Why I'll vote for British exit (but don't care very much)

...not, you will note, Brexit. The sullying of our political discourse with this silly coinage manages to annoy me more than pretty much anything else around the sorry excuse for politics that is the current EU debate.

Anyway.

The force for non-chauvinistic internationalism that is the red-white-and-blue clad Britain Stronger In Europe Campaign are putting about the claim that Britain leaving the EU would cause problems for the NHS. Here they are doing precisely that.

They have two reasons for saying this. The first can be dismissed swiftly:

A series of experts have predicted our economy would fall into ‘recession’ if we left the EU, meaning cuts to public services like the NHS.

Now, far be it from me to disagree with un-named 'experts' about the possibility of a post-exit recession (after all, there is going to be a recession sooner or later, quite apart from Britain's relationship to the EU). But it simply does not follow that this would mean cuts to the NHS. That would be a political decision. This is basically what those of us who have opposed cuts made in the wake of the 2008-9 crisis have being saying about those.

Their other claim is straightforwardly true:

And Vote Leave, the campaign for Britain to leave Europe, is run by people with a history of campaigning against the NHS. 

They have campaigned for:

• cuts to NHS spending and ending the NHS ring-fence

• cuts to NHS staff pay

• an increase in prescription charges

• allowing NHS trusts to fail

• increased NHS privatisation

Vote Leave is, there is no doubt about the matter, run by a shower of bastards. The only problem with this otherwise watertight strategy for getting the socially conscious to vote In is that exactly the same can be said for Britain Stronger In Europe. Although the list of members of their board is not displayed on BSE's website, it includes such luminaries as Peter Mandelson, Danny Alexander, and Damian Green. These are people who in various ways have contributed towards the privatisation and cutting of the NHS. The token non-bastard, Caroline Lucas, is not in a position to have much influence. In this respect she epitomises the position of the left more generally in the referendum debate.

As this might suggest, the referendum campaign is being conducted from the right by both sides. As far as I'm aware, nobody is actually running on a 'Our Position on the EU Makes It Easier to Clobber the Health Service' ticket. But both sides are certainly making the case that they are better placed to be tough on immigration and are advocating what is 'best for business'. With the Labour leadership half-heartedly falling behind a Labour In campaign headed up by Alan Johnson, again prioritising business as well as 'security', the prospects of any left voice being heard effectively during the next few months are precisely nil. Not, of course, that the perpetually over-optimistic British left will believe this in any numbers.

Now, I don't care terribly about all of this. Or rather, I don't care very much whether Britain stays in the EU. I care deeply that this debate is pitching politics to the right, and distracting attention from far more important issues. In actual fact I think that the impact of EU exit would be pretty minimal. The debate is basically a family row on the part of British capital, being conducted through the medium of politics. Those sections of capital whose markets are predominantly within the EU want to remain, others take a different view. And, as we saw with the Scottish referendum, the moment there is the tiniest threat that corporate profits might be under threat, out comes the hyperbole, out comes Project Fear. On the other hand, I don't think exit would pave the way for a British road to socialism, as the Stalinism re-enactment societies heading up the 'left' pro-exit case seem to think. Capitalism is a global system, and needs ultimately to be fought at a global level.

A footnote at this point. The most persuasive 'left' argument on the In side might seem to be based on the impact of the Social Chapter and similar instruments. So, Labour In For Britain, have this to say:

British workers benefit from EU agreements on workers’ rights, including the right to holiday pay, paid maternity and paternity leave, anti-discrimination laws, equal pay and protection for agency workers.

There is a seductive, but damaging, picture of the history of workers' rights at play here. These were not handed down from on high through the generosity of commissioners. They were fought for by workers themselves, organised into unions, in Europe and elsewhere. "No saviours from on high deliver".The struggles of unionised workers established norms for treatment in the workplace and in statute, which could not be transgressed without industrial strife. When standardised minimal conditions across the then EEC began to be discussed, these being needed for the smooth functioning of a single market, those norms had to be incorporated. They were, none the less, won from the bottom up, not the top down. In the presence of strong unions in Europe, the guarantees provided by the EU are irrelevant. In the absence of strong unions, those guarantees will be eroded in coming years.

