Trading away rights – why it matters for both Remainers and Brexiteers

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(Updated after The Independent ran a story that said something extremely similar to my previous post.  It makes one wonder!  I’ve referenced their article below.)

It’s pretty likely that Brexit is going to happen.  Sorry – it is, whether there is further democratic scrutiny and public consideration of the ultimate deal or not.  I’m not picking a fight about Brexit though – people’s opinions are so entrenched now that there is no point – we’ve got to let history unfold and tell the tale.  Instead, I want to highlight a couple of reasons why Brexiteers and Remainers have a major shared interest in what happens next…

One: we’re all a bit biased and we’ve all been duped.

We’ve got to clear the air to move forward and if there is one thing that the last year has shown is that to many political leaders the public are little more than pawns whose votes are bought with mind-numbingly bland soundbites and emotional blackmail. From Remainers’ threats of ‘Punishment Budget’ and ‘10% fall in house prices’ to Brexiteers’ claims of ‘invasion by Turks’ and ‘£350 million for the NHS’ – both sides peddled blatantly unfounded nonsense that undermined informed choice.  This doesn’t just insult the intelligence of the public – it runs from it.

Presenting real, balanced arguments to the public would have risked losing the argument, the vote and the platform for achieving party ideologies and personal ambitions.  So if there is one thing that innies and outies have in common is that we’ve all been duped, one way or the other.  Accepting that is hard – it admits a weakness in all of us – particularly the weakness that means we all tend to accept new information if it confirms what we think we already know.  Confirmation bias – the scourge of modern political ‘debate’.  Thank goodness some people are at least trying to make sure we can access the facts on key issues…if we really want to https://fullfact.org/economy/brexit/

Two: we should all be concerned about what happens next.

Post Brexit there will be years of trade negotiations. Power matters in trade negotiations and we don’t have as much leverage as our colonially-inflenced national ego might make us think.  Look at these three fact-checkable facts:

  • Around 50% of the UK’s exports go to the EU. Only 6%-7% of total exports of other EU countries come the other way. (ONS)
  • The USA exports just 3.2% of its goods to the UK but it accounted for 17%of the value of UK exports in 2015.
  • 5% of our goods go to China while we import 2.6% of their stuff. ( http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/ )

So when it comes to negotiating a trade deal, it’s our target trading partners that hold the best cards and have the power to make demands that affect us all.

And this is why it matters.

Before talks went down the pan, Europe was negotiating a massive, scary free trade deal called TTIP with the USA.  Even many ‘Remainers’ were concerned about this – free trade deals discussed in secret that would affect all of us – directly.  And our Government supported it wholeheartedly.

Sure there are some benefits to deals like TTIP but it’s broadly accepted that they would lead to profit-increasing, health-damaging, environment-killing measures such as increases in genetically modified goods, greater use of toxic substances and hormones in food production, privatisation of health services and loss of jobs.  I’m talking about the food we eat, the air we breathe and the medical care we need when this all goes bad. I don’t want to wake up one day to find hat bees are extinct, I have hormone-induced man-breasts and my meagre health insurance won’t pay to remove them.

Perhaps more scarily (if that’s possible), is that such deals enhance the capacity for corporations to sue national governments that make decisions they feel impact on their ability to make profit.   I kid you not: the mechanism is called an ‘Investor-State Dispute Settlement’ and is common in international trade deals.  Monsanto used this to sue Germany when it banned its GM maize.  OceanGold mining company sued El Salvador for refusing a mining permit.  The list goes on.  Read more on such crazy, anti-democratic dealings here.

To compound this even more, through the severely over-named Great Repeal Bill, our own Government is making every effort to deprive its own citizens of the right to sue and claim compensation if the Government itself acts in a way that damages our rights or health.  It’s so blatant that it’s worth considering whether this was the agenda all along and Brexit is simply a means to an ends, but that would be a bit Orwellian for my liking.

The irony is painful: Instead  of sovereignty being ‘lost’ to the EU and its institutions it is wilfully given away twice: first, through pandering to larger economies for a piece of their trade pie or traded away to massive, anti-democratic corporations that can potentially take us all to court if we resist their profit-seeking urges. Second, by attempting to change the rules so that you and I have less redress for when Government actions have a negative impact on us.  I hazard a guess that the latter is a necessary tool to enable the former.  You really couldn’t make this up, could you?

Whatever the rhetoric about tough negotiating, this adds a weight of desperation to trade negotiations where we’re already starting from a relatively weak position, as the trade figures show. There will be some big-time international-level sucking-up in coming months and years, that’s for sure, where our best interests are eroded and ethics compromised.

If we’re all going to avoid some pretty crappy outcomes that could impact for generations, we’re all going to have to put aside our differences and agree to look for the facts behind what our leaders tell us about trade deals and collectively hold them to account – before we lose the ability to do just that.  As a good friend of mine recently wrote “A country’s ability to advance is always fundamentally tied to its citizens’ ability to cooperate – to act collectively in their mutual best interests”.  And she’s never wrong.   If that means writing to our MPs, we should.  If it means voting against our usual party, we should.  If it means joining a protest march, we should.  WTF, I’ll happily sit around a camp fire and sing Kum Ba Yah with Michael Gove if it helps.

When words are not enough

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So we wake up to another senseless act of barbarism and already our leaders are expressing their well-intentioned words of comfort and defiance.  The acts are of course ‘terrible’ and we ‘will not be cowed’. This never satisfies.  It doesn’t even scratch the surface.  Their carefully chosen words just don’t…can’t go far enough to express the anger and sadness in equal measures that these acts bring.

What I actually want our leaders to shout from the rooftops of Whitehall is ‘You! Yes You! You sick, deranged animals abusing a noble religion as an excuse to express your psychopathic, masochistic condition – you are amongst the lowest that our species has ever produced and you don’t even know it.  You are deluded.  A stain on your family, your communities and whatever God you claim to act in the name of.’  But they won’t of course.

It’s no coincidence that a democratic campaign like an election is a target. It’s an opportunity to breed the kind of fear that opens the doors to division and to see that reflected in future policies.  Far from our democracy itself being a target, if we’re not careful it can be their tool. By creating fear and conflict, more extreme positions can be formed which itself can entrench conflict.  When our PM says ‘things need to change’, fair enough… but in whose interests?  Is it any wonder that moderate voices in our own elections struggle to be heard while being desperately needed?

So what are we supposed to ‘do’? I don’t know about you but despite the fine words, I am a little bit cowed.  Anybody going about their life would be and it’s surely entirely understandable.   Surely there are some deeds to accompany the words – some small acts of defiance?

I’ve said elsewhere that the only victory available for our worst enemies is our division. Turning our anger inwards and towards each other and on those Muslim communities that are as much a target as the rest of us is exactly what the sick animals that launch atrocities want.  It’s all they can really hope for.   That’s why days like today are important reminders of how important it is to understand others, not blame the wrong people; accept we have different views on things.  Accept when we may be wrong.  Most importantly, consider instead the common ground we all have, not on the things that divide us.  And heaven forbid – smile at a stranger on a train. That’s what we can do.  Well, that and vote.

How fake patriots support extremists and ruin dinner parties

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FFS Bus 2

I’ll try not to be too glum but I’m kicking off with something a bit heavy and probably controversial.  Oh well.

Across Europe and America politicians and media are applying the ‘fear of the other’ to stoke up anti-immigrant sentiment, purely to get elected or spout editorial bias.  They lay claim to the mantle of patriotism with brainless burka-banning policies, dopey slogans and accusations of being ‘weak on terror’.  It’s a striking feature of public discourse in the UK, US, France, Germany, Austria, Holland, Turkey – all nations beset by the increasing strain between the liberal and the fearful; the internationalists and the ‘my country firsts’.

We’re witnessing strange and disturbing times where previously unacceptable views become ‘okay’ again.  Close friends, communities and countries are finding themselves divided by such painfully opposite views that we could justifiably question if we ever really knew each other in the first place – or are even bothered about wanting to know each other in future. Foreigners are targeted by hate crimes; political groups find currency in bigotry, fear and lies; whole political norms and systems start to shift as woeful, self-interested leaders fail miserably to understand what’s going on and instead focus on the easy, emotionally-charged pickings.  In opening the door to such opportunistic and poor leadership, the world becomes a much more dangerous place as countries look inwards and the fundamentals of international stability are eroded.  We seem to have forgotten that without international stability everything else apart from weapons manufacturing and the black market in silk stockings fails.

Now let’s say that you didn’t really care much for Western liberalism and /or democracy anyway.  In fact, let’s go so far as to imagine that your strategic objective is the downfall of democracy and the political and economic systems that embody it.  Maybe you’d even quite like to establish a Caliphate.  Although I’ve not had a look at ISIS’s accounts recently I’m guessing they don’t have the resources or personnel to achieve this directly, through military overthrow or mass revolution of some kind.  But here’s the thing…they don’t have to.

Planting bombs, shooting policeman and driving trucks in to people would never in themselves achieve their strategic aims.  Inevitably and conveniently though, sometimes those truck drivers and shooters are immigrants and for some, immigrant is therefore synonymous with terrorist.  Right wing parties draw on this to blame others; nationalism re-branded as patriotism is fuelled; and fear and division within communities and between countries grows: if you’re not anti-immigration you’re probably ‘unpatriotic’; if you’re not sad at Brexit you’re probably a ‘racist’. And we all have no idea who is good to invite around to dinner on a Saturday night any more.

Add to this the ISIS-led war in Syria that is driving millions of refugees into an already fragile EU and into the vitriolic sights of Le Pen, Wilders and Farage – and the strategic picture becomes clearer.  You don’t need to defeat the West militarily – you defeat it from within: create enough fear to fuel the bigots; generate enough evil, scrounging, migrating foreigners to keep the fear-fires burning and let the debates burn.  Divide and conquer.

With so much fear and division it really isn’t inconceivable that another major country eventually decides to leave the EU and the whole project disintegrates faster than Donald Trump’s self-control at a beauty pageant.  And so begins the reversal of decades of unprecedented cooperation that has helped sustain peace between nations that were almost constantly warring for centuries.  I’m not saying this will lead to wars – maybe not for a few decades anyway – but it will lead to divided, inward-looking countries getting on with banning burkas while letting struggling countries fester in their own isolated, under-aided mire.  The inevitable increased flow of desperate migrants this causes becomes an armada and the cycle continues:  foreigners, fear, blame, division.  Painfully ironic but I guess that irony is lost on many and it doesn’t make a snappy enough statement to paint on to the side of a bus.

Our social, political and economic division is a victory for our worst enemies and nothing can be less patriotic than playing a part in your opponent’s success. So extremists don’t need many bombs and trucks – just enough to create dividing lines on a ballot paper.  Hence, voting wisely has never been more important and we all have a shared responsibility and interest in sidelining those short-short-sighted, insular, divisive relics of 20th century nationalism.