Tuesday 25 June 2019

This misty-eyed Remainer revisionism needs to stop


One of the most irritating tropes that keeps doing the rounds in the Remainer echo chambers is that pre-2016 Britain was some kind of glorious good-natured utopia until 17.4 million Leave voters decided to fuck everything up on purpose for no good reason.

Aside from all the stuff I've detailed in the header image, just consider these facts:
  • Tory austerity fanaticism also resulted in the closure of literally thousands of public facilities and services (hospitals, police & fire stations, Sure Start centres, libraries and other local government services ...) and left the remaining services massively over-stretched, under-funded, and under-staffed. 
  • Between 2010 and 2016 the two main areas of growth in Britain were in exploitative and unstable Zero Hours Contracts, and in people reduced to such poverty that they were left reliant on food bank charitable handouts.
All of this stuff was happening before the EU referendum in 2016, and the self-serving silence of the Tories and centrists during the EU referendum (because they didn't want to implicate themselves for supporting all of these ruinous policies) left the door wide open for the Brexiteers to cynically blame all of it (collapsing wages, crumbling public services, widespread poverty, shitty low-paid jobs ...) on immigrants and the EU.

Of course a lot of smug "centrists" were having a whale of a time between 2010 and 2016, entirely unconcerned by the ravages of austerity, social security vandalism, and wage repression because the horrifying consequences weren't falling on them ... but millions of us were fully aware that Britain wasn't the "moderate", "good-natured", "fundamentally calm country" of "good practical judgement" that exists in this absurd centrist delusion.

The most damaging thing about this bone-headed centrist delusion that because everything was fine and dandy for them pre-2016, it was fine and dandy for everyone else too, is the fact that this stance is so damned counter-productive.

If Remainers really wanted to convince Leave voters to switch allegiances in the "another roll of the dice" referendum they've invested so much effort in demanding, hitting the people you need to convince with this "everything was fucking marvellous before you stupid fuckers fucked it all up for no reason at all" attitude is about as counter-productive as you could imagine.

A practical approach to undoing this Brexit farce would be to try to understand the underlying causes of the Brexit vote, and to point out that most of the crap people were suffering in the neglected, de-industrialised, and left-behind communities that voted for Brexit was due to decades of hard-right neoliberal economic policies, ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, and malicious public service vandalism ... not immigrants and the EU.

There's no way you change the minds of the appalling far-right ultranationalist Blue-Kippers in the Home Counties and the Shires because they'll always be financially insulated from the worst of the Brexit chaos, but it is at least possible to reach out to people in left-behind communities and explain that their suffering was caused by malicious domestic government policies like deindustrialisation, austerity, welfare vandalism, infrastructure under-investment, and severe public service cuts, not by membership of the EU.

But the smug centrist approach is to tell people in these communities that everything was always quite simply marvellous, and that they should have been perfectly happy with the pathetic crumbs that they were getting in a system that was working absolutely fine for the well-to-do, rather than deciding to fuck everything up for no reason at all.

The worst impact of Tory austerity fanaticism a lot of these smug centrist Remainers will have felt is having their bin collections reduced from weekly to fortnightly, so it's no wonder they're absolutely incapable of empathising with the pain, and misery, and hopelessness, and stress of the poor and vulnerable people who suffered under the jackboot of it.

So they sneer at them: 
How dare working class Leave voters fuck everything up for us for no good reason? How dare you all be so stupid and irresponsible? How dare you not listen to us when we've told you what's best for you? How dare you ruin our beloved delusions that Britain was some kind of magnificent utopia? How dare Jeremy Corbyn go to a laughable shit hole like Morecambe rather than pandering to us?

And somehow these people imagine that they'd actually be able to win another EU referendum by campaigning like this!


Remainers tend to absolutely hate it when their opponents portray them as smug, out-of-touch metropolitan elitists who are only concerned with their own comfort.

But when extremely high-profile Remainers resort to this sickening rose-tinted glorification of past circumstances that were indisputably nightmarish for millions of us, and thousands of other Remainers retweet this counter-productive nonsense all over the Internet, how else do they expect to be perceived?

The terrifying thing is that having intolerably smug and strategically inept people like this push themselves to the forefront of the anti-Brexit movement means that it's almost certainly doomed to fail, and their failure will mean that the austerity-victims that they quite clearly didn't give a shit about during their imagined pre-2016 utopia will be the ones to bear the brunt of it all over again.


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16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent work Tom, as usual. I've had many a person tell me how bad things will be post-hard Brexit. Then they look blankly at me when I cite some of the stuff in your article. Because it hasn't affected them.

Anonymous said...

I agree with what you say, but not all 'Remainers' are "smug centrist Remainers"! There are some of us on the left who would prefer a second vote, with all its drawbacks, to a disastrous, Tory, 'cliff-edge' Brexit. I say this as one who is no big fan of the EU as it exists, and who voted against membership in 1975. I, like many others, have no wish to see the 'Disaster Capitalists'and health insurance salesmen descend on what's left of the UK after Brexit.

Unknown said...

Hahaha, I constantly state, "40 yrs of Thatcherism." Boring maybe, bit that's the Way, I see it ¡

LaFlaneuse said...

