When you look at the facts and evidence, it's pretty damned clear that quitting the EU without at least maintaining very close cooperation on the economy, security, citizens' rights and the environment would be a disastrous move for the UK.
When even Brexiteers like Jacob Rees-Mogg are claiming that Britain won't see any Brexit benefit for at least 50 years, it's hardly an uncontroversial point to say that Brexit is going to be disastrous until almost everyone of working age is a pensioner or dead.
However one point that is rarely raised is whether the EU would actually be better off without us.
You see the over-whelming British attitude towards the EU is apathy, while most of those who do express a view do so with so little regard for the actual structure and makeup of EU democracy, it's pretty much indistinguishable from contempt.
The turnout at the EU elections was just 37%, meaning two thirds of eligible voters didn't even bother to express a view, and of the minority who did bother voting, a massive swathe of them treated the election like a ridiculous proxy referendum on EU membership, with 31% backing the Faragist Brexit Party, and 20% backing the absurd single-issue "Bollocks to Brexit" Lib-Dems.
How many Lib-Dem voters know, or even care, that the Lib-Dems belong to the despicable ALDE group in the European Parliament, and by returning 15 of them, they've massively increased the power of one of the most toxic groups in the European Parliament.
If one thing is absolutely guaranteed in the European Parliament, it's that is some sickening pro-corporate piece of legislation, or an egregious attack on European citizens' rights and freedoms (the TTIP corporate power grab, banning people from using the term "veggie burger" at the behest of the meat industry, attacking Internet freedoms with Link Taxes and Upload Filters ...) comes along, ALDE will be cheering for it and voting it through.
So in order to say "bollocks to Brexit" like a bunch of political toddlers, literally millions of Brits voted for the European Parliamentary group that makes the EU so bloody bad in the first place, and literally millions more had an equally embarrassing political toddler tantrum in the opposite direction by voting for a bunch of lazy expenses-scamming far-right shit-stirrers to protest against the EU.
Aside from our woefully immature attitude to electing members to the European Parliament, there's also the fact that Britain is so often completely out of step with the general European Consensus.
I'll give just a few examples:
When the EU tried to clamp down on excessive bankers' bonuses, George Osborne was the only finance minister in Europe to oppose the proposals, using public money to fight a doomed-to-lose rearguard action in defence of bankers' rights to extract vast bonuses even as they drive their institutions into insolvency!
When the EU tried to protect the European steel industry by putting tariffs on artificially cheap Chinese steel flooding into European markets, once again the Tories were the only major ruling party to object to and obstruct these moves.
When the EU tried to discipline the far-right Orbán government in Hungary for their interference in the independence of the judiciary, the Tories were the only ruling party in Europe to align themselves with all the extreme-right and neo-Nazi parties in the European parliament to vote in favour of Orbán's anti-Semitic regime.
And it's not just limited to British obstruction against the European political consensus, there's a hard-right British mindset that just doesn't exist on the continent.
Even in countries like Germany, where the centre-right CDU have ruled the roost since 2005, publicly owned not-for-profit public services are commonplace and they've actually reintroduced free university education across the board.
In the UK Jeremy Corbyn is derided as some kind of dangerously radical extremist for espousing these policies that are absolutely commonplace on the continent. Policies like publicly owned rail, water, national grid, and mail system, free university education, and decentralisation of economic control and infrastructure investment funds.
What's absolutely commonplace and uncontroversial over there is derided as lunatic extremism over here, and then when it comes to UK government policy Europeans are genuinely shocked when you tell them what the UK government have been doing over the last nine years.
They're shocked when you tell them that they've privatised 3/4 of the schools in England into the hands of unaccountable private pseudo-charities who fill their own pockets at the public expense through bloated executive salaries and dodgy no-bid supply contracts to their friends and family.
They're shocked when you tell them that English kids are facing £9,000 per year university fees on rip-off inflation+3% repayment terms that mean 83% of graduates will never pay off their debts despite entire working lifetimes of paying 9% of their disposable incomes in "education tax".
They're shocked when you tell them that the Tory government has privatised prisons, and the probation service, and the forensic science service, and front line police operations, and absolutely gutted Legal Aid to turn the courts back into the playgrounds of the rich.
What is our normal is radical hard-right extremism to most of them.
And what's their normal is almost universally derided in the media as dangerously extreme Marxist nonsense when Corbyn proposes it over here.
On Brexit we're just an embarrassment hanging around in the doorway, threatening to leave the party in the most destructive way possible, with senior government ministers, right up to our soon-to-be-departed Prime Minister spreading bizarre anti-European conspiracy theories, and her senior ministers referring to our EU neighbours as "Nazi concentration camp guards".
