Rev Left Radio - Reflecting on the UK Election: Corbyn, Brexit, and Neoliberal Centrism

Episode Date: December 18, 2019

Jon Greenaway, co-host of the Horror Vanguard, joins Breht to discuss the recent UK election, the role of the British media, class conflict, the ostensible implications for American elections, Boris Johnson, the depraved and outdated Monarchy, and much more.  Find more of Jon's work here: https://thelitcritguy.com/ Follow Jon on twitter @TheLitCritGuy Check out Jon and Ash's podcast, Horror Vanguard here: https://www.patreon.com/horrorvanguard on twitter @HorrorVanguard Outro music: 'The Daily Mail' by Radiohead. ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. So today we have on John the Lickrigg guy, John Greenway, from the Hore Vanguard. He's been a guest multiple times on Rev. Left. And I reached out to him earlier this week because of the U.K. election. And I wanted to sort of tackle that, think about it, talk about the media, talk about the comparisons being made between the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.K. and just sort of offer a principled left-wing understanding, especially for audiences outside of the UK, who might not have as much understanding of the UK situation as people within it.

So that is what John is here to educate us on today. For those who still don't know who you are, John, would you give a quick introduction of who you are, your podcast, etc.? Yeah, of course. Hey, everybody. My name is John. I go by the liquid guy on Twitter and the internet. As Brad said, he's been kind enough to invite me on the show a few times.

We've talked about things like post-modernism. We've talked about things like capitalist realism. I am also the co-host of a little show called Horror Vanguard. This is where me, a friend and comrade called Ash, sit down and we talk about horror film explicitly from a left-wing perspective, interested in a radical cultural critique of capitalism. If you like spooky shit, you should definitely check out our show. I think you'd like it. But I'm really happy to be here. Absolutely. Well, as happy as you can be given the results of this past week's UK election, which was rough on many fronts.

So I guess the best way to start this, and this is going to be maybe a little shorter episode, but I just wanted to make sure we cover some main points here. So just basically just want to tell our audience what happened in the election, sort of what it means and just sort of contextualize the overall event for us. Yeah. So like as simply as possible, the mainstream left in UK politics took a big, fast. at L. Like, it was, the election happened just a couple of days ago. It was a disaster in terms of the results. It's left the Conservative Party who have been the ruling party of government for the past 10 years with an increased majority, one of the biggest majorities they've ever had. It means there is very little by way of legislative means that can be done outside of the Conservative Party to slow down any kind of radical right-wing agenda, which the Labor Party

was warning about all throughout the six-week-long election campaign. The result has seen a lot of working class, a lot of explicitly left-wing and socialist members of parliament lose their seats, which means they're not going to be representing their communities anymore. And it is, yeah, it's been a disaster. You know, Jeremy Corvin, who is the leader of the Labour Party, was for a very long time on the kind of left wing of the Labour Party. And we're seen as kind of a marginal figure, sort of a bit of a kind of kind of

Cooke, and he ended up as the leader of the Labour Party after a huge surge of interest in membership. Membership of the party rose to half a million people. He was incredibly popular with the membership. The overall parliamentary Labour Party hated him for a very long time. They were enormously opportunist about trying to take any way of getting rid of him that they could. It didn't work. A few years ago, there was a vote of no confidence. So he won the leadership with a massive mandate from the membership. They forced the leadership. contest, which he won again with an even bigger mandate from the membership. And now there are certain sections of the Labor Party which are seeing this is a real

opportunity to expel huge amounts of the kind of left wing, push them back to the margins and pursue a kind of much more explicitly centrist political policy. Can you talk a little bit about the maybe similarities and differences between the Labor Party and the Democratic Party here in the U.S. I know, obviously you guys have a parliamentary system with multiple parties. We have a two-party electoral system with just two shitty parties, a center-right party and a far-right party. So just to help a North American audience orient themselves to what labor is as a party, like what are the comparisons to the Democrats? So like what are the differences and similarities there? I mean, I think it's probably a pretty good starting point,

but the Labor Party has always been a much more kind of broad church party. So you had like trade unionists, you had socialists, you had kind of Democratic socialists and then social democrats. Corbyn's probably closest to like a social Democrat politician that you'd see in places like Scandinavia, Denmark, that kind of thing. Then you had very centrist, kind of center-right. They would describe themselves as being economically radical but socially conservative, which is a pretty noxious combination of politics. I hate that. Just sends chills through you if you know anything about political history. So it encompassed a huge kind of swath of kind of possible political positions from the left where Corbyn was situated through to kind of careerist who made their name with Tony Blair, the last Labour Prime Minister, who was very much more in the centrist, technocratic mould.

