A Dog's Brexit

Politics in what once passed for the Anglo-Democracies has gone mad – and the voters ain’t gonna take it anymore! America has turned into what a friend has called ‘Trumplestiltskinland’. Canada’s pin-up liberal Prime Minister is facing down claims that he corruptly sought to protect a corporate supporter from criminal prosecution, pressuring Ministerial colleagues in the process. The fact that these colleagues were women further dents his ‘Feminist’ credentials. The United Kingdom is, well, disunited and as I write the Brexit deadline is a few days away. Australia is in the phony war lead up to an election to be held within weeks. A federal government on the nose is rushing around (no flapping arms please) busily reinventing itself as a climate change champion and a prophet of social cohesion. And – God help us – New Zealand is reeling from its worst terrorist attack ever. Like many such attacks it was carried out by a self-promoting white supremacist, this time against Muslim Kiwis at prayer in Christchurch, a city that now has a social catastrophe piled on top of a natural one. The alt-right is regrouping, trying valiantly to reframe the attack as the fault of Muslim immigrants who refuse to become “Us”.

Those voters who are not completely turned off are angry. How have we got here? In my lifetime, we as a country and members of so-called Western civilization, have seen the post-war period of steady growth and political stability seep away into a morass of aspirational double-speak and stagnating living standards for all but a tiny minority whose accumulating wealth is stashed away in assets located in exotic locations well away from the reach of the national taxman. Looking back in time it’s relatively easy to trace the main contours of what has happened. From the 1970s onward, the post-war social settlement that saw a mixed economy ameliorate the routine rhythms of capitalism progressively unwound, in part due to the inherent systemic contradictions and political tensions of life in the Cold War, in part to the intended and unintended effects of the neoliberal political project.

The defining feature of the past 40 years has been the remorseless increase in economic and social inequality in mine and similar countries, as Globalization in its economic, political and cultural dimensions has overwhelmed the steering capacities of national governments and other social institutions – family, community organisations, churches, trade unions and political parties – to distribute the fruits of progress in a fair and just manner.

Take Brexit. What the hard line proponents of Brexit twigged to and all the economic, professional and political elites missed in Britain was the sheer fury of workers who saw their jobs disappear or their incomes fall. It was then easy for the racist extremes of British politics to capture their support and frame the decision as a choice between continuing marginalization and a chance at recapturing their lost security. Nationalistic imagery was a gloss that helped put lipstick on the pig. Yes, racist attitudes to foreign workers, especially from Eastern Europe played a part. But the underlying reality was the impact on the job opportunities and wages of British workers that turned many against EU membership. It was competition from those Eastern foreigners, not anti-Islamic ideology or Caribbean immigrants that stoked the engines of the Brexiteers. The protestations of remainers that the economy would suffer – no matter how accurate – was read as a plea of the privileged to retain their privileges. And, in the end, there was an element of ‘so what’. If we are going down, you are coming with us.

What a significant number of those leavers realised was that that the way the EU worked, necessarily marginalised them. Take the Posted Workers Directive (PWD) of the European Commission. The EC is the formal bureaucracy of the EU, based in Brussels. There is an elected European parliament and a regular meeting of heads of government, but the real power resides with the Commission. Together with the IMF and European Central Bank it formed the infamous ‘Troika’ that imposed ‘austerity’ on Greece and other struggling member countries in the long and continuing wake of the GFC. The PWD established the rule that workers could be hired by a multinational company in one EU member country and sent or ‘posted’ to work in any other member country at wage levels determined in the worker’s home country. These workers could not only be paid lower wages than in the receiving country, but they could be sent home at short notice if, for example, they decided to complain about their working conditions, underpayment of wages or decided to join a union. Thus, local workers saw their wages undercut, their conditions threatened and the power of their unions to protect their position undermined. Posted workers receive only the most basic of rights and even here, if they demand them, they can be sent home and replaced by more compliant arrivees. The terminology is instructive. Workers from poorer member countries are packages posted to the West. This is perhaps the best example of Marx’s notion of alienated labour in modern times.

The PWD has been liberally interpreted by the European Court of Justice, the highest judicial tribunal in the Union to which the courts of member countries are subordinated. It is difficult to understand the rage of leavers with the ECJ until you observe some of their decisions. For example, in a key case the Court found in favour of a Finnish shipping company that ‘reflagged’ itself in Estonia, sacked all its employees and hired Estonians at substantially lower wages to the collective bargain previously agreed by the company with the Finnish trade union. When the union threatened legal action the ECJ ruled that this threatened the right of free movement of commerce and labour within the EU and, to add insult, that if the union persisted it would be liable for financial damages payable to the company.

Examples could be multiplied but the lesson was clear, and the British voters learnt it. The rules of the EU expressed and protected the interests of dominant players, rules drawn from the neoliberal playbook of ‘free markets’, deregulation, privatisation and austerity. However, once the vote came and went, the British government was left with the job of executing ‘the expressed wishes of the people’. More accurately, the government had to wrestle with a result supported by a bare majority of a bare majority of eligible voters, none of whom had been given a clear roadmap of what leaving the EU would look like or result in. More than two years down the road, with the clock ticking towards midnight, they still don’t know, as their political representatives in Parliament can’t agree on any way forward other than to kick the can further down the road. What a mess!