Then after three years of threatening to shoot ourselves in the head if we don't get exactly what we want, we repeatedly rejected the departure deal that we ourselves negotiated, and then pathetically begged and grovelled for yet more time to sort ourselves out, because nobody here can even agree on how to actually do Brexit.
They've shown remarkable patience in the face of this unprecedented chaos and uncertainty, with all 27 remaining EU states coming together to agree their negotiating position, while we, on our own, remain pathetically divided over ours!
When it comes to foreign policy, once again we're completely out of step with the rest of the EU.
When Jeremy Corbyn appealed for calm, and asked to see conclusive proof that Iran were responsible for the tanker explosions in the Gulf of Oman, he was roundly derided in Britain as some kind of lunatic anti-British traitor for daring to question the suspiciously evidence-light assertions of US warmongers like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.
But then you look at the European reaction to the same incident, and you see that far from being some kind of wildly deranged commie, Corbyn's just expressing the general European consensus.
Germany’s foreign minister Heiko Maas said the grainy video provided by the US is far from sufficient to prove that Iran was behind the attacks.
France's foreign ministry called on all sides in the region to "act with restraint and towards de-escalation".
And the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called for "maximum restraint".
Nobody in Europe is spitting abuse and shrieking "traitor" at these figures for saying the same kind of stuff Corbyn did, nor demanding that the European public unquestioningly accept the American's evidence-light assertions, and war-mongering rhetoric.
Whichever way you look at it, Britain is glaringly out of step with the general European consensus.
Of course a lot of Brits who believe in more liberal social values, and peaceful internationalist ideals, and the mixed economy social democratic way of doing things, would prefer not to leave the EU at all, but maybe it's just time for people like us to accept that (outside of Scotland) we're actually in the minority, surrounded by a majority comprised of tub-thumping hard-right little-Englanders and those who are outright apathetic towards European principles and ideals, which means that the Europeans might well be better off without us continually mucking things up for them.
The other option of course is for Britain to change course, to ditch the obstructionist British attitudes in the European Parliament, to adopt the European consensus on public ownership and affordable/free university education, to unwind all the egregious Tory privatisation scams that most Europeans are genuinely shocked by when they hear about them, and to seek de-escalation in volatile conflict zones rather than spitting undiluted hate at those who preach caution instead of jingoistic war-mongering bollocks.
But if we're going to take this other option, we've got a heck of a lot of work on our plates to reform the way we do things in Britain haven't we?
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Dear self-styled "centrist" Labour politician,
With the prospect of democratic reselection of Labour MPs (to weed out the corrupt, self-serving, lazy, incompetent, and the deliberate internal wreckers) looming on the horizon you Labour right-wingers have agreed amongst yourselves that your new propaganda line is that everyone in Labour needs to unify to fight the Tories.
The problem of course is that we all remember what you lot did in the wake of the Brexit vote in 2016.
On the day of the worst Tory cock up in decades you Labour right-wingers didn't come together with the rest of the party to criticise the Tories over their decision to gamble the entire future of the UK in order to nick a few votes off UKIP, and their utterly reckless failure to draw up a contingency plan in case their extraordinary gamble backfired.
No, you decided to use this once-in-a-lifetime Tory cock up to launch a pre-planned coup against your own democratically elected party leader meaning the entire summer of 2016 was spent on a bitter internal battle, rather than in condemnation of the Tory Brexit farce.
You lot were so confident of successfully removing Corbyn that you even briefed your mates at the Daily Telegraph about your plot to oust him three weeks before the Brexit result came in!
Nobody summed up the idiocy of this anti-Corbyn coup better than your stalking horse candidate Angela Eagle who went from praising Corbyn for campaigning against Brexit on a schedule that "would make a 25 year old tired" on June 13th, to claiming that he campaigned with "an ambivalent half-heartedness" in her resignation letter just 14 days later.
And now the very same Angela Eagle is calling on everyone in Labour to unify to fight the Tories, without any mention of the fact that she was one of the Labour Coup-plotters who utterly squandered the best opportunity to fight the Tories in decades in 2016, or showing the slightest contrition for having acted in such a divisive and damaging way at such a crucial time in British political history.
The tragedy is that you lot really seem to think that us ordinary folk have such short political memories that we'd just forget the last three years of your divisive and destructive internal wrecking.
You really seem to think that we're stupid enough to forget the way you lot squandered the best chance to fight the Tories in decades to launch your spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup.