A lot of these people thought Corbyn would never have any kind of mass appeal and both them and their friends in the media went out of their way to make sure that that couldn't happen. obviously I don't want to I don't want to sound like there are no criticisms of the Corbyn project or of Corbinism more generally that absolutely are but the Labour Party is a kind of very diverse movement there is the kind of Labor members who are people who've signed up to support the party financially there's the parliamentary Labour Party which are the members of Parliament aligned to the Labour Party and there are constituency Labour parties which are kind of more locally based so it's a very kind of diverse movement Corbyn was from that from the left the social democratic tradition, in contrast to a lot of the most powerful figures in the party who came from this much more centrist, technocratic center-right point of view. And now those people are sharpening the knives, as it were, against the kind of left wing of the party. And that, I think, is really instructive point just to drive home, which is the, I mean, there's so many critiques to be made of both the Labor Party and the Democratic Party, of course, but one of the big critiques is this is what will always happen when you try to have a political party that, you know, that

is sort of class collaborationist that has working class base that is tied to the unions but also has a rich donor base, a professional class base, etc. The class interests within the party will never be aligned and the centrist and those more aligned with corporate ruling class power obviously have all the advantages when it comes not only to money and sort of ideology but also just their ability to push their narrative and to have that sort of just generalized support that, you know, working class people, we don't have the money or the platforms to even compete with that. And so, you know, anybody that really, and we can talk all day about the advantages and disadvantages of trying to co-opt one of these parties or infiltrated, et cetera, but from a purely

class perspective to understand that you cannot be in a party, in a group, in a political formation with millionaires and professional class liberals and elites that have, you know, six-figure incomes and also working class people as if we're all, we all agree on social issues, basically, so that's enough to keep us together and it's obviously not. But, you know, that's a pretty obvious point. I just want to ask one more question before we move on to the role of the media, which is you said that Corbin is a social Democrat, and certainly so is Bernie. The lines between what is social democracy and democratic socialism are blurry to the point where they can pretty much be used interchangeably regarding like the basic methodology of both approaches. But

would it be fair to say in your opinion that Jeremy Corbyn is probably significantly left of Bernie or at least noticeably to the left of Bernie? I think the main area where he is noticeably and importantly to the left of Bernie is on foreign policy. Corbyn's been hugely like it's been a kind of towering figure in the anti-war movement, has been like a constant advocate of anti-imperialist struggle, which got him into a huge amount of trouble in the election in 2017, he, you know, refused to shy away from the fact that actually talking to groups all around the world is much preferable to just dropping bombs on them, that using nuclear weapons would be a disaster and wouldn't do anything to keep anybody safer.

And this is, to many people on the left, this sounds incredibly obvious to the point of being banal, but in the kind of mainstream political discourse to explicitly say that nuclear weapons should never be used and that like negotiating with groups around the world is a much more preferable strategy to just killing as many people as possible makes you seem like you're some kind of like radical um yeah exactly so I think one of the areas in which he is he is kind of noticeably more left wing than Bernie even though I'm sure in terms of economic policy they would probably share a great deal is that I think Corvin's been much better in terms of talking about the necessity of anti-imperialism, even if those critiques are limited, you know,

it's much better than nothing, his stuff on foreign policy than a lot of Bernie stuff. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I mentioned this in the What of Bernie wins episode, but like, you know, Bernie talking about Venezuela and Maduro as a dictator, et cetera. So even to have just the anti-imperialism of a, you know, social Democrat like Corbyn would be a goddamn breath of fresh air here in the U.S. But yeah, I think that's an important distinction to make, and Corbin is certainly better on that front.

