In perilous times

It’s short.  It’s sharp.  Fits a hashtag.  A headline.  It’s genius. And the remainers don’t have an equivalent to a single word that sums up the biggest decision we’ve undertaken – Brexit.

In an age of renegade politics up against the establishment –whoever they may be – those who wanted to stay in the European Union who accepted the status quo for cultural as well as political and economic reasons, lost.  They weren’t with the zeitgeist.

Now they are branded.  Remoaners. Remainiacs.   How come Brexiters have escaped the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?

Brexit, isn’t even original coming as it does from the Greek ‘Grexit’ coined by an economist in Citigroup.  Greece’s economic crisis and the riots on the streets of Athens as a response to the economic battering by the Troika, the IMF European Central Bank and the EU, demanding ever greater austerity, was played out on our TV screens for weeks on end.

In an act of political theatre and even with an overwhelming No vote to a further euro bail out Greece’s politicians ignored the vote. Grexit it would seem simply didn’t mean Grexit.

Despite the much smaller margin here – 52 per cent to 48 per cent – the Brexiteers rebuff any opposition in their relentless route march to Article 50 and the formality of setting the clock running to trigger negotiations.

We’re exiting and that’s that.

Theresa May has said there won’t be a cliff edge.  Once Article 50 begins the Prime Minister and her troika (David Davies, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson) are unlikely to have a choice.   If there isn’t a deal within two years the UK will go over the cliff edge with only the rules of the World Trade Organisation for support.

But May’s two years it seems doesn’t mean two years.  The EU’s negotiator Michael Barnier, dealt the Prime Minister a blow claiming there would ‘only be eighteen months for proper negotiations’.

Backed by a virulently hostile press division over Europe within the Conservative Party have been apparent for decades and it still is divided.  The difference now though is that those Tory MPs who have made euro scepticism their life work are in the ascendancy.  The battle won it only leaves whether or not the exit is hard or soft, quick or slow.

Plan

As good democrats Labour accepts the referendum result.   Using an opposition day the Labour front bench forced a debate and a vote in Parliament against May’s mantra of no running commentary.  There will now be a plan, it may be a meagre plan, but as the argument goes, it is at least a plan that has to return to Parliament to be scrutinised.

We have to ask however does the cost of the government forced U-turn mean the forty eight per cent have been abandoned?    In a country that is more polarised than ever before – are we all Brexiteers now?

We’re in perilous times.  In those 18 months will the unions get a look in?  Unite, Britain’s biggest manufacturing union has an international reach without parallel.  It has a strategic relationship with unions in Germany, Belgium, France, Southern Europe and Scandinavia.

And up against hard Brexiters who will readily sell workers’ rights ‘down the swannee’ it will defend its members’ jobs, pay, conditions and employment rights.

In amongst this toxicity and Brexit uncertainty the Chancellor, Phillip Hammond stood at the despatch box to deliver his Autumn Statement.   It was a statement that made no mention of essential public services, revised down economic growth forecasts, revised down wage forecasts and revised up borrowing and unemployment forecasts.

Economic failure preceded the EU vote.   There has been a failure to invest. Hammond’s predecessor George Osborne’s March of the Makers quickly ran into the buffers.

Failure is this Conservative government’s middle name as it was with the previous Conservative led Coalition.    Job creation has been in the low pay sector with zilch certainty from one week to the next.

Paul Johnson head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the day after the statement: “real wages will, remarkably, still be below their 2008 levels in 2021”.

And the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, in a lecture to Liverpool John Moores University argued that globalisation victims must now get a share of the gains.  He warned that the UK had entered the ‘first lost decade since the 1860s’.  Policymakers across advanced economies, he told his audience, had to tackle the causes of a growing sense of ‘isolation and detachment’ among those feel left behind by globalisation.

Welcome to our world.   The one per cent in their jet stream having loyalty to no one couldn’t care less either way. But for other bits of the establishment it has taken the No vote to the EU and the election of Trump, neither of which they saw coming, to trigger a nervous impulse.

This comment piece first appeared in Tribune, December 15, 2016. Joy Johnson writes in a personal capacity