You really seem to think we're stupid enough to forget the way you've spent the last three years rudely and arrogantly slagging off hundreds of thousands of ordinary Labour Party members as "trots", "dogs", "rabble", "entryists", "Stalinists", "Nazi storm troopers", "cultists" ... and conducting vast purges of left-leaning Labour Party members for crimes like once retweeting Caroline Lucas or liking the Foo Fighters too much!
You really seem to think that we're stupid enough to believe your reality-reversing nonsense that you're the poor innocent victims after your backstabbing, your efforts to "break Jeremy Corbyn as a man", you're barrages of insults, abuse and condescension against ordinary Labour members, and your failed attempts to rig both of the Corbyn leadership elections by ruthlessly purging thousands of left-leaning Labour Party members.
If you really cared about unity, why on earth didn't any of you speak out against the purges and all the abuse at the time?
The reality is absolutely obvious to anyone with a few brain cells to rub together.
If you lot were genuinely motivated by a desire to unify and fight the Tories, you would have unified to fight the Tories when it would have counted the most, in the wake of the Brexit vote.
But you didn't show unity then, you launched a staggeringly divisive and destructive internal civil war instead.
Now that the prospect of democratic reselection of Labour MPs is looming on the horizon you've suddenly had a massive change of heart because nothing frightens you as much as the prospect of having to justify your actions to the ordinary Labour Party members you've spend the last three years insulting, smearing, defying, and purging.
So now you're desperate that everyone unify and fight the Tories, rather than holding you lot to account for your actions and replace you with people who will actually fight the Tories!
My advice, if you want it, is simple: If you get on board now, show some genuine contrition for your divisive and destructive actions in the past, and show that you're intent on expending every effort on opposing the Tories rather than on continuing to defy the will of the Labour Party membership, then maybe that will be enough to save you from the democratic reselection you're so afraid of.
But if you resort to yet more gratuitous insults and abuse towards ordinary Labour Party members like Joan Ryan (trots, Stalinists, communists) and Chuka Umunna (dogs), you're clearly just making the situation worse for yourselves by insulting and abusing the very people who you're going to have to justify your actions to when it comes to democratic reselection.
The tragedy is that if you'd taken your own advice in the past, you'd never be facing the prospect of democratic reselection now because Corbyn never wanted it this way, and it's even possible that it's not too late for you now, if you'd just get with the programme instead of continuing your internal wrecking.
But there's little doubt at all that most of you will have forgotten this unify to fight the Tories argument within a few days in order to return to plotting and smearing, because it seems that many of you couldn't stick to a principle, even if your parliamentary careers depended on it.
I honestly wish some of you would follow through on this unify to fight the Tories argument you've come up with, because all it takes is a bit of humility to understand that the vast majority of Labour Party supporters actually want genuine democratic socialism, not the kind of pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-war, anti-welfare, unregulated neoliberalism that's dominated UK politics for so many decades.
But you've spent so long wrapped up in the "how can we get rid of Corbyn?" groupthink that even a tiny bit of humility and realism about the direction Labour is moving in is probably beyond you.
So all the best in developing a sense of humility, and coming to terms with the reality that Labour has returned to democratic socialism, and that it's headed towards becoming a genuine grass roots organisation where members have a real say, rather than just serving as campaign fodder to help people like you get elevated into the unaccountable "jobs for life" brigade.
Best regards and good luck for the future,
Tom (AAV)
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The economist Steve Keen is backing Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. This is big news because he was one of the only economists to predict the global financial sector meltdown.
Foresight
Steve Keen was one of the only economists to accurately predict the global financial sector meltdown in 2007-08. Of course a lot of people could see that the housing bubble was creating unsustainable amounts of private debt, but Keen was one of the few who used this information to accurately predict the way that the global economy would collapse.
Here's a paper he wrote in 2006 almost a year before the sequence of bank failures started in 2007. He concluded that the state of debt and the ever increasing debt service burden meant that a recession would be unavoidable.
In hindsight he was absolutely right, but at the time he was derided as a scaremongerer and a crank for the "crime" of predicting the financial crash that the mainstream economics profession absolutely refused to see until the economy actually started imploding around them.
I don't know if you've ever been in the position where you're trying to alert people to the danger, and they just laugh at you and deride you. It takes bravery and great strength of character to keep swimming against the tide and standing up for what you believe in under such circumstances.
Labour
In an interview with Mark McGowan Keen explained why he was backing Labour. He's particularly enthusiastic about the proposed financial transaction tax, describing it as a tax that can't be evades by means of complex offshore structures, because every time they sell a product, they'll face a transaction tax.