that really leads us well into this talk about the role of the media in this election. You mentioned Corbyn sort of getting hit hard on refusing to initiate a fucking nuclear Holocaust as if, you know, that was some sort of weakness of his. And what he should have said is, yeah, I'm ready to let the bombs fly any second. So it's sort of disgusting and cruel and barbaric and weird that that became the issue that it was. But the big issue, I think also, and confusing for people in the U.S. too, because I think a lot of people on the left bought into this is the anti-Semitism claims against Jeremy Corbyn as a

person. So can you just talk about the anti-Semitic accusations and then let that roll into a broader discussion between you and I of the role of the UK media overall and the role that it played specifically in this election? Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to kind of dismiss the claims because the Labor Party has had a problem with this in the past. But that I think it should be made very clear that, like, there is a clear distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. That criticism of the state of Israel is not criticism of all Jewish people. And I think it's actually dangerous to equate the state of Israel with all Jewish people everywhere. So there have been accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, but this became an explicit

issue in the media magnified and repeated over and over again because of Corbyn's support and solidarity with Palestinian causes, I think, because he has refused to kind of tow the correct line on that issue. And, yeah, whilst there probably have been anti-Semites who've been drawn to the Labour Party, there have been internal party struggles to expel those people, you know, these cranks that you don't want anything to do with, if you're trying to build a working class movement, you don't want anything to do with those people. But this was an issue. This was an issue that was very useful to the media. And it became one of the most repeated stories about Corbyn was that he was personally

anti-Semitic, which frankly seems just ludicrous. I think he was far too slow to recognize what a danger this accusation was and the way that it was useful to construct a kind of ruling class, media class

perception of him that could just be repeated over and over and over and over again. Again, I don't want to minimize those claims, but I think it's really telling that it became something that was attached to him personally. and I do think it was probably because him and a lot of the people on the left of the party have been very strident in their support for the Palestinian struggle. This was an excuse. It was a cudgel that was used.

And I think the thing that's actually quite shameful about it is the way that it instrumentalizes Jewish communities to attack a left-wing politician. Because we shouldn't think for a second that the media genuinely is deeply concerned about anti-Semitism in Britain. And the way that we're going to see the proof of this is that when there is a new more centrist, more acceptable labor leader, all those concerns about labor being an institutionally anti-Semitic party will just be discounted. They'll just disappear. It will just completely get memory hold. We won't talk about that anymore. So it was a way of instrumentalizing the cranks and anti-Semites who were there and who were being dealt with, even if that was not particularly efficient. And as I say, there's a very valid criticism there, but this was hugely magnified as a means of personally attacking a kind of left-wing politician. Yeah. And the centrists and the neoliberals in the United States seem to have picked up on that playbook because they've, you know, gone about slandering somebody like Elon Omar. Principally, I think for her anti-imperialist take when she questioned one of the architects of the sort of right-wing death squads and Contra shit in South America when

it came to a recent, I forget the name of the guy, I think Elliot, Elliot Abrams, I forget the name. Oh, Elliot Abrams. Yeah, Elliot Abrams, there you go. So right after she criticized him publicly on his role in sort of U.S. Imperial right-wing death squads in South America, the claims that she was a virulent anti-Semite started to be pushed out. And, you know, UK had already been getting the ball rolling against Corbett in this way, and the U.S. picked up on it and used it as a battering ram against Elon Omar. And then in my last episode, I talked a little bit about how this stuff is cynically weaponized against progressives and people with class and anti-imperalist politics. And I said in that episode, you know, if Bernie Sanders wasn't himself Jewish, they

would be doing the same thing to Bernie Sanders. And sure enough, two days after we released that episode, the Federalist paper here in the U.S., put it in a whole article talking about Bernie Sanders' ostensible adjacency to rampant anti-Semitism. And of course, this is not totally new. but people have tried to make this argument against Bernie in the past, but the fact that he is so obviously and clearly Jewish and has been a Jew his entire life and people know him as such. It makes that slimy accusation even harder to stick, but it doesn't stop him from trying, and they're going to continue to do that.

