here think of this Len McCluskey speech on immigration

http://labourlist.org/2016/11/len-mccluskey-workers-need-safeguards-and-strong-unions-to-make-migration-work/

So we need a new approach. I believe it is time to change the language around this issue and move away from talk of “freedom of movement” on the one hand and “controls” on the other and instead to speak of safeguards.

Safeguards for communities, safeguards for workers, and safeguards for industries needing labour.

At the core of this must be the reassertion of collective bargaining and trade union strength.

My proposal is that any employer wishing to recruit labour abroad can only do so if they are either covered by a proper trade union agreement, or by sectoral collective bargaining.

Put together with trade unions own organising efforts this would change the race-to-the-bottom culture into a rate- for-the- job society.

It would end the fatal attraction of ever cheaper workers for employers, and slash demand for immigrant labour, without the requirement for formal quotas or restrictions.

It sounds good, but will McClusky actually organise those workers?

Len McCluskey's still alive?

There's a lot of Legitimate Concerns guff wrapped up there, specifically talking about "people's daily experience" - some of the highest-immigration areas in the country are also the ones that are the most tolerant. The roles of deinustrialisation and (especially) austerity are glossed over and ignored, as is the prospect of the unions as a force for political education. It's capitulating even as it claims to be providing solutions.

Some of it sounds like "we decide who gets the cheap immigrant labour" - so everything will obv be alright.

also lol since when did the unions have any sway or power

The cuddly band of unions around the world all working together sounds great in theory until you consider that maybe unions in India aren't going to be too happy with their members' jobs all being moved to the UK, any more than the reverse.

Some of it sounds like "we decide who gets the cheap immigrant labour"

this is not a position unknown to the trade union movement

If all workers in Britain suddenly unionised I suppose they could agitate for jobs to go to them not to immigrants, but would this do anything for people who are chronically unemployed already, who are out of work already after years of de-industrialisation, etc?

Talking of India: http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2016/11/07/india-shows-the-ultimate-failure-of-the-brexit-project

the necessity of unions' role in protecting their members against incursions from wage-undercutting labour has always meant that they aren't the ideal instrument for class solidarity, even if you accept the chronically unemployed as belonging to the same class as skilled or semi-skilled union members - which unionists have almost never believed to be true

all this aside, unionization is one of the few protections working class people have ever had

Agree

Are any of Labour putting forward serious proposals for new job creation + protections for workers (surely the way to solve both poverty and 'legitimate concerns')?

"this is not a position unknown to the trade union movement

"this is not a position unknown to the trade union movement"
Yeah, but this one I wouldn't trust much.

I was once at a company where during the '07 recession they felt empowered enough to effectively have zero hour conditions, in the gaps between big contracts starting and finishing they would just casually say "we haven't got anything for the next month (even though they could have allocated people onto other sites) come back then" to staff who were f/t and not self-employed. One of my colleagues was a member of unite and he said they were a waste of time when he took his grievances to them.

this fucking scrote:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/10/nigel-farage-jokes-about-trumps-alleged-sexual-assaults

thank god ukip are in such disarray right now - if they were any better organised, i would actually be fucking terrified at the potential repercussions of the trump result on our politics, particularly given that there will likely be a growing public impatience with the government failing to deliver the glorious brexit that was promised.

corbyn's weak response to the election not much helping my state of mind. now is one of those moments to galvanize the left, but just like after the brexit vote, cometh the hour, cometh the vague mumbles and a bit of shuffling about

I don't think Farage can really claim credit for the success of a billionaire reality TV star.

In further 'this fucking guy' news:

@George_Osborne
Came across this anti-Trump protest here in New York last night - can't help wondering how many of them voted ....

Everyone out last night will have voted. D'oh!

Perhaps he hasn't heard of the ... the ... electoral college.

@George_Osborne
Came across this anti-Trump protest here in New York last night - can't help wondering how many of them voted ....

Hillary beat Trump %58.8 to %37 in New York. But then, numbers never were Osborne's strong point, were they?

i was there. i didn't vote because i'm not allowed, but i have voted against him several times fwiw.

also clinton won 59% of the vote in NYS, but 82% in manhattan, 75% in kings (bk), etc., etc.

Jon Cruddas on the splits in Momentum:

Arguably, the real tension lies between traditional Leninist far left politics based around a discernable industrial working class base and the post-operaismo—literally the new “post workerist”—left. The latter was highly influential within the anti-globalisation movement and the post-crash Occupy and student anti-cuts protests. For this group, the working class base of the left is disappearing, thanks to technological change and automation. The new core left project is pushed by the urban, globally orientated, networked and educated youth—rather than any group resembling the proletariat. The class absolutism of the old guard is at odds with the new “autonomists” and their rejection of mainstream left political parties, unions and traditional representative democracy.