Keen also praised Corbyn for the policies of rail renationalisation, properly funding the NHS, and scrapping student fees, saying the policies mean that Labour is no longer Tory-lite, but "a real social democratic alternative" that could finally break the ruinous neoliberal political hegemony that has ruled since the rise of Thatcher in 1979.
Another think that Keen noted was the vicious anti-Corbyn bias of the mainstream media and the elitist Westminster political establishment for proposing the kinds of policies that are taken for granted in plenty of other western economies, such as nationalised rail (France, Netherlands, Japan, Italy, Ireland ...), a publicly owned national grid (Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, even Texas!), a publicly owned mail system (Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland) and a national investment bank/sovereign wealth fund (Norway, Singapore, Australia, South Korea).
Watch the interview here:
Steve Keen's book "Debunking Economics" features on my list of recommended reading for those who want to learn more about economics.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
On May 12th 1994 the Labour Party leader John Smith died of a massive heart attack at the age of 55. At the time Labour had a 23 point lead over the Conservative government in the opinion polls, and Smith was seen as an honest and organised alternative to the outright lies and absolute chaos of the John Major administration.
Smith wasn't just a good leader who unified the Labour Party, he was also a very intelligent man and an engaging public speaker too.
These days practically every speech a politician makes ends up on Youtube, Facebook or Twitter, but Smith died before the Internet age, meaning that many of his speeches haven't even been transcribed onto the Internet, let alone posted onto social media.
The main part of this article will include quotes from a John Smith speech entitled "Reclaiming the ground" that he read at the R.H. Tawney memorial lecture in March 1993.
None of these fantastic quotes have appeared on the Internet to date.
The concluding part of this article will explain why John Smith's untimely death was a tragedy for the Labour Party, and a tragedy for the United Kingdom as a whole.
Quotes from "Reclaiming the ground"
"Let us not deny the tide of opinion, which I believe is beginning to flow towards a recognition of the value of society and away from the destructive individualism of so much of modem Conservatism ... Arid at a time when the moral values of our society are coming under
increasing strain, we could be taking the first steps in a social revolution by encouraging, through conviction and example, a return to the standards of integrity and honour our society deserves."
"We must never be afraid of saying that we will adopt a policy because it is, quite simply, the right thing to do."
"Despite the considerable electoral disappointments that many parties of the Left have experienced in Western democratic societies throughout the 1980s, there remains strong public acceptance for many of the principles and achievements of democratic socialism. I am thinking in particular about the National Health Service in Britain and the framework of social and employment rights that are widely supported in most countries in Western Europe."
"Real freedom depends on the interdependence of the individual and society, and why this idea - which has long remained at the centre of democratic socialist thinking - retains Its intellectual force and its capacity for popular appeal."
"The flaws in the doctrines of the radical right are becoming more widely appreciated and more easily exposed than ever before. Their vision of humanity consists of individuals as decision-making units concerned exclusively with their own self-interest, making transactions in a marketplace. It is a theory that makes very ambitious moral and economic claims, for example, that it alone preserves freedom and promotes prosperity. I believe however that it is a doctrine based on an absurd caricature of human behaviour, which grossly misunderstands the nature of freedom, and seriously ignores the value of society - even to the extent of denying its very existence."
"The fundamental flaw in the individualism of the classical writers, and their modem counterparts in today's Conservative Party, is, I believe, their assumption that human beings conduct their lives on the basis of self-interested decisions taken in radical isolation from others. This thesis grotesquely ignores the intrinsically social nature of human beings and fails to recognize the capabilities that all people have to act in response to commitments and beliefs that clearly transcend any narrow calculation of personal advantage."
"Providing perhaps unexpected support for this line of argument is none other than Adam Smith who, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, wrote: 'How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness to be necessary to him'. The fact that this insight of Smith's Is difficult to reconcile with his later and more famous study of economics has caused many of his recent followers to overlook his earlier work. Just as they also tend to ignore his support for public investment in infrastructure, in education and the arts, which are hidden gems of intervention that can be found alongside his thesis of the invisible hand in the Wealth of Nations."
"Markets do not enjoy the total supremacy that is envisaged for them by neo-classical economics. Market systems, whilst remaining an effective and useful means of enabling choice and distribution of myriad goods and services, exist alongside and are embedded in other social and political institutions which also contribute to human welfare, and which themselves shape and modify the way markets actually work."
"What R.H. Tawney realised was that meaningful freedom depended on real ability. That for millions of people citizenship was empty and valueless if squalor and deprivation were the reality of a society only theoretically free. What was needed was positive liberty - the freedom
to achieve that is gained through education, health care, housing, and employment. An infrastructure of freedom that would require collective provision of basic needs through an enabling State. It is this richer conception of freedom for the individual in society that is the moral basis of democratic socialism."
"The undermining of local government (which is part of the deliberate down-grading of all alternative power systems to the central State) means that communities are being weakened by having no means to advance their own ambitions and to tackle their own problems in their own way."
I urge a renaissance of local government in the context of a more pluralistic and diverse society. It is why I believe that devolving
power from an over-centralised Westminster and Whitehall to Scotland, Wales and the regions of England is a necessary part of the refurbishment of our democracy. Democracy has to be a vital and constantly refreshing element on our socialism."
"There is no good reason why Britain should not have emulated the achievements of the Scandinavian countries which, profoundly influenced by their social democratic tradition, have set standards which in recent years our country has fallen well below."
"There is so much of good that can be done if we seize the opportunities which the modem world makes available.
Instead of carrying the miserable burden of mass unemployment, we could be investing In new technology and in new skills.
Instead of witnessing the crumbling of our education system and the fracturing of our health service, we could be building high-quality public services which provide security and opportunity for every family in the land.
Instead of allowing our society to become diminished by the violence and dishonesty of crime, we could be building strong communities which provide protection for every citizen.
Instead of savagely increasing unfair taxes which will further damage so many lives, we could be investing in people, investing in infrastructure, investing in manufacturing Industry.
There is so much we could do. There is so much that needs to be done."
Why John Smith's death was such a tragedy
As you can see from the quotes above, Smith was an intelligent and articulate man who cared deeply about the whole of society. Had he lived to lead the Labour Party to triumph at the 1997 general election he could have decisively rejected the hard-right economic agenda of the Tories and set the United Kingdom on a radically different course towards a more democratic, and more equal society, where the wealth of the nation was harnessed to provide opportunities for all to success, rather than being siphoned off to further enrich a tiny super-rich minority as it is now.
The great tragedy is that this man of such principle and integrity was succeeded by the self-serving opportunist Tony Blair, who did follow through on some of Smith's favoured policies (such as devolution, investment in education and the health service, and combating poverty) but who also made an agreement with the right-wing propagandist Rupert Murdoch that he would not reverse the hard-right privatisations and financial sector deregulations of the Tories in return for support from the Murdoch propaganda empire (The S*n, News of the World, Times, Sky TV).
There's absolutely no way that John Smith would have supported the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq, and there's no way that he would have supported a Labour government adopting the right-wing economic madness of PFI alchemy schemes (bribing private companies to build public infrastructure, then paying them 5x, 10x, 20x the construction cost in order to rent it for the next couple of decades).
Had John Smith lived to win the general election in 1997, he would have begun properly reversing the worst aspects of Thatcherism. Instead of inheriting Thatcher's throne and occupying it for his own benefit like Blair did, Smith would have restructured society in order to re-empower individuals and local communities.
Putting the catastrophe of the Iraq war aside, it's undeniable that Tony Blair achieved some significant things - like saving the NHS from the ideological ruin the Tories had been steering it towards, significantly reducing child poverty, introducing the minimum wage, the Irish peace process, and devolution for Scotland and Wales.
The problem was that he didn't steer the country away from the radical hard-right economic dogma of the Conservatives and prove that there was a better way.
In fact he sat idly by as the country drifted towards the social and economic ruination of the bankers' crisis that blew up in Gordon Brown's face and handed the Tory rabble an unexpected route back into power to continue the fanatical hard-right economic agenda that should have been killed stone dead in 1997.
Had Smith reversed the flow instead of simply going along with it like Tony Blair did, the Tories would have been forced to reappraise their hard-right fanaticism and develop a more socially responsible form of conservatism (like the 19th Century one-nation Conservatives, or the Christian Democratic Union in Germany).
The reason the UK is now facing the horror of an economically and socially ruinous hard Brexit led by the most savagely right-wing authoritarian Prime Minister in living memory is that John Smith never had the opportunity to decisively prove integrity and democratic socialism to be superior to opportunism and hard-right economic dogma.
Sadly John Smith died at the age of 55 and then his successor Tory Blair went on to completely destroy the idea of integrity in high office with his self-serving behaviour and the outrageous deceptions he used to con the nation into going along with his plan to invade and occupy Iraq.
Instead of reversing the hard-right neoclassical dogma, Blair simply softened the edges of it and then kept the seat of power warm for the Tories.
That's why Margaret Thatcher once quipped that Tony Blair and the New Labour project were her greatest achievement in politics, because unlike an awful lot of wishful thinkers on the left, she saw Tony Blair as the ideologically indifferent self-serving placeholder he was.
She would never have seen John Smith that way.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