And just seeing how they use it against Bernie Sanders is really a great way to see just how cynical and devious this shit is. And it's not, as you said, it's not stemming out of a genuine concern because if that was the case, then, I mean, look at what Antifa's been doing. Look at the right. I mean, here in the U.S., especially in the last few years, the anti-Semitism, the mass shootings and synagogues, the Nazi graffeting all across, you know, coast to coast. It's a fucking huge issue.

Donald Trump just last week got up in front of the, I think it's the Israeli-American committee or council, and went on this speed-fueled rant, sort of joking around half-heartedly, but like talking to a Jewish audience using the most disgusting tropes. and stereotypes about them in the process of talking to them, and it barely got any coverage at all. And so you can really see how the centrist media reacts to the right and the left and how they employ these criticism cynically against left-wing figures, and they don't nearly make as much of a deal about it when the right does it just as a sort of pattern of behavior on the right across the world. So I think that's an important thing to understand. But can we

just talk a little bit more about the media beyond just the anti-Semitism stuff, just sort of the UK media's overall role in the conclusion of this election and the role that the UK media played. And maybe just how slimy the UK media is for people in the US. Yeah. I mean, I know, I know it's like, it's almost like a meme that the US media is generally, genuinely terrible. And I think you've got as beat on like terrible op-ed writers. But like the UK, like every time I talk to American friends who come over to the UK, they're like, the UK media is just awful. They're just terrible. This goes, like, the vast majority of the press is owned by right-wing billionaires who have, like, slandered and monstered every single labor leader that refuse to kind of show

the appropriate level of deference towards them. They have given little to no scrutiny to the Conservatives' positions. The massive institutional Islamophobia in the Conservative Party has barely gotten a mention, the fact that, you know, Boris Johnson has got huge amounts of close contacts in the media. The conservative adverts were shown to have, I think 88% of their election adverts were shown to have false or misleading claims. And literally nothing happened about that. I was on Twitter just yesterday, actually, I was hearing multiple reports of people who had spoken to just ordinary people across the country, who because of the huge amount of attention given to Corbyn, they believed that the Labor Party were in government the past 10

years and had voted for the Conservatives. So that's the amount of coverage that was given negatively to Labor in contrast to the amount of time that the paper spent reporting on the Conservatives and what they had claimed. They got away with just making up out of whole cloth claims that they were going to build 40 new hospitals when in fact the actual number was closer to six. like just an outrageous display of partisanship from from huge media institutions which we desperately need to keep ruling governments in check to keep them accountable and that there was a complete failure of that from almost every single section of the British media yeah and it really does

highlight perfectly how the center and this the so-called you know liberals who like to paint themselves as like these progressive people the moment there's a left-wing candidate that challenges imperialism or the class hierarchy, the center and the right just completely team up immediately and throw everything they have against the left. And I think, you know, that says a lot about a lot of different things, but it also shows just how threatened they feel in the face of a possible mass movement of working class people in these countries. They don't want that to happen because the people in the media, the centrist, the op-ed writers, the near attendants of the world, you know, their six-figure incomes, their class position is clear.

They don't have any, they're very privileged, very wealthy, comfortable, luxurious lives, and they don't want their unfair, unjust position in the hierarchy to be questioned, much less toppled. And so for all the ostensible gesturing towards progressive social values that these centrist liberals have, they're really reactionaries when it comes to any sort of real structural change to the way that these countries operate. And I think in times like this, they really show who they really are. and they're more right wing than they are left wing. That is something we should all remember, yeah. I think it was really telling that in kind of breakdowns of why people didn't vote Labor,

they said they did not like Jeremy Corbyn personally. And I think for all of the failings of Corbyn and Corbyn's politics, we don't necessarily need to get into that now. But the image of who he was was created and mediated through the media. And so for four years, this is a person who's been reported as a terrorist sympathizer, as a radical Marxist, as somebody who's coming to take away people's homes, when in fact, like, the labor policies were capable of making a material difference to a lot of working class communities and were pretty much kind of fairly moderate, sensible, social democratic reforms,

the nationalization of a few key industries, and borrowing to invest in communities. I think the disconnect between what was actually in kind of the proposed manifesto for the Labor Party and people's perception of Corbyn that was explicitly created through the media is incredibly important to notice. Absolutely. What has, just out of curiosity, what's been the sort of the mainstream media over in the UK? What's been their take since the election? We know what their take was leading up to it and during, but what, what's the sort of narrative that's being formed in the wake of the results by the mainstream centrist neoliberal media? They have been crowing about the fact that this has been a disaster for Corbyn, specifically,

