Alternate universe theory suggests the possibility that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, and that new ones spring into existence every time a choice is made.
According to alternate universe theory the universe where I decided to write this article is the one we're living in, but another alternative universe branched off at the moment I made the (probably correct) decision that producing a multiverse theory article on the root causes of Brexit would be a ridiculous waste of my own time, and did something else like go far a walk.
If alternative universe theory is correct then that means that in some parallel universe Prime Minister Ed Miliband is approaching his fourth year in office having decided to actively oppose ruinous Tory austerity dogma back in 2015, rather than following the hopelessly self-defeating strategy of Blairite centrists like Ed Balls and Chris Leslie who thought that pathetically imitating Tory austerity dogma would win Labour the 2015 General Election by appealing to soft-Tory voters in marginal constituencies.
In this alternate universe Ed Miliband was smart enough to realise that Labour offering a toxic prescription of yet more Tory-style austerity would drive away dozens of natural Labour voters all over the country for every soft-Tory voter they won over in marginal constituencies, and told them to go away and come up with an strategically competent and economically coherent investment-based alternative to Tory austerity madness, or get out of the shadow treasury and let someone with an actual clue have a go instead.
In this alternative universe Ed Miliband leadership presented Labour as the only UK-wide alternative to 5 more years of ruinous austerity madness. This strategy gave Labour Party activists a very clear message to get enthusiastic about and sell to the electorate, and galvanised the Labour vote resulting in a resounding defeat for the austerity-fixated Tory/Lib-Dem coalition.
This Tory defeat meant that there would be no referendum on quitting the EU, and that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell would remain obscure Labour backbenchers as Ed Miliband was sworn in as Prime Minister, rather than becoming the guys who finally made Labour stand up, stop imitating Tory austerity fanaticism, and offer an actual alternative to economically illiterate Tory austerity madness.
What's the point in imagining this alternative universe?
The point is that imagining an alternative universe where Labour didn't continually track further and further to the right under the direction of clueless centrists like Ed Balls and Chris Leslie illustrates how centrism managed to deliver it's own worst nightmares.
First this clueless centrist agenda of ever closer imitation of the Tories managed to deliver the Labour Party back into the hands of genuine democratic socialists after two decades of control by pro-privatisation, pro-austerity centrists, and then to make matters even worse for the centrists their absolute ineptitude helped to give birth to Brexit too.
If Ed Miliband had become Prime Minister in 2015 there would never have been an EU referendum, and even if he'd still somehow still lost the 2015 general election to the Tories, the EU referendum would obviously have played out very differently.
Had the centrists actively opposed ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma from the beginning rather than pathetically imitating it, they could have made the very clear argument that the unprecedented collapse in living standards that people had been suffering was purely the consequence of hard-right Tory policies like austerity dogma, wage repression, the deliberate defunding of public services, and massive social security cuts.
But having actively supported these ruinous austerity policies, the centrists were left biting their tongues while the ukippers, the hard-right of the Tory party, and assorted extreme-right fanatics gleefully filled the political vacuum by blaming the devastating real life consequences of hard-right Tory austerity dogma on immigrants and the EU.
The centrists blatantly created their own political nightmares by enabling (Lib-Dems) and imitating (Labour right-wingers) the hard-right fanaticism of the Tory party, and now they're left torn between slinging abuse and lies at Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who supports his pro-investment economic policies in the vain hope of returning the Labour leadership to centrist control, and desperately trying to stop the Brexit shambles that they enabled in the first place by means of another referendum that they're actually quite likely to lose again given their abject failure to address the root causes of why the 2016 Brexit vote happened in the first place.
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| This Tweet from David Cameron will never get old |
Imagining a calm and rather boring Ed Miliband approaching his fourth relatively uneventful year as Prime Minister helps us to understand the sheer idiocy of all the centrists who somehow imagined that the essence of political centrism isn't maintaining a mix between capitalism and socialism, but continually tracking the Tory party ever further towards the bonkers hard-right, no matter how blatantly harmful and self-defeating the economic fanaticism the Tories have been promoting.
But if the behaviour of centrists has taught us anything over the last three years it's that they're absolutely immune to self-awareness, and absolutely intent on bitterly blaming everyone apart from themselves for the absolute chaos they unleashed by deliberately denying the public any real alternative to hard-right Tory austerity fanaticism back in 2015.
They won't blame themselves and their noxious austerity-lite agenda for Ed Miliband not becoming Prime Minister. They'll blame literally anyone else from Rupert Murdoch for publishing that notorious bacon sandwich picture, to Ed Miliband for supposedly being too left-wing (!!?!), to people who voted Green/SNP/Plaid Cymru in 2015 (because they were the only parties that actually bothered opposing Tory austerity fanaticism at the time).
And they absolutely refuse to blame themselves for facilitating Brexit either.
Even when Lib-Dem centrists were part of the pro-austerity government and Labour "centrists" controlled the pro-austerity political opposition too, it's still somehow always somebody else's fault.
If only Ed Miliband had been smart enough to reject the centrists morally indefensible and strategically incompetent austerity-lite rubbish and actually given the public an alternative to get behind, but all we can do now is imagine what that might have been like, and marvel at the self-absorbed wittering of centrists who still outright deny the fact that their despicable austerity-appeasement opened the door to all of this Tory chaos in the first place.
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