For this group, the fashionable talk is of “accelerationism” and even “fully automated luxury communism,” with technology offering new straightforward route maps toward some vaguely defined era of “post capitalism”—captured in the current post-workerist fad: the Universal Basic Income.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/momentum-crisis-labour-party

Cruddas, earlier today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYZpZr3Cv7I

Momentum's statement on the US election is all I need to know: http://momentumpress.tumblr.com/post/152969802602/momentum-statement-on-the-us-election

While Corbyn's own statement was weak as long as he keeps on being an enabler for this I'm all for it.

hmmmm

http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/main/Readmit_expelled_socialists

Yes a press release on the Momentum website is truly the moral lead we've all been craving in these dark times.

I can only assume someone somewhere has asked Corbyn to soft-pedal on all this because it looks more "statesmanlike" or whatever, in the magical fictional world where he might conceivably be PM, but if he can't be relied upon to show moral leadership on an issue of this magnitude then what on earth is the point of him? Plus all this vague guff implying that because Trump also represents a threat to the neoliberal status quo then there must be something good about it if you look hard enough - something that is also I suspect behind his Brexit stance.

Obviously Bernie Sanders now has nothing to lose but the difference between him and Corbyn this week has highlighted how desperately the Labour left needs a better figurehead.

Think I'm going to let my LP membership lapse. Really raw about politics atm, and I don't regret my membership - I do think Corbyn is a Good Thing. Even with the reduction in price it's still money I could be drinking, and I hate the meetings.

Also, way to go tacking "and all forms of racism" onto every sentence when someone's accusing one of your boys of being an antisemite but not when the US elects an actual fucking fascist.

There's a kind of optimism I find absolutely infuriating in British politics. The same people saying that 'nothing will change, it won't be that bad' have been saying it about Trump. Let me have my moment of misery, damnit!

god I've been reading re-admit as read-mit all day

I'm nearing the point of agreeing that Corbyn isn't very good but am too hateful of every centrist neolib conclusion that seems to lead to, because in this case, bad player or not, the problem is absolutely the game itself and fuck wanting to play it

like, well done realists, you win, let's get a nice telegenic orator in and win some hearts and minds on the road to full socialism in 3016

Or, some funny bloke that makes up his own words and might actually appear on "Tipping Point" to get his face over to people.

Yeah I mean anyone who thinks that another technocratic centrist is the answer right now just has a profound lack of insight or understanding of anything.

It's becoming increasingly obvious that the divide is not between 'electable centre-ground moderates' vs people who are too right/left-wing. It's between politicians people believe will do something for them vs politicians they don't. Remember the 2015 election was basically fought between three dudes competing on how much they were going to take away from people. One of them had to win and the British public forced his exit the first chance they got.

Unfortunately Corbyn is in that camp for too much of the country as well, he's just a terrible communicator when it comes to people who aren't already predisposed to listen. I don't want another glossy neoliberal centrist, I want a competent version of Corbyn, one who isn't going to squander what might be the left's only opportunity in a generation.

otm

He doesn't really 'get' America; his/Milne's analysis of the GOP vote doesn't mention the kind of exurb dweller who swung this, much as the Brexit analysis given by the vast majority of UK politicians doesn't acknowledge the well-off golf-club types who really swung it.

He is a not very dynamic and driven leader ok a useless fucker - but nevertheless a useless fucker operating in difficult conditions, and as the only trustworthy candidate offering a genuine opposition to austerity he still has my support. Pure selfish self interest here, but when I get completely sick with politics it's the only motivation left to carry on engaging.

Just heard about the local Y Pat centre losing funding and staff. For some severely disabled people it offers just about the only social interaction they get outside of family. The Labour centrists have supported the austerity agenda at every vote, and then carried on with hypocritical smooth-tongued lip service to social inclusion blah blah, so fuck every last one of them cunts forever.

his/Milne's analysis of the GOP vote doesn't mention the kind of exurb dweller who swung this, much as the Brexit analysis given by the vast majority of UK politicians doesn't acknowledge the well-off golf-club types who really swung it

It's because it gets in the way of the convenient 'people who have been failed by the neoliberal consensus' narrative, a narrative that also requires downplaying the white supremacist angle. A lot of the voters you describe, maybe even the majority of Trump voters, would have the neolib consensus back in a heartbeat if they felt they were still the ones benefiting from it.

This supposed Brexit march seems to be being organised mainly by the Telegraph. If it actually happens there must be a counter-protest.