and they have been sort of like gushing in their praise of Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson, who is a kind of right-wing politician, dangerously similar in some ways to Donald Trump. He has been described as the person who's going to bring the country together. And I think we're going to see some pretty ugly rhetoric become much more normalized. One of the most concerning ones is a consultation allowing for the arrest and destruction of Romani communities, moving them on, refusing to let them set up camp to even making them, you know, borderline illegal in some places. So there's going to be some really kind of vicious narratives coming out of the conservatives. But this is at the moment, the press is very much sort of like, oh, well, we've

done this now. The left experiment was tried and failed. You know, we need to get rid of this crazed Marxist extremist and get back to sensible politics. Sensible. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Boris Johnson, maybe we can talk about him just a tad because I think in the U.S., I mean, you know, the physical appearance between him and Donald Trump is sort of funny. But in the U.S. people really don't have a good understanding of who Boris Johnson is. And oftentimes when he's portrayed in the media, he comes across as sort of like a charismatic goofball who, you know, knows that he's sort of playing it up to the camera. He's almost portrayed as a sort of innocent figure almost. I think in the U.S. media,

I think, you know, just the sort of average person engaging with Boris Johnson in the U.S. sort of have the very weird understanding of who he is, a very skewed one. And I think it's really played up, I think, by Boris Johnson, who knows how he comes across and sort of plays into that in certain ways. But just so people in North America specifically and just outside the UK generally have a better idea of who Boris Johnson really is, can you just talk a little bit more about like sort of where he came from and what his actual politics are, maybe some of his disgusting slurs and rhetoric around minorities and stuff like that. He's enormously privileged. first of all he like he's enormously privileged this is a phenomenally wealthy person and that kind

of bumbling upper class goofball image is very cynically created it's very deliberate there's a there's a kind of long-running joke about Boris Johnson that whenever he's about to be interviewed on TV obviously you go through hair and makeup to make it to kind of smarten you up and get you ready for camera and he will always deliberately mess his hair up for when he appears on camera it's a it's a it's a ploy and it's part of a very cynically created image. He was a journalist for the right wing magazine, The Spectator, where he wrote some pretty disgusting stuff, which I'm probably not going to repeat here. It's a kind of upper class homophobia, racism, particularly towards people who are not white,

huge amounts of class privilege, comments about single mothers, working class fathers being drunks and idlers, single mothers being lazy. Like, it seems parodic, but I think it's. probably well worth bearing in mind that he probably believes that quite sincerely. He wrote a novel, which is also full of disgusting anti-Semitic stereotypes. And I think the thing that's really revealing about him is that David Cameron, the previous conservative prime minister, one of the previous conservative prime ministers, said that when he was younger, that he wanted to be prime minister because he thought he'd be rather good at it.

Boris always comes off for someone who wants to be prime minister because he thinks he's been born to it. He's been wanting to be prime minister for the entirety of his of his politics. political career. And now he's got there and he's got there into a position with the biggest conservative majority since the 1980s, which was a dark time for British politics. Yeah, like American politics, that's the Thatcher Reagan era for sure. Yeah. So the best advice that I could I could give to, especially people in North America, is do not for a second be fooled by that media savvy image that he presents. In lots of

ways, he is sort of like Trump. He's very media fluent. You know, he knows exactly how. how to create an image. And for his supporters, it just means that he's charming and likable. And you trust him. But it is all pretence. Boris Johnson does not give a fuck about anybody who is not rich and white and successful like him.

He doesn't care. He doesn't care. So whenever he appears on American TV, you know, quoting Homer or Shakespeare and kind of messing his hair up, it is a cynical ploy to make you pay attention to the image and to stop paying attention to what his policies actually do.

