economic crisis

Brexit defeated an overwhelming array of what Zygmunt Bauman defined as the global elites of liquid modernity; the City of London, Wall Street, the IMF, the Fed, the European Central Bank (ECB), major hedge/investment funds, the whole interconnected global banking system.

The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life.

A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain’s ancient regime and the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.

The most effective propagandists of the “European ideal” have not been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st century zeitgeist, even “cool”. What they really are is a bourgeoisie with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as “neoliberalism”.

As Tory turned mercilessly against Tory, the schism in the Conservative establishment received much attention. But a parallel (thankfully more civilized) split afflicted my side: the left.

As I travel across Europe, advocating a pan-European movement to confront the EU’s authoritarianism, I sense a great surge of internationalism in places as different from one another as Germany, Ireland, and Portugal. Distinguished Lexiteers, like Harvard’s Richard Tuck, are prepared to risk quashing this surge. They point to pivotal moments when the left took advantage of Britain’s lack of a written constitution to expropriate private medical business and create its National Health Service and other such institutions. “A vote to stay within the EU,” Tuck writes, “will…end any hope of genuinely left politics in the UK.”

Many leftists find it hard to fathom why I campaigned for “Remain” after EU leaders vilified me personally and crushed Greece’s “Athens Spring” in 2015. Of course, no truly progressive agenda can be revived through the EU institutions. DiEM25 was founded on the conviction that it is only against EU institutions, but within the EU, that progressive politics has a chance in Europe. Leftists once understood that the good society is to be won by entering the prevailing institutions in order to overcome their regressive function. “In and against” used to be our motto. We should revive it.

That such a campaign could prevail – leading soon to a hard right government in Britain – testifies to the high-handed incompetence of the political, financial, British and European elites. Remain ran a campaign of fear, condescension and bean-counting, as though Britons cared only about the growth rate and the pound. And the Remain leaders seemed to believe that such figures as Barack Obama, George Soros, Christine Lagarde, a list of ten Nobel-prize-winning economists or the research department of the IMF carried weight with the British working class.