Forward with Johnson?
The Guardian reports today,
Labour will make a clean break from its divisions over Europe and will not seek major changes to the UK’s relationship with the EU, Keir Starmer has told the Guardian, vowing to shift Labour’s focus to “Britain in the 2030s” rather than the battles of 2016.
Evoking Tony Blair’s election slogan of “forward not back” on the eve of the vote on the post-Brexit trade deal, Starmer said he wanted to lead a party that was focused on the future – saying it was unlikely Europe would even feature on his party’s election leaflets.
The Labour leader, who said the aim of his first year had been listening to voters about the party’s general election loss, said his party would now begin to spell out its vision of a future Labour government. Starmer said 2021 would be the time to define his vision and values as a future prime minister – with a focus on the economy and the NHS.
In a nod to his angry backbenchers, dozens of whom are expected to refuse to endorse the Conservative deal, Starmer said he knew there were difficult choices, but said the vote for the deal would bring some closure.
The Brexit vote today will be far from a “closure”.
The Morning Star, which fails to report the support of John McDonnell for the Another Europe is Possible declaration, says,
Another Europe Is Possible and Labour For A Socialist Europe organised the statement opposing the deal, which has received support from both wings of the party.
Signatories include ex-cabinet minister Lord Adonis from the Blairite wing of the party.
The statement warns that it is the duty of the opposition to provide proper parliamentary scrutiny and to set out an alternative.
“That task gets harder if opposition parties fall into the trap of rallying around this rotten deal,” it said.
“We are witnessing an act of vandalism against our livelihoods, our rights and our horizons.
“We call on Labour, the labour movement and other opposition parties not to support the Tories’ Brexit deal when it is put to a vote in the House of Commons.”
Other signatories are said to include former MEPs, councillors and local activists.
Labour is the only opposition party supporting the deal, with the SNP and the Liberal Democrats having said they would vote against it.
With Labour support, the EU (Future Relationship) Bill is expected to be passed comfortably today after MPs and peers debate and vote, with the legislation being rushed through in
They give space to one source which refuses to oppose the deal,
Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths said: “Successive British governments should have been investing in ports, customs services, strategic companies, R&D, local supply chains and exports, regardless of Brexit.
“We need a comprehensive strategy to rebuild our industrial base in the English regions, Scotland and Wales, in the interests of workers as well as business.
“Ironically, only outside the EU can we use state aid, public ownership and capital controls on the scale necessary to implement such a strategy — a reality not recognised by die-hard anti-Brexit Labour MPs.”
The Marxist-Leninists of the Morning Star are said to be taking advantage of the new post-Brexit terrain to build a mass movement to assert popular sovereignty against ‘monopoly capitalism’ .
This will not happen. What we are seeing a change in the mode of regulation of British capitalism comparable to that created by the Thatcher ‘revolution’. This is not the lifting of burdens imposed by the EU, but the imposition of new burdens in the sovereign UK: the opportunity for free-booting capitalists to plunder the public purse, attack workers’ rights, and to cream off financial profits.
That is, the Brexit deal is an important stage in creating a more liberal form of capitalism in Britain, glossed with the nationalist ideal of an “anglosphère’ of trading free-market nations’.
That ideology aside what form of capitalism is involved?
The development of modern capitalism during the pandemic has been analysed differently by Robert Boyer, a left wing economist of the ‘School of Regulation’. This autumn he published, Les capitalismes à l’épreuve de la pandémie (la Découverte).
To Boyer there are different forms of capitalism, engaged in competition. The obsolete concept of monopoly capitalism does not figure in his account of how these capitalisms is developing.
In this book Boyer argues that the Covid pandemic has acted as “an accelerator of transformations already underway in the long term”. On the one hand, there a transnational “platform capitalism” centred on the exploitation of information. For this regime of accumulation, and mode of regulation, globalisation has to continue its momentum, and that nationalist withdrawal and the return of borders do not take place. Opposite is another form, different types of state-driven capitalisms which, driven by those left behind by the opening up of economies, intend to defend the prerogatives of the nation-state, including in the economic field“, were born these last twenty years.“Ideologically reinforced by the pandemic” since it was necessary to close the borders and recognise the importance of the State during the crisis.
Transnational capitalism has broken up and transformed national production systems and helped polarise societies between social groups which have benefited from the competition between different countries and regions (“concurrence des territories et les autres”) and those who have seen their living standards stagnated or get worse. (Page 183)
Boyer argues that there is another possibility the emergence of a capitalism centred on health, ecology and education in certain developed countries, notably in Europe.
In Une pandémie, deux avenirs (Le Monde Diplomatique. November) Boyer has argued that,
On the one hand, the Covid-19 has already changed a number of types of behaviour and practices: the structure of consumption has registered the risks of face-to-face relationships ; work has been digitalised, allowing both temporal and geographical disconnection from the tasks that produce a dematerialised good or service; the international mobility of people has been durably hampered ; and global value chains will not emerge unscathed from efforts to regain some national sovereignty over the production of goods deemed strategic. The modes of regulation will be transformed, with little chance of a return to the past.
He concludes with these possible futures,
A first future could result from an alliance between digital techniques and advances in biology to result in a society of generalised surveillance which institutes and makes possible a polarization between a small number of rich people and a mass of subjects rendered powerless by the abandonment of the democratic ideal.
The second future could result from the collapse of such a society. The dislocation of international relations and the failure of the fight against the pandemic by purely medical means (treatments, vaccines, or on the contrary obtaining collective immunity) show the need for a social state which becomes the guardian of a democracy extended to the economy. One that, in the face of health threats, strives to strengthen all the institutions necessary for collective health and sees education, lifestyle and culture as contributions to the well-being of the population.
The success of a growing number of national experiences could eventually make it possible to build an international regime centred on global public goods and ” commons “. Without which national regimes cannot prosper: transnational trade regime, financial stability, public health, ecological sustainability. One thinks of the advance taken by the Scandinavian countries, whose social-democratic-inspired capitalism favours investment in essential public services and the consideration of environmental imperatives.
The British government’s strategy is clearly at odds with the second “social” outcome: the European Union, many would argue, could offer a potential framework, larger and stronger than ‘national experiences’ Boyer refers to . Europe’s ‘functionalist’ model may have serious difficulties, but they are as nothing to what lies in store for us under the new UK regime. Our national experience will be the opposite of the policy of the common good. It will be focused on the benefits to Boris Johnson, his party cronies, his business backers, and the their national populist constituency, at the expense of everybody else. Its management of the Pandemic, and the money creamed off by the friends of the Tory Party, richly illustrates this. There is, in short, a national dystopia here, one of no doubt many….
As Manuel Cortes says,
Labour MPs must ignore Keir Starmer and vote against this rotten Tory Brexit deal
it will make our economy smaller, and as a result we will be poorer, with fewer jobs being created. But this is not just about our economic wellbeing, as important as that is. It’s also about our cultural and social lives being impoverished. Ending freedom of movement and our participation in the Erasmus programme will narrow our horizons and experiences.
some on the left say that we shouldn’t take sides in what is effectively a fight within the capitalist class. And this might be the right strategy if we had the forces to ensure the creation of a new socialist dawn. But when this isn’t the case, we shouldn’t be neutral. We must argue for a relationship with the EU that gives working people the greatest confidence to fight for something that’s better – not worse – than their current lot. The higher unemployment and lower living standards that the trade deal will deliver will do nothing of the sort. It also keeps in place – lock, stock and barrel – the legal framework that has led to the privatisation of public services and attacks on workers’ terms and conditions – a reason many “lexiteers” backed withdrawing from the EU.
Michael Roberts asks in The Brexit Deal,
What about the impact on working people? On leaving the EU, what little British labour has gained from EU regulations will be in jeopardy within a country which is already the most deregulated in the OECD. The EU rules included a 48-hour week maximum (riddled with exemptions); health and safety regulations; regional and social subsidies; science funding; environmental checks; and of course, above all, free movement of labour. All that is going or being minimised.
…
He continues,
But maybe the UK can confound these dismal forecasts, as the government claims, because UK industry and the City of London can now expand across the world ‘free from the shackles’ of EU regulation. And it is increasingly clear how it thinks it can do this – by turning Britain into a tax and regulation-free base for foreign multinationals. The government is planning ‘free ports’ or zones; areas with little to no tax in order to encourage economic activity. While located geographically within a country, they essentially exist outside its borders for tax purposes. Companies operating within free ports can benefit from deferring the payment of taxes until their products are moved elsewhere or can avoid them altogether if they bring in goods to store or manufacture on site before exporting them again.
Conclusion,
In sum, the Brexit deal is another obstacle to sustained economic growth for Britain. But the COVID pandemic slump and the underlying weakness of British capital are much more damaging to the UK’s economic future than Brexit. Brexit is just an extra burden for British capital to face; as it also will be for British households.
Do accept that our future lies under the boot of transnational digitalised capitalism, in these miserable conditions, or do we refuse to agree?
Tendance Coatesy 