Perfectly said. Absolutely. I think that's incredibly important for people outside the UK to understand just how cynical and managed, that imagery really is, that spectacle of Boris Johnson. Let's go ahead and move on to comparisons between the U.S. and U.K. Because I think this really sort of gets at the heart of it from the American perspective because the moment the even the exit polls started showing this big conservative win, the centrists, the neoliberal media centrist here in the U.S., a media. began spinning it as like, see, this is what Bernie Sanders type politics will get you. And if

the Democrats are smart at all, they will run away from their left wing of their party and towards the center. And, you know, the UK election is the prime example of just why that has to happen. They don't mention at all, of course, that the more centrist neoliberal party in the UK, the Lib Dems, got absolutely fucking slaughtered. And if we're really going to take these comparisons at face value, then if anything, this election said that the neoliberal center status quo is the least liked option of all on the table. But that's really neither here nor there. So can you just talk a little bit about the implications for the U.S. election and more importantly, what is not implicated for the U.S.? Yeah. I mean, this idea that this says anything about American electoral politics

is just nonsense because the political and material and social conditions of the U.K. have got, like, The comparison just doesn't hold any water at all. And I think it is really important to note that every time that Labor have gone back to this centrist, technocratic mode of politics since 2008, it's lost and it hasn't been successful. The Lib Dems can only achieve something as wreckers, as preventing left-wing candidates winning, which is exactly what they did this time round. So this idea that this says something about the left wing of the Democratic Party or kind of progressive electoral is. is complete nonsense done by people who are just glad to see the back of any coherent left-wing political project that's getting kind of mainstream acceptance. I think the only thing that people who are interested in, you know, in Bernie or in trying to

kind of push for Social Democrat to be the presidential nominee is to pay very close attention to what happened to Corbyn and to Corbyn supporters. I mean, Corbyn was a jam-making man who liked. spending time out in his garden growing vegetables. He's like the furthest away from any kind of dangerous radical that you could get. And even this person was kind of endlessly monstered as some kind of terrorist who was going to see Britain absolutely run to ruin, turned into the Venezuela of Europe, whatever. And I think the only thing that this tells us is that the extent of the kind of fight that Bernie or any other progressive mainstream politicians, is going to face the extent of the class interests which are entrenched and which will do all that

they can to secure their own interests is really, really striking. So people who say this that actually what this means is you should go back to centrism, what they mean is that they want, you know, any kind of left-wing politics to fail. That's what that's what they mean. They mean that it came too, it came too close to being mainstream. It came too close to providing proof of concepts. And they want to continue to insist that you can't have any kind of like transformative politics happening within mainstream institutions. And here in the U.S. there's this argument that we're seeing from the Democrats very much like what you're seeing in the UK is this idea is like we, it's so fucking nauseating too because this is exactly what we were told in 2016, which is we must run to the center that, you know, this is not that we have to beat Trump by all costs. And the only way to do that is to be sensible and moderate and in the middle so that like the 2% of Republicans who haven't fully fucking joined the Trump cult might be persuaded to come over to the Democratic side. And we already saw that that loss.

We've already seen where that strategy leads, but it's almost as like the entire center of American politics in the U.S. has complete amnesia. And they're arguing the exact same shit they argued back then as if with like no sense of irony, no sense of self-awareness, we need Joe Biden. need Pete Buttigieg. That's the only way we can fucking beat Trump. Meanwhile, Bernie's leading and all these polls, you know, he's leading in Iowa and New Hampshire. Biden continues to show that he has just a brain that is in the process of completely melting down. And, you know, you just, it's just so cynical and so disingenuous. But I really, before we move on, I really want to focus on Brexit really quick and the way that Brexit shaped this election, because I think

here you have a real solid difference between the UK election and what it revolved around, which really, as I said online to you and to my Insta story, which you follow, is like this idea that the entire UK politics really morphed around the Brexit issue, and Labor had a really precarious position with regards to Brexit. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that and just really drive home how much Brexit shaped this election and how different that is. We don't have a Brexit issue here in the U.S., right? So how did it. different that is. Yeah, I mean, just to kind of pick up on what you were saying, firstly, as I think it's really important to keep a sense of political memory, right? That centrist,