Now, last year I blogged arguing for an abstention in this year's vote. Read it here. I agree with my reasoning in that post, but I now find myself disagreeing with my conclusion. I will, with little enthusiasm, and more that a little ennui, vote Leave. My reasons are two. First, far too much hope has been invested in the EU: from soft-leftists worshipping before the Social Chapter, to irritating liberals thinking they are a bulwark of cosmopolitan intelligence against their brutish inferiors (who all, you understand, hate foreigners). Illusions need to be laid bare, so that a better politics can thrive. Secondly, exit would precipitate a crisis in the Tory party, and that is no bad thing.

At the end of the day, however, all of this matters a lot less than people seem to think. So please don't spend hours agonising over how to cast your vote. If you want to do something useful, spend that time thinking about how you can support the junior doctors when they strike next month, and about how you're going to get to the Peoples' Assembly demonstration against austerity on 16th April.

Remembering Easter

"We are here", writes Terry Eagleton in his recent Hope Without Optimism, "to make trouble on behalf of those who can no longer make trouble themselves, namely the dead". Receiving his political formation through expatriate Irish republicanism, and now resident in the country, Eagleton's Irishness goes some way towards explaining the importance of narrative, history, and our relationship to each in his political thought. For the history of Ireland's still incomplete liberation from imperialism, and by extension of Britain's relationship to its last colony, is one in which the past looms large. Debates about the politics of the southern state, about partition, and about identities in the north are framed historically. The dead are silent participants, in their name claims are made, past injustices are redressed, and present-day senses of political self are established and reinforced. If you want confirmation of Benjamin's claim that people are driven to revolt by the image of enslaved ancestors, not liberated grandchildren, you need merely to glance across the Irish sea.

As with Benjamin's original quotation, Ireland's revolts are understood in terms of sacrifice (he also speaks, in terms which sit uncomfortably with his acquired status as the acceptable face of Marxism for English Literature syllabuses, of the 'hatred' of the labouring classes). The Easter Rising, which took place on Easter Monday a hundred years ago features heavily in the roll of those who laid down their lives for Ireland. Not by any means enjoying universal support at the time, the bloody manner in which the rising was put down, and its leaders executed, won support for the republican cause, and ultimately therefore played an important role in the movement for independence. It would be difficult to come up with a better example of a seemingly futile fight, born out of desperation, anger, and conviction having effects beyond reasonable expectation: it was hope in action, history spreading out from it, like ripples from a solitary stone hitting the water. There can be little surprise that this action from the underside of history, an episode that truly warrants the overused word 'heroic', has had its memory disputed through the subsequent years of civil war and partition, nor that its fallen are honoured to this day as martyrs. They certainly deserve more than the mechanised patriotic piety of politicians who have presided over an austerity regime as harsh in its consequences as any in Europe since 2008. What they deserve is the future.

Honouring those who died in rebellion against their rulers is always a risky business for those who hold power at the present moment. Reminding the presently powerless that their forebears responded to their situation by erecting barricades has the potential to backfire. History, though, cannot be altogether avoided, and all states are built on the bones of past ruling classes. For those states whose native bloodletting lies in the recent past, or whose existence remains contested, the question of original violence is a particularly treacherous one to negotiate. The past is too live to be consigned to a museum or smothered in nostalgia. It retains a power, at once a potential means to win the assent of the governed to state power, and also a convenant that power can be accused of betraying. If Fine Gale and Fianna Fáil politicians joined a military whose continuity with the rebel forces in 1916 is far from obvious in honouring the Rising's leaders yesterday, they would have done well to glance nervously over their shoulder at the representatives of the electorally ascendant Sinn Féin. The professional ideologists known as broadsheet journalists are well aware of this subversive power of memory, which is one reason they have been at the forefront of 1916 revision in recent months. A more recent convert to the cause is Bob Geldof, who without any apparent intended theological irony chose Easter to dismiss the idea that there are some causes worth dying for.

If the memory of the past is unstable, and so a site of present struggle, this is in part because the past itself was shot through with division and contradiction. The migraine-inducing wailing of Dolores O'Riordan, 'it's the same as its been since 1916/ in your head (in your head) they're still fighting' has a truth to it unintended by the author: they are still fighting. The irreconcilable differences, present in kernel within the Irish republicanism of the early 20th century, the fissures of class, politics, visions for Ireland and for the world, were fought out through the civil war, relived through the tragedy of partition, and continue to echo at the present time, the theme being picked up in many cases by people who do not recognise its origin. The tradition of past generations certainly does weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Much as in the case of actual nightmares, however, the solution has to be to redeem the trauma that gave rise to it. In the case of Ireland this would involve identifying the genuinely emancipatory strands in republicanism and claiming them, whilst identifying the forces capable of realising them in an Ireland that is divided and capitalist.

James Connolly has deservedly been quoted with a regularity bordering on the monotonous:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

These are words that these days are as likely to be found on t-shirts or beer mats as in political discussion, but if any lines have been vindicated by subsequent history they are these. Connolly's socialist republicanism was one for which freedom from imperialism was inseparable from the liberation of working people from exploitation, and was by its very nature internationalist. Strikingly, it was a politics to which the emancipation of women was integral:

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave. In Ireland that female worker has hitherto exhibited, in her martyrdom, an almost damnable patience. She has toiled on the farms from her earliest childhood, attaining usually to the age of ripe womanhood without ever being vouchsafed the right to claim as her own a single penny of the money earned by her labour, and knowing that all her toil and privation would not earn her that right to the farm which would go without question to the most worthless member of the family, if that member chanced to be the eldest son.

To put matters mildly, Connolly's clear-sighted awareness of the oppression of women, unusual for a male leftist of the period, was not an obvious feature of subsequent Irish politics. More generally, his socialist republicanism met with opposition at the time from both the British state and within the republican movement. Its clearest immediate heirs fought in the anti-Treaty forces in the civil war; many of them went on to fight for the anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War. It has precious little in common with the precious romanticism for which the legacy of the rising has been appropriated.

A politics of the oppressed acting in their own interests, this is the best honour we can do the dead of 1916, because to the extent that we undermine those who oppress and stunt humanity, wherever in the world we do it, we retrospectively delegitimise those who did so in the past. In that sense, at least, the Easter Rising can still be won.

Confessions of a confused socialist

It's a strange time to be active as a socialist in Britain. Hence, in part, the absence of much recent activity on this blog. I've written previously about my disquiet with the state of the left since Corbyn's welcome victory last autumn, and the uneasy feeling remains.

Back in December I think I saw the fundamental issue as being how we relate a bottom-up socialism that doesn't fetish parliament to the reality of a left-wing candidate having won the leadership of the Party. That is still at least of much of an issue as it was then. Fundamental questions have been asked: do we believe that capitalism is incompatible with human flourishing? If so, and if a socialist alternative is needed, how does a left-reformist Labour Party fit into with a strategy for moving in the direction of that alternative? Quite apart from this: what are we doing, individually, as a Labour left (organised in groups like Momentum and the LRC), and as the Labour Party to support the concrete grassroots opposition to Tory attacks? The junior doctors' strike is a prime example of something around which a good deal more organising should be happening

At the same time, of course, we can't ignore the reality of the Corbyn leadership, content in telling ourselves that the Labour Party or parliament don't really matter. If I believed that, I wouldn't be a Labour member; I won't bore you all on this Easter evening by rehearsing the reasons this is the case. The problem is precisely that these things matter, and that the left has, in an outcome slightly more antecedently improbable than Dapper Laughs turning out to be an expert in Jane Austen, won the leadership of the Labour Party. Its hold on this leadership is, however, at least as precarious as Laughs' actual grasp of Sense and Sensibility; if it loses that leadership, through pre-emptive backbench revolt or electoral failure, that will count against the intra-Labour left for years to come. "Your strategy has been tried and failed", the refrain will go, "now shut up, and listen to Dan Jarvis". And it may seem as though our critics would have a point.

The knives are being sharpened for Corbyn. Here's Jamie Reed's subtle Twitter account, for instance:

If the improbably named Rebel Alliance are not to have their way, the Party membership has to exert counter-pressure, making it clear to the PLP that we will not accept a coup. This will involve voicing our support to more sympathetic MPs, arguing the case with those who can be persuaded, and using mechanisms of accountability against those whose contempt for the membership is such that they want to reject last year's decisive leadership result. In this last respect, it is a serious tactical mistake for the leadership and elements of its organisational support to have downplayed talk of mandatory reselection. This is a basic democratic demand, whose time has come. Similarly, the present situation, where the left has the leadership and the membership without controlling the Party, is unsustainable. It's imperative that we organise to contest elections at CLP and other levels and, crucially, that we get Corbyn-supporting conference delegates sent this year: this conference will be a chance to consolidate his position, back left-wing policy, and set in motion democratic reform of the Party.

And the urgency of this task doesn't undo my initial point about not losing sight of the extra-parliamentary. There's a lot to be done.