This Election is Not About Brexit, It's About Common Human Decency
November 5, 2019
John Wight says grim British living standards ensure that the general
election next month is the most important in a generation.
By John Wight
in Edinburgh, Scotland
Medium
One million people, many of them in work, forced to rely on foodbanks; 1 in
4 children living in poverty; homelessness, including rough sleeping, at a
30-year high; real wages down; the worst housing crisis of any advanced
industrialized economy; the NHS in crisis; the most ramshackle, anarchic and
expensive rail system in Europe; the highest prison population in western
Europe; crime up; suicides up - all this as as the combined wealth of the
richest 1000 people in Britain increased by 183 percent over the same decade
in which 120,000 people have died as a direct result of austerity.
This grim toll ensures that the general election on Dec. 12 is the most
important and seminal in a generation.
Brexit of course will figure front and center for many people when casting
their vote. The issue has polarized British society over these past three
years, corroding social cohesion as the country grapples with what is
inarguably the most severe political and constitutional crisis it has faced
in generations. What is crucial to grasp is the fact that Brexit is not in a
Tony Benn exit from the EU. Instead it is a disaster capitalist project of
the right, dripping in nativism, English nationalism and xenophobia,
exposing the dire consequences of a country that has yet to honestly or
properly address its colonial and imperial past.
Labour's Fortunes
Corbyn: Under siege. (David Holt via Flickr)
Jeremy Corbyn. (David Holt via Flickr)
But, no matter, Labour and Jeremy Corbyn's fortunes in this election will be
bound up not with Brexit or even Corbyn's personal qualities as a putative
prime minister. Instead, as in 2017, Labour's fortunes will be bound up with
their manifesto for transformational change.
If this manifesto is anything like the one Labour fought the election on two
years, it will be one that plants its colours squarely on the side of
working people, the low waged and the vulnerable, pledging to reverse
decades in which successive governments have worshipped at the altar of the
free market, allowing blind economic forces to dictate every aspect of
government policy, embracing thereby the economy as a tyrant over the lives
of ordinary working people rather than as a servant of their needs.
In this regard austerity, rolled out as the answer to the global financial
crash of 2007-08, had absolutely nothing to do with economics and everything
to do with ideology - specifically the unleashing of a class war with the
objective of transferring wealth from poor and working people to the rich
and affluent, using the crash as a pretext.
The Price We Pay for Civilization
The Tory political and media establishment accuses Corbyn of wishing to drag
the country back to the 1970s, a supposed decade of doom and gloom in
Britain. This is nonsense. I grew up in the 1970s and for working people it
was a veritable paradise compared to today. Free dental care, eye care,
school meals for all children, decent wages and conditions, trade union
rights, a sense of community that is sorely lacking now. And thinking about
it, to label these things as "free" is a misnomer. They weren't free. They
were paid for out of general taxation - and taxation, as every smart person
knows, is the price we pay for civilisation.
Yes, there was a rising tide of industrial action by the unions, but in
contradistinction to the right's historical narrative of the period, this
labour unrest came about in response to the spike in inflation that had
arrived on the back of the liberalization of the global financial system,
beginning in the early 1970s and exacerbated by the Nixon administration's
decision to abandon the gold standard in 1971. This measure was taken in
response to the economic drain on the U.S. economy and the value of the
dollar internationally as a result of the war in Vietnam. The result for
British workers was downward pressure on wages.
As revealed by Cambridge academics Ken Coutts and Graham Gudgin in a report
on this causation: "The freeing up of finance led to a huge, and eventually
unsustainable, expansion of household borrowing. This temporarily
accelerated the growth of consumer spending and hence GDP and of house
prices, but in 2008 contributed to a banking crisis and the longest
recession for over a century."
Later in the same report, on the issue of industrial relations, the authors
have this to say:
"Common sense indicates that less [industrial] disruption should be a good
thing in itself but not necessarily if the result has been a weakening of
wage bargaining power that has allowed a resurgence of extreme income
inequality. We note that the UK economy grew consistently and well through
the 1950s and 1960s even with poor industrial relations, as it did in the
USA with extra-ordinarily high strike levels by British standards."
Corbyn, with a manifesto that will do less to drag Britain back to the 1970s
and more to move it out of the 1870s, has reignited the kind of class and
political consciousness we haven't seen in decades, challenging three
decades of permanent government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
And it is for this reason that he's been so fiercely attacked and demonized
by those whose power and privileges are predicated on mass political
somnolence.
Meanwhile, when it comes to foreign policy, just consider the difference
between a government that slavishly attaches itself to the coattails of
President Donald Trump in Washington and a leader of the opposition who, if
elected prime minister, will not. And this is without taking into account
the prospect of bringing a long awaited curtain down on the disgraceful
cozying up to a bloodsoaked Saudi kleptocracy, blind support for the
apartheid State of Israel, and the propensity for military instead of
diplomatic intervention as a means by which to sustain influence on the
world stage.
In 2010 the Tories came to power and unleashed war on society, turning the
lives of millions of British people and their families upside down in
service to a callously and consciously cruel belief that poverty marked out
its victims as perpetrators of their own condition. Thus the demonisation
that accompanied austerity shaped public apathy if not consensus when it
came to its implementation as being necessary in order to trim the fact of a
bloated public sector and purify the poor and disadvantaged with pain.
We may not be materially affected by austerity, by food banks, benefit
sanctions, zero hours contracts, and by attacks on the disabled. However our
humanity obliges us to be offended by it. You don't have to be a migrant to
resent their depiction as the enemy within. And you do not need to be among
the ranks of growing number of rough sleepers on our streets to understand
that no one should be allowed to fall that far. The savage consequences of
austerity impacts all of us; the normalization of so much injustice and
cruelty chips away at our own humanity, and that more than anything is
unforgivable.
It is why, if nothing else, the success of the Tories in turning us into
passive spectators of the mass experiment in human despair they have
inflicted on the most vulnerable in society should be foremost in our minds
when we cast our vote on Dec. 12.
John Wight is an independent journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
This article was first published on Medium.