technocratic politics just ate shit in 2016. And it will do every time it's tried because that puts you on the terrain of the right and the right will always do that better, always. And people are never going to go for a kind of watered down version of something they can get stronger and better elsewhere. In terms of Brexit, huge amounts of the kind of post-industrial north of England particularly voted to leave the EU. And the factors for that are very long and very complicated, but I've probably tied into the fact that these areas have just been just been ignored and left to kind of fall into decline over the past 30 years, since the 80s, actually. These places have just been left to kind of fester in low-paying jobs, in lack of housing, in lack of

investment, in lack of any kind of like community, lack of representation. And those are traditionally labor voting places for obvious reasons, right? So increasingly, though, because of that deindustrialization, huge amounts of young people, especially from those areas, from diverse backgrounds who've moved to the big cities, particularly London. And London, which used to be a very kind of conservative city, has become much more labor voting. So when Brexit happens, you have a split in labor's voters, right? So you have the people who voted to leave, who are working class probably on low incomes, probably from these places which have suffered the kind of brunt of neoliberalization in Britain. And you have people who would normally vote Labor, but would have voted to remain,

who have moved to big cities and who have probably slightly gone to university and are trying to make a life for themselves away from those communities. So initially, Labor said that they would respect the result of the referendum. And they said that for a very long time, whilst a significant proportion of what we might call like the soft liberal side of the party, which includes, lots of people who would eventually end up voting for the liberal Democrats were saying you have to support remain, you have to say that you're going to give us another referendum, we'll get to have another choice. And they didn't for a very long time. And then after a long time of kind of

stonewalling of saying they were going to respect the results of the referendum, they said, actually, we're going to have a new deal, we'll negotiate a new deal, we'll put it to a vote, and the vote will include the option to remain in the UK. Now, that's trying to square a very difficult circle. And what it meant was that it left the Labor Party open to this accusation of, oh, they don't know what their own position is. They're trying to deny the democratic will of all the people who voted to leave. And the truth of that is eminently debatable because it's a kind of media creation. But it gave the kind of political right a hugely effective line to use. I mean, what the conservatives campaigned on was three words. And it was just three words that were

were repeated hundreds of times a day for six weeks, which was get Brexit done. That's all they campaigned on. And we saw that it worked. It worked. They were able to paint Labor and the left as equivocating, as hesitant, it's not having a clear policy, and potentially even threatening to deny the results of that vote. And all they had to do was hammer over and over again, the conservatives of the one who would get Brexit done.

And as we saw, it got the result they wanted. Yeah. And so this entire election sort of zooming out a little bit, correct me if I'm wrong, but this means now that Boris Johnson will be the prime minister of the UK for the next five years, right? And then you go into another normal election? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So Parliament sits for a term of five years. I think we have to kind of be honest about what's going to happen. There's going to be some pretty bad stuff happening. I mean, there was a conservative senior politician on the radio just either today or yesterday talking about the need for British people to start buying private health insurance. We've heard news from the potential UK US trade deal, which means that

drug prices will be set by US pharmaceutical companies. So exactly what Corbyn was warning about during the election campaign in regards to the National Health Service where healthcare is free for all at the point of use, exactly what was warned about of, you know, US health providers getting involved, creating a market for healthcare in the UK. I can see that is something that is going to happen. Yeah, that he has a sufficient majority now that whatever policy he wants to propose, nobody other than conservatives needs to vote for it and it will pass and it will become law. So this is going to be a really pretty dark and tough five years. And that will be 15 years that Britain has been under the kind of boot of like genuinely savage austerity measures and

absolutely slashing to the bone and beyond of things like the National Health Service of any kind of social safety net of any kind of benefit system. The statistic is I think somewhere between 120 to 150,000 deaths over the past decade have been directly linked to that austerity, particularly falling on people who have been out of work for a very long time or people who have been dealing with serious disability. And so the danger is that they're kind of most vulnerable of society, which is specifically children are going to face the brunt of this, specifically the people. who are seriously ill and people with disabilities

and people who are not white British. Absolutely. And, you know, I just wanted to sort of, you know, drive this point home for anybody out there who, you know, might have problems with the NHS or, you know, just people outside of America that don't know

how fucking brutal and just depraved and cruel that our health care system here in the U.S. is where it's centered around insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations, gaining profit off human misery and not centered around treating people. I've grown up my entire life as a low-income American, and I can't even begin to tell you the

