The Automatic Earth

DPC White Star liner S.S. Olympic, sister ship of Titanic, NY 1911

The reason the Brexit debate has gotten so out of hand is nobody understands what it’s about.

The Brexit campaigns have started anew in the UK, and from what I’ve seen here from left field barely a thing has changed since the murder of MP Jo Cox. Neither side has any qualms about using her death to make their respective points. The main, and perhaps only real, point is that nobody understands what the vote is about. Jo Cox, bless her soul, didn’t either.

This lack of understanding is also, at the same time, the reason why the debate has gotten so out of hand. Nobody seems to understand it’s not about Cameron or Nigel Farage, or Michael Gove vs Boris Johnson, it’s about voting for or against the EU, for or against Juncker and Tusk and five other unelected presidents having a say in one’s life.

And that’s not all either. It’s about voting to leave, or remain in, a Union that is already dead and preserved only in a zombie state. Brexit is just one vote and many more will inevitably follow. Brexit is not the first, Grexit had that ‘honor’ last year. Later this month, elections in Italy and Spain have the potential to turn into preliminary Italix and Spexit votes. And then there will be more.

The reason why these things are taking place, and will be, going forward, is that the economies of all these countries are fast deteriorating. The sole reason why people have accepted the rule of Brussels coming from far away over their daily lives, is the promise that it would make those lives better and more comfortable.

That promise has been shattered. The EU has made things worse for most Europeans, not improved them. And when seen in that light, why should people agree to continue to be told what to do by those who’ve made them poorer? There’s no democratic model in which that remotely makes sense. There are only undemocratic models left.

Britain’s Brexit referendum has run head first into global developments, and there is no sign that any voice in the discussion recognizes this. They all think it’s about something else. And of course Cameron’s policies have devastated the country, and of course the even more right wing Leave campaigners would make that worse. But that’s not what this is about.

 

What Cameron missed when he called the referendum is not that some of his friends could turn on him and go Leave, what he missed is that so many Brits from both the left and the right would turn on him. He never expected that to happen. He always figured his manipulated rosy pink economic numbers would outweigh people’s actual daily lives.

This is a global phenomenon, it has little to do with Cameron himself, other than his neoliberal budget cuts are often even more extreme than those of many of his pan-European and indeed American and global peers. It has a lot more to do with the neoliberalism embedded in Brussels, which has installed technocratic governments in many countries, especially in southern Europe, all with disastrous consequences for the populations.

It’s an exact mirror image of what is happening in the US. The jobs numbers the government and media feed Americans look good once filtered through a hundred layers of manipulation, but people look at what job they themselves have, and what it pays them, and they look at their families, friends and neighbors, and then decide this just ain’t working out or adding up.

The Brexit vote is, in a nutshell, Britain’s last chance to hit the lifeboats and jump the Titanic before it hits the iceberg. This is not even because of the dictatorial character Brussels has taken on, which is starting to display cartoonish properties, it’s because the global economy has hit the debt iceberg well before the EU has.

Voting Remain in next week’s referendum comes down to “Let’s stay onboard so we can help rearrange the deckchairs. And while we’re at it, pick some nice tunes for the orchestra to play on the way down as we sink.”

 

If there’s one outstanding advantage to the Brexit debate, it must be that it has opened up British society to reveal all its festering boils, pimples, pustules, ulcers and neoplasms that had before remained veiled by either stiff upper lips or outright dumb-ass ignorance. Not that the ‘discussion’ has done anything to lift the dumb-assery, mind you; the intelligence level of the Brits has been exposed as yet another hidden sore.

Nothing typically British there either. Neither the people nor the politicians nor the media in the country show any sign of comprehending what is happening to them. Nobody is capable of taking a step back and seeing a bigger picture. Jo Cox’s death has done nothing to fix that issue. Indeed, if there’s one thing Britain has been, and still is, showing the world it’s that it’s incapable of solving its problems.

But that incompetence is not going to be alleviated by handing the reins to Cameron or Johnson, or Corbyn, or indeed Juncker and Tusk. The only remedy is a cold hard look at what’s really going on in Britain itself, a look at its place in a rapidly imploding global economic system, and a look at what being a part of the EU actually means.

To gauge that last bit, all one has to do is to look at Greece, at how the EU has forced the demise of the Greek economy, of its once magnificent health-care system, and of countless other segments of a society still mired today in inexorable decline. A look at the treatment of refugees holds a lesson or two as well.

The summarized lesson from all this is that Brussels will happily throw you under a bus if it feels that would further its ambitions. Of which the EU has many.

The treatment of Greece and the refugees has redefined the term ‘Union’, and everyone should take note.

 

In America, the Democratic and Republican parties have all but internally combusted and destroyed themselves. In Britain, Labo(u)r did that years ago through Tony Blair, and the Tories are doing it today by infighting over Brexit. None of these things are incidents or stand-alone events.

They are part of a much larger pattern, as evidenced by the popularity numbers of people like French president Hollande (8%?!). All but a few incumbent parties in the west are evaporating. And all for the same reason: the demise of the existing economic models and systems that they have based their policies and popularity on.

An economy in decline means the end of centralization and the end of existing political power structures. This is inevitable. Because both can exist only by the grace of ever growing economies. It’s what our economies are based on. It’s what our entire world view is based on. Sometime in the future historians will have a hard time understanding this, but for now it’s all we have, because it’s all we’re willing to consider: growth to infinity and beyond.

Which was, or seemed to be, kind of alright as long as there indeed was growth. But there no longer is any growth. And it will not return for a long time, arguably not in our lifetimes. Which makes it a problem that we haven’t prepared for the end of growth. Which is not terrible smart given that making a point for growth having stopped decades ago looks quite solid.

 

People in Britain try desperately to link Jo Cox’s murder to some sort of larger movement or entity, even if for all they know, for all they can know, the killer is just another warped individual who didn’t take his meds for a long enough period to make him go fully off kilter.

Yeah, he ordered some right wing magazines and books. But that doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy behind the murder. Nor does it make this fascist and/or right-wing terrorism. Those claims are made solely in an effort to connect the tragedy to the Brexit vote. And that effort all by itself is a huge blemish on Jo Cox’s life, her death and her legacy.

To truly honor her would be to make sure you understand, and help others understand, what she herself did not.