LOL. What a load of aberrant nonsense. As a left, working class Remainer, it makes me laugh when people purporting to be left wingers think that they speak for all working class people.
How will leaving the EU suddenly turn the UK in to some sort of socialist utopia, when we’re going to have unfettered free market economics when we Brexit?
There is a lot wrong with the EU, but we don’t get to change that by being outside of it, and right now it’s the only thing that is keeping the Tories on their toes.
Do you honestly think that if and when we leave, there are going to be any protection for normal working people once the likes of Mogg start ramping up their Disaster Capitalism campaign?
I cannot stand the class-ridden divisive bullshit peddled by the Tories, but neither can I stomach inverted snobbery and the persistence of the myth that working class people are some sort of monolithic entity. It does no one any favours.

Anonymous said...

Nostalgia is ALWAYS a lie. The 'good old days' were never good, they were in fact crap. Not that 'we've never had it so good' is true either. Some things ARE worse. But what's worse is NOT the people, it's NOT the 'youth of today' either. The current generation is the best ever. They're educated, take less drugs, fitter, eat better, smoke less and drink less. They are less racist, less homophobic and more tolerant of different people and new ideas (I'm generalising, of course)

What's WORSE is our politicians. In the 80s Thatcher sold the 'family silver' and privatised everything in site whilst her family (via Denis's directorships) benefitted directly by asset stripping formerly state owned shipbuilding companies with Trafalgar House. It's the epitome of political corruption and unjust enrichment. She made sure she kept her ill gotten gains by offshoring it all and famously (well, famous in the Inland Revenue anyway) paid less tax than her cleaner. She started it, now Cameron, May and potentially Boris will go the whole hog and dismantle social security and healthcare. This is ongoing. Letwin's idea for breaking the link between NI and pensions (originally Thatcher's idea) and then 'free at the point of use' healthcare s the next step.

Bevin was right, they ARE 'lower than vermin' A rat won't attack you for the pleasure of seeing your pain. In fact, rats have been shown to be quite altruistic to other rats. Something the Tories could take a lesson from!

But I DO have mixed feelings on the EU - like many. Labour campaigned against it as they feared that we would be pushed away from the type of economy we had. Back then USSR had a command economy and US had unbridled capitalism. We, on the other hand had a mixed type of economy, and we were rightly proud of that. Labour feared being pushed in to having to have a Capitalist economy with no chance to subsidise, save industries, preserve specific jobs and trades and act in our own interests by ensuring no one could choke off our supply of coal or steel and the government owned our utilities and kept them safe. They feared ALL of that changing and it DID all change. All of our utilities are foreign owned, privatised and more expensive providing less jobs but still costing more money. North Sea Oil came on line and instead of being a MASSIVE bonus it was swallowed up paying for the results of the Miners' Strike which was caused deliberately by Thatcher. It might be too late to put the genie FULLY back in the bottle but, as it is an inevitability, we must try to use Brexit to our advantage and take back those things which ARE good without being unrealistic. Brexit could have been so much different were it being negotiated by Labour. The Tories ONLY priority is to make money for themselves and their friends, they are the worst people to do this. Those who voted for Brexit may not have realised this now takes away ANY possible protection from our OWN GOVERNMENT when it is tory, this time it really WILL be their fault.

Like another commenter here I agree that the working class are NOT some monolithic group but, unlike him I believe that Brexit will neither be wholly good nor wholly bad either. We all know politics doesn't work like that. But, adding this again, neither are Remain voters. 99% have fully accepted the democratic outcome of the referensum and are as keen as Leavers to see that this is done timeously and properly. The public ISN'T divided, there are no fights and families torn in two over this. That is entirely manufactured by the press and politicians. People do what they always do - get on with their lives as usual...

Justine said...

I don't agree either with you or Ian Dunt. There was a festering heap of nationalism and racism fed by the likes of the Sun waiting to emerge, and the Leave vote gave it some kind of legitimacy. I don't think Ian Dunt was saying everything was rosy before, just that the debate back then was less aggressive. This is true, but not the point. I think things will be much worse out of Europe, bad as they are now. What little money goes to the regions will become even less. I expect foreign powers/corporations to come in and take over to exploit the handy English speaking population, who will welcome them as saviours and be glad of poverty wages rather than starvation. Our NHS will be sold off and God help us all. If we had remained we could find common ground with others in Europe and protect ourselves from the ravening US. I do agree that in part the situation we are in is a result of well off centrists in London not doing enough to stop the abuse of the poor, disabled and unemployed and ignoring the regions.

Stephen Flaherty said...

What we want, I guess, is to be uncompromising on Brexit - it's a terrible idea - and uncompromising on the causes of Brexit, i.e. all the stuff that AAV mentions in the article. "Tough on Brexit, Tough on the Causes of Brexit", in short. Sounds kind of familiar...

Anonymous said...

They probably look at you blankly because you've randomly brought up austerity measures during a conversation about Brexit.

Unknown said...

Except its not random if its directly related is it? Or are you one of those really really clever people the article talks about?

Unknown said...

To be fair the term smug centrist remainer refers specifically to a subset of smug centrist remainers. The author is a remainer too.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Well that depends, were you referring to the Tory sanctions which the E.U didnt enforce (but applauded), or referring to the austerity sanctions the E.U enforced on Greece THREE times as part of the deal to loan them billions and ended up being deemed human rights abuses by the U.N?

I don't suspect it's the latter somehow, but surprise me ;).

Anonymous said...

Festering racism and nationalism... right. Absolutely nothing to do with the likes of TTIP, the Greece and Portugal austerity sanctions, massive and relentless corporate bailouts paid for by tax payers...

No it was racism. Of course, it's so obvious, all those examples of the E.U making peoples lives miserable for the sake of corporate interest absolutely pale in comparison to the legion of frothing Nazis Cameron thought were going to vote to remain. Alex Jones called, he wants his conspiracy back.

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