Sunday 7 August 2016

Are Brexiters immune to irony?


One of the most commonly cited objections to membership of the EU were the complaints that the EU is undemocratic and that it's not right that unelected technocrats and political appointees should rule over our lives.

On June 23rd 2016 37% of the UK electorate voted in favour of a haphazard abandonment of the EU without anything even remotely resembling a coherent plan of action for what comes next. The immediate reaction of the Prime Minister David Cameron was to hand in his resignation and begin drawing up a list of his Tory mates to stuff into the unelected House of Lords and shower with knighthoods, OBEs, CBEs and other gongs.

The House of Lords


In the end Cameron stuffed thirteen new Tory cronies into the ridiculously bloated House of Lords including two multi-millionaire Tory donors (Andrew Fraser and Jitesh Gadhia). He wanted to stuff two more Tory donors in there too but Michael Spencer (who was embroiled in the Libor rigging scandal) was rejected by the scrutiny committee and Remain Campaign bankroller Ian Taylor turned down the peerage because he didn't like the negative publicity.

Thanks to David Cameron's six years of cronyism the House of Lords is now the second biggest legislative chamber in the world, second only to the Chinese parliament. It's by far the biggest unelected chamber, and as such is an affront to democracy. An awful lot of Brexiters seem immune to the irony that their vote to quit the EU is going to hand even more political power to the unelected £300 per day plus expenses House of Lords political cronies club.

Theresa May

David Cameron's replacement as Prime Minister Theresa May outright refused to intervene to stop David Cameron's brazen display of political cronyism. Interestingly she was appointed as leader of the Tory party without a hint of democracy. The 150,000 Tory party members should have been given a vote on their next leader, but the other candidate Andrea Leadsom was leaned on to withdraw from the contest so that may could be anointed as Prime Minister without any filthy oiks having their say.

The Bank of England

As a result of the vote for Brexit the widely reported economic chaos happened. The Bank of England slashed their economic growth forecast for 2017 from 2.3% to just 0.8%, which was the worst decline in economic expectations since records began.

Nowadays in the UK monetary policy is decided by a small group of unelected technocrats called the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC).

The nine member MPC is comprised of the Governor of the Bank of England (appointed by the government) four external members (appointed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer), the Bank's chief economist and three deputy governors.

These nine unelected technocrats have enormous powers to influence the lives of ordinary people through tinkering with interest rates, propping up failed banks, inventing hundreds of billions of pounds out of nothing to flood the financial markets or buy up corporate bonds ... Yet there is no democratic accountability whatever and virtually nobody has even heard of the members of this tiny unelected group.

The response of these unelected technocrats to the Brexit mess was to use it as an excuse to create £170 billion out of nothing to flood it into the financial sector. Their own evidence from last time they did they created cash out of nothing after the financial sector insolvency crisis is that 40% of the economic benefit went to the 5% of wealthiest households, but they've decided to do exactly the same thing again rather than trying a different approach.

Instead of using the newly created cash to invest directly into stuff like infrastructure, jobs, house building, services, education, industrial development ... (things that benefit everyone) they've decided to distribute the cash to the private banks to funnel into unsustainable house price and asset inflation bubbles (things that almost exclusively benefit the wealthiest people in society).


The irony

As a direct result of the vote for Brexit David Cameron used his resignation as an excuse to stuff another 13 unelected Tory cronies into the House of Lords, the UK now has an unelected Prime Minister pursuing a fanatically hard-right agenda (just like a lot of people predicted) and the unelected technocrats at the Bank of England MPC are using the (widely predicted) economic chaos as an excuse to pump vast amounts of newly created cash into the private banks to gamble with as they please.

It's absolutely obvious that the UK is an undemocratic shambles dominated by political cronyism, private corporate power and unelected technocrats, yet there's hardly any outcry about it from Brexiters. It's as if they're perfectly content with cronyism and unelected technocrats ruling over their lives, as long as they're British* cronies and technocrats.


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* Or in the case of the Bank of England Governor Mark Carney - an unelected Canadian technocrat appointed by British Tories.

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