permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

[Attn: Mr. McDuck, John d'Hondt, Steve Hart]

Tony Blair: Brexit’s Stunning Coup
By TONY BLAIR
JUNE 24, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/tony-blair-brexits-stunning-coup.html?_r=0

London — THE decision of British voters in Thursday’s referendum to leave
the European Union will have vast consequences for Britain, for Europe and
for the world. For a day, the British people were the government, and by 52
percent to 48 percent, they took the decision to go.

I was a British prime minister who believed completely that Britain’s
future lay in Europe. I was the prime minister responsible for legislating
substantial self-rule in Scotland so that it would remain part of the
United Kingdom. I negotiated the Good Friday Agreement so that Northern
Ireland could be at peace within Britain. Because the result of the
referendum has put so much of this at risk, Friday became a day of great
personal, as well as political, sadness.

The immediate impact of the Brexit vote is economic. The fallout has been
as swift as it was predictable. At one point on Friday, the pound hit a
30-year low against the dollar, and a leading British stock index had
dropped more than 8 percent. The nation’s credit rating is under threat.

The lasting effect, however, may be political, and with global
implications. If the economic shocks continue, then the British experiment
will serve as a warning. But if they abate, then populist movements in
other countries will gain momentum.

How did this happen? The right in British politics found an issue that’s
causing palpitations in the body politic the world over: immigration. Part
of the Conservative Party, allied with the far-right U.K. Independence
Party, took this issue and focused its campaign to leave Europe on it. This
strategy could not have succeeded, though, without finding common cause
with a significant segment of Labour voters.

These Labour supporters did not get a clear message from their own party,
whose leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was lukewarm about remaining in the union.
They were drawn by the Leavers’ promise that Brexit would bring an end to
the country’s perceived immigration problems. And, worried about their
flatlining incomes and cuts in public spending, these Labour voters saw
this vote as an opportunity to register an anti-government protest.

The strains within Britain that led to this referendum result are
universal, at least in the West. Insurgent movements of left and right,
posing as standard-bearers of a popular revolt against the political
establishment, can spread and grow at scale and speed. Today’s polarized
and fragmented news coverage only encourages such insurgencies — an effect
magnified many times by the social media revolution.

It was already clear before the Brexit vote that modern populist movements
could take control of political parties. What wasn’t clear was whether they
could take over a country like Britain. Now we know they can.

Those in the political center were demonized as out-of-touch elites, as
though the people leading the insurgency were ordinary folks — which, in
the case of the Brexit campaign, is a laughable proposition. The campaign
made the word “expert” virtually a term of abuse, and when experts warned
of the economic harm that would follow Brexit, they were castigated as
“scaremongers.” Immigrants were described as a bunch of scroungers coming
to grab Britons’ jobs and benefits when, in reality, the recent migrants
from Eastern Europe contribute far more in taxes than they take in welfare
payments. And besides, immigration to Britain from outside the European
Union will not be affected by the referendum decision.
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The political center has lost its power to persuade and its essential means
of connection to the people it seeks to represent. Instead, we are seeing a
convergence of the far left and far right. The right attacks immigrants
while the left rails at bankers, but the spirit of insurgency, the venting
of anger at those in power and the addiction to simple, demagogic answers
to complex problems are the same for both extremes. Underlying it all is a
shared hostility to globalization.

Britain and Europe now face a protracted period of economic and political
uncertainty, as the British government tries to negotiate a future outside
the single market where half of Britain’s goods and services are traded.
These new arrangements — to be clear about the scale of the challenge —
must be negotiated with all the other 27 countries, their individual
parliaments and the European Parliament. Some governments may be
cooperative; others won’t want to make leaving easy for Britain, in order
to discourage similar movements.

Britain is a strong country, with a resilient people and energy and
creativity in abundance. I don’t doubt Britons’ capacity to come through,
whatever the cost. But the stress on the United Kingdom is already apparent.

Voters in Scotland chose by a large margin to remain in Europe, with the
result that there are renewed calls for another referendum on Scottish
independence. Northern Ireland has benefited from virtually open borders
with the Republic of Ireland. That freedom is at risk because the North’s
border with the South now becomes the European Union’s border, a potential
threat to the Northern Ireland peace process.

If the people — usually a repository of common sense and practicality — do
something that appears neither sensible nor practical, then it forces a
period of long and hard reflection. My own politics is waking to this new
political landscape. The same dangerous impulses are visible, too, in
American politics, but the challenges of globalization cannot be met by
isolationism or shutting borders.

The center must regain its political traction, rediscover its capacity to
analyze the problems we all face and find solutions that rise above the
populist anger. If we do not succeed in beating back the far left and far
right before they take the nations of Europe on this reckless experiment,
it will end the way such rash action always does in history: at best, in
disillusion; at worst, in rancorous division. The center must hold.

Tony Blair was the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
from 1997 to 2007.


-- 
Lawrence F. London
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
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