1. Down with Centrists
I have just unsubscribed from ”The Rest is Politics” podcast which has consistently been voted the number one podcast în the UK. My reasons are well caught în this recent post from Rikki - but I did at least convey to Cambell and Stewart my reasons for stopping the subscription viz that Alaister Campbell, despite my initial admiration for openness about his mental health, is a criminal warmonger who deserves prosecution; and Stewart, despite my initial respect, is a self-confessed egocentric
2. Brexit.
I’ve been a bit remiss în not keeping my readers updated on this subject on which, each week, there is no better chronicler than Chris Grey. For almost 8 years now he has regaled us once a week with his analyses of this discourse. His most recent post is, for me, one of his best – în suggesting that Brixiteers are like communists with their argument that it has never been properly attempted or has been betrayed
A recent example is the discussion on GB News between Jacob Rees-Mogg and
Nick Tyrone, which Tyrone described on his Week in Brexitland Substack. Tyrone
did as good job as anyone could of responding to Rees-Mogg’s salvoes, the more so given the huge advantages his interlocutor had by virtue of being the host. But it is impossible to ‘win’ such encounters because they are intended to confuse rather than to clarify, and setting innumerable false hares running is one of the easiest ways of doing so. This doesn’t just apply to broadcast interviews. In any number of published comment pieces, Brexiters layer falsehoods upon half-truths upon questionable assumptions, in ways which can only be unpicked through line-by-line ‘fisking’, which
is incredibly time-consuming, and not especially effective.
Nevertheless, it’s worth disaggregating and examining some of the commonest arguments
currently used to defend Brexit, an especially those about sovereignty and democracy, which are the Brexiters’ last redoubts. Even so, despite being the longest ever post on this blog, it’s impossible to provide an exhaustive analysis.
Stonewalling and denial[ These are the now boilerplate defences of Brexit, so
commonly made as to not need specific links. They include the claim that ‘it hasn’t been done properly’, which comes in variants ranging from ascribing this to governmental incompetence, to blaming it on EU punishment, right through to positing betrayal by various actors up to and including ‘the deep State’.
All of these were virtually baked into Brexit, partly because it made utopian promises that could never come true, and partly because it thrives on narratives of betrayal,
treachery and victimhood. So, like apologists for communism, Brexiters say it has
‘never really been tried’fallen victim to counter-revolutionaries and to renegades from the true path
of purity
3. EP Thompson’s 100th AnniversaryThis famous British historian and activist was born on 3rd February 1924 with one of the few tributes being in The Tribune. His “Writing by Candlelight” (1980) gives a flavour of the quality of his writing. And Bryan Palmer has given us a superb Homage to the man – in two parts, the first here and the second here.
I object to the liberal analogy of the failure of Brexit with the failure of communism. The determination of what Brexit meant was fairly clear, in terms of it was supposed to bring control of borders and so on, and of sovereignty, whether that sovereignty was to enable a more rampant free market (brexiters) or some fantasy of socialism in one country (lexiters). That sovereignty has indeed been established, but its consequence has not been what was promised from it, and rather has been what Marxists (though not liberals) always said it would be, in a world where there is no such thing as real national self-determination.
ReplyDeleteThe definition of communism, specifically as set out by Marx, but also described by Lenin, even as the revolution had taken place, most certainly does have nothing in common with the abominations created in the USSR and elsewhere. Lenin made clear, in 1918, that what they had and were creating in Russia was not communism, or even socialism, a task he noted required a revolution in at least several advanced countries.
In the one case you have precisely what was asked for, Brexit, being established, and its consequences being not what those that proposed it, claimed, whereas in the other, you have what was asked for never having been established in the first place.