Brexit and Boris Johnson Are the Legacies of Tony Blair – Jacobin magazine

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It taught us a lot. One point I was getting at with that quotation was that there was a time when nearly every important business in the country had its representatives in the House of Commons. I dont mean trade unionists I mean the owners. The Conservative Party was the party of British industry. My favorite example is the owner of Meccano, a very important Liverpool toy company, who was the MP for Everton in Liverpool for many years. But one could repeat that example again and again. It applies to many prime ministers, especially Stanley Baldwin.

However, in the recent past, things have been very different. The UK has been a place where global capitalism does its business. Theres relatively little we could straightforwardly call British capitalism. The FTSE 100 share index tells you very little about the health of the British economy or British firms, for example.

What does this mean in practice? It means that there arent the sort of connections between business and the Conservative Party that there would have been when they were all the same people. There are, perhaps, connections between particular kinds of business and the Conservative Party particular hedge funds, for example, or Russian oligarchs. Between them, theyre pushing the Conservatives to be a party thats pressing for an even greater degree of tax-haven status for the British economy, making it even more of a rentier, liberalized economy than it already is.

That essentially has been the project of the hard, ultra-Thatcherite right of the Conservative Party. Its a policy of liberalization and globalization. It has ironic consequences for free trade and all the rest of it, but at its heart is a belief in a very radical version of the free market. The Thatcherite program, combined with a revivalist view of the British economy, has been extraordinarily powerful in recent British politics.

However, theres another side to this, which I think is very important, and not sufficiently appreciated. Brexit was never thought through by these people. They never had a plan for it. They never really knew what Brexit was going to be or what it would take to make it happen. There was no preparing of the people, no preparing of business, and no preparing of the infrastructure.

There were systematic self-delusions and lies about the impact of Brexit, as we see in what I fear will be a tragic unfolding of the Brexit fiasco in Northern Ireland an absolutely scandalous set of developments, with the unthinking, brutal unionists of the Conservative Party pushing this, together with the Democratic Unionist Party. We have an extraordinary politics, in which a particular fraction of capital, allied with hard-right elements of the Conservative Party, are pursuing a policy that they dont really understand and cant really come to terms with.

That is something radically new in British history. Weve had great programs of political-economic change, from mobilization in World War II to going into the European Economic Community. But those were planned and thought through there werent any great surprises. This one hasnt been. It hasnt even really been improvised. It has just been a very peculiar mess.

The other aspect is that the politics of the Brexiteers themselves arent the politics of Brexit voters. The Brexit vote is an old vote, just like the Conservative vote. One has to credit the Conservatives with realizing that their vote was an old one and doing everything they could to sustain that vote for example, by keeping NHS spending and pension spending up, systematically targeting welfare at the elderly and taking it away from the young.

But many of those old people were in effect Lexiter protest voters people who wanted national industry back and perhaps national agriculture as well. They were expressing an entirely legitimate disapproval of where the economy had been going for the last forty years. But instead of voting out the powers that be in London, they were convinced that they had to vote out the powers that be in Brussels. I think that they made, from their point of view, an appalling mistake, and thats going to add to what I think will be a most incendiary time in British politics.

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Brexit and Boris Johnson Are the Legacies of Tony Blair - Jacobin magazine