Posts Tagged ‘Lexit’
Brexit, Whatever Happened to the Lexit ‘Left’?
British Economic Breakthrough.
This is the Brexit News today:
Voters worried that Brexit has been bad for economy, as official figures show massive slump in trade
Independent.
Major shock’ from 40 per cent fall in exports to EU in January
The majority of Britons believe Brexit has been bad for the economy and trade, according to new polling for The Independent.
The findings offer the first indication that the damage caused by leaving the EU’s single market and customs union in January is cutting through with voters.
Official statistics showed on Friday a precipitous 40.7 per cent fall in goods sales to the EU in January, with experts blaming Brexit for a large chunk of the lost exports.
The slump – which also saw imports from the EU decline by 28.8 per cent – represented the largest monthly decline in trade with the UK’s largest commercial partner since records began in 1997.
One of the most prominent ‘left’ supporters of Brexit, the Harvard Professor Richard Tuck wrote in 2017,
I think Brexit would help the Left is more fundamental. It was that the essential character of the EU, as Wolfgang Streeck has powerfully argued, is hostile to traditional socialism of the mid-20th-century variety. If Britain left the EU, the space available to left wing policies would suddenly expand, and all sorts of possibilities, including such things as thorough-going nationalisation or differential regional taxes, would be on the table again.
In October 2000. this appeared.
In his new book, The Left Case for Brexit, the Harvard-based British historian of political thought Richard Tuck goes even further. Rather than merely finding a silver lining in the referendum vote, he instead presents a full-throated defence of ‘lexit’ – i.e., Brexit for the left – that treats leaving the EU as the opportunity that democratic socialism has been waiting for since its heyday in the years immediately following World War II. By reinvigorating the sovereign powers of Parliament in Westminster, Tuck concludes that Brexit is desirable per se, as it will once again make socialist policies based on nationalisation possible in the UK: ‘The great prize awaiting the Left in Britain…is genuine Brexit followed by a Labour government
He is still at it,
Here are some tips retweeted by the Red-Brown Full Brexit site.
Sailing, sailing away….
H
Brexit Britain: Government Confirms Employment Rights “Under Review.”
A Poster That Has Not Worn Well.
For Perry Anderson, a founder of New Left Review, and a professor at the University of California, ” for all its woeful shortcomings… Westminster is vastly superior to this lacquered synarchy” of the European Union.
The eminent academic and post-New Leftist without apologies, joins others who saw possibilities in Brexit. A fellow Eurosceptic, and NLR contributor, Wolfgang Streeck, known for his defence of borders, oft-cited by Anderson, put his name this appeal, The Full Brexit.
This is a group which under the aegis of the Spiked Network, brought together supporters of the Brexit Party, traditional Labour Party nationalists, defenders of Somewhere People like David Goodhart, left sovereigntists, Blue Labour, anti-cosmopolitan campaigner Paul Embery and the Communist Party of Britain. An alliance of national populist colours between ‘left’ and openly nationalist forces.
They claimed that a unique opportunity stood before the ‘left’ (that is this left alliance with the far-right Party of Nigel Farage), if only sufficient vision was found.
This lack of vision threatens to neutralise Brexit’s potential to renew our political and economic life. EU rules are not neutral: they lock in a set of neoliberal policies that tightly constrain governments’ capacity to innovate, experiment, and tackle voters’ concerns. By preventing practical redress of voters’ grievances, this corrodes representative democracy. Brexit offers a precious opportunity to change this. If this opportunity is squandered, the public will rightly conclude that voting changes nothing. Disengagement and cynicism will intensify and populism – rampant elsewhere in the EU – will surge, threatening what is left of our parliamentary democracy.
A challenge to the logic that “There is No Alternative” is urgently needed, and this must come from the left. The Full Brexit is not a political party. We do not all agree about each and every policy or document on this website. But we do agree, first, that the left’s proper role is to be the architect of a better, more democratic future and, second, that a clean break with the EU is needed to realise that potential.
The Full Brexit had many visions, none of which happened, and none of which were ever going to happen.
Others had their own plans.
Government’s Attack on Workers’ Rights the Unleashing of ‘Britannia Unchained’
In 2012, five newly-elected Conservative MPs co-authored a pamphlet, Britannia Unchained, which denounced the UK’s “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation” and British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world”. Four of it authors – Dominic Raab, Priti Patel, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng – are now among the leading lights of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet.
Their judgement of the UK workforce was severe.
“We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor,” they wrote. “Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”
The UK, they declared, should “stop indulging in irrelevant debates about sharing the pie between manufacturing and services, the north and the south, women and men”.
Their prescription was that, instead of learning from Germany and the Nordic states, as social democrats advocate, that Britain should copy Australia, Canada and the Asian ‘tiger economies’ of Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea – by slashing regulation and taxes.
For libertarians like them, the promise of a hard Brexit was that it would allow the deregulation they dreamed of. “If we could halve the burdens of the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3 billion boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs,’ said Priti Patel in 2016. What burdens she was speaking of aren’t clear, but the legislation she was referring to contains such onerous measures as paid holidays, safety at work and maternity leave – not something that most employers, never mind employees, would want to be without.
Patel and her colleagues now have a Brexit deal that allows this deregulatory bonfire – at the price of huge, costly, and for many unworkable new barriers to trade. But the UK is, on paper, free from the obligation to stay aligned with EU standards.
Update, Border Maniac Wolfgang Streek is unrepentant,
Writing from the sovereigntist Brexit ultras of New Left Review he writes today,
As to the United Kingdom, for the Lexiters Parliament rules again, unconstrained by ‘the Treaties’ and the European Court, and British citizens finally have only their own government to blame if something goes wrong: no responsibility without responsiveness.
As Attack on Workers’ Rights Looms, Lexit (‘left’ Brexit) is Trending…
Heavyweight Supporter of Lexit.
Lexit is trending on Twitter.
This is why:
Those from the left who supported Brexit helped the Tories win the last election, by building support to ‘get Brexit done’ and ‘take back control’.
They facilitated this.
UK workers’ rights at risk in plans to rip up EU labour market rules
Financial Times.
Post-Brexit shake-up of regulations including 48-hour week likely to spark trade union outrage.
Peter Foster, Jim Pickard, Delphine Strauss in London and Jim Brunsden in Brussels YESTERDAY 833 Print this page Worker protections enshrined in EU law — including the 48-hour week — would be ripped up under plans being drawn up by the government as part of a post-Brexit overhaul of UK labour markets.
The package of deregulatory measures is being put together by the UK’s business department with the approval of Downing Street, according to people familiar with the matter. It has not yet been agreed by ministers — or put to the cabinet — but select business leaders have been sounded out on the plan.
The proposed shake-up of regulations from the “working time directive” will delight many Tory MPs but is likely to spark outrage among Britain’s trade union leaders. The move would potentially mark a clear divergence from EU labour market standards but the UK would only face retaliation from Brussels under the terms of its new post-Brexit trade treaty if the EU could demonstrate the changes had a material impact on competition.
What was Lexit, the campaign to leave the EU on a ‘socialist’ basis?
Those on the left with longer memories than than SWP fruit flies will recall it well.
Lexit – the Left Leave Campaign
With the referendum campaign on Britain’s membership of the EU now underway, left forces have officially launched a campaign for a left wing British exit. The organisations backing #Lexit — the Left Leave Campaign include the RMT rail workers’ union, the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, Counterfire, the Indian Workers Association, the Bangladeshi Workers Council of Britain and Scottish Left Leave.
They are united around five key arguments for a left exit — against the EU’s neoliberal agenda, its undemocratic nature, and the horrors of Fortress Europe; and for a defence of workers’ rights through collective organisation and union strength, and for exploiting the crisis for the Tories that a leave vote would provoke.
There was also the hardline Full Brexit group, a red-brown alliance of the Brexit Party backing Spiked, many Lexit supporters, the Communist Party of Britain, Labour Party nationalists, sovereigntists, ‘Trade Unionists Against the EU led by anti-rootless cosmopolitan campaigner Paul Embery’ (supported by the Socialist Party) and various other odd bods.
They had their critics.
Brexit offered the public three wishes: you can take back control of your money, your borders, and your laws. Lexit does much the same with a socialist twist. Offering little more than dreams, both sides fail to realise that in an interconnected world, you can’t take back control without giving something up.
Without a proper account of the EU’s complexity and origins, the Lexiter position tends to fall into a self-made abyss of misunderstanding. And without having the class power to back up its position, a Lexit – just like Brexit – may condemn the UK to perpetual autarky and possible disintegration.
Lexit still has at least one supporter.
Sparing time from writing about happy memories of participating in the paramilitary Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse, KdA) in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East Germany),leading member of the Communist Party of Britain, Nick Wright says,
We are where we are on Britain’s exit from the EU. Where we no longer confront the employers or ministers able to hide behind the conditions that EU treaties impose on member states, we face different obstacles built into the new trade agreement negotiated by a Tory government that now represents an evolving consensus between big business and the banks and the EU’s dominant states.
That this is buttressed by the new US regime waiting in the wings is a reminder that the Atlantic alliance is as much a mechanism for economic control as it is a war fighting machine.
Where we once grappled with the pro-employer judgments of the European Court of Justice, we now directly face our ruling-class court system. Britain’s bourgeoisie rightly fears an insurgent working class and we have a long history of challenging British courts with industrial action.
We expect the Morning Star to call for trade union factory militias to lead the battles!
Others have a different take.
H
Bob sums up their effect.
The Government has reacted to the FT report with a policy of staunch denial…(which means it’s true).
Business secretary has denied claims EU-based employment laws such as 48-hour week will be axed.
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This blog has begun reading hardline Leave supporter and post-New Leftist Perry Anderson’s latest roman fleuve on Brexit in the London Review of Books……
Tendance Coatesy 