horror stories of just my personal experience with this disgusting health care system, how much I've had to suffer throughout my life, just me personally, not to mention millions and millions of other people who aren't insured in this country. I remember I've gone like streaks of like a year having daily crippling anxiety and depression having no mechanism whatsoever because i was you know 21 22 at the time i had no extra money i had no health insurance no means to to get treated um and so when you're sitting day in and day out when you're scared when the sun goes down for some reason um you can't sleep you have physical ailments because of the sort of mental strain that you're dealing with

with no respite with no therapy no medicine no anything it's brutal and that's just my personal experience. You know, last year, for example, I had a bad accident and I really fucked up my ankle. I sprained it like really, really bad. It was swollen for a long-ass time, much longer than any sprained ankle I've ever had in the past. To go to the doctor wasn't even an option. It didn't even occur to me that that was a possibility because I don't have the money. I don't have health insurance. I never had health insurance. And I certainly don't have the money to pay out of pocket. And so, you know, for people in the UK who have been blessed with the NHS, who look over to America and see the shiny image that America portrays.

to the rest of the world about who we are and what life is like here. Like, I promise you, it is fucking brutal. And if you don't have a lot of money, a privatized health insurance system is a violent attack upon you and your family. So the stakes really could not be higher here, especially with the NHS in the UK. And just as an American who's been living under Trump for four years, you know, we fucking feel the pain and the fear and the uncertainty that our, you know, UK comrades and brothers and sisters in the UK are feeling right now. And our hearts go out to

all of you. You know, we definitely stand in solidarity and we know how it feels. But if I could say anything, like one of the only good things that the UK has done historically, I think, is the creation of the NHS system. And to see that chipped away, to see that go away, I promise you that we'll just make health care will be great for rich people. Like I always say, like America is the greatest country on earth if you're rich. It is a play. ground. You will enjoy it. If you're not rich, it is a fucking hellhole, and it is a life of precarity and uncertainty and pain and suffering. And so that's what they want to bring in to the UK and U.S. corporations will benefit and profit gloriously if they can make that happen.

So fight against that with every fiber of your being. I promise you, it fucking sucks not to have health care as a human right. But to wrap this conversation up, John, can you just maybe talk about, maybe speculate on what the future of the UK left is, like, you know, given this huge blow to electoralism, what the, what the UK left-wing radicals and revolutionaries should do, and then maybe talk about whether or not there's any silver lining in this result, because I think there might be some here. So just go ahead and take that wherever you want. Yeah, absolutely. So a few things that I want to kind of bring up as upsides is that I think for vast, this could be, this can be a kind of radicalizing moment for a lot of people who would

maybe count themselves as like progressive, you know, probably wouldn't use the term socialist or Marxist or anarchist to describe their own politics. But I think they, the manifesto itself managed to kind of reach a huge amount of people. It was, it is kind of redefined what it means to be on the left in the mainstream of British politics, things like renationalizing national assets like a transportation network, things like universal services, such as one of the proposed policies was universal free broadband internet for everybody, the cancellation of student debt. All of these things have been put back into the kind of mainstream of the political agenda, which is great. I think this is going to be a really good spur for a lot of local organizing in those

working class communities that were historically labor that voted for conservatives. I think that's an incredibly important opportunity to actually get out and build power outside of electoral systems within those communities. A few kind of silver linings, an independent Scotland looks closer than ever. And just as excitingly, actually, I think a United Island looks closer than ever as well. So the breakup of the union, which I think is going to be nothing but a good thing and is well overdue, is an upside. I think there's going to be a huge amount of.

of what's been really, what's been really kind of inspiring is I follow a lot of people who are quite, who were really involved in the election campaign. And there was a huge amount of people who were brought into campaigning to like the practical work of like being involved in politics. And whilst everybody was shocked, everyone was heartbroken. Everyone was disgusted when the election results came in. All that's happened ever since then, all the discussions that I've seen or been a part of have been about strategy. Right. What's like strategizing. We can't, we don't have the time to wallow in defeat. There's a great quote by Tony Ben,

who was a really famous Labour leftist, a kind of older statesman, as it were, of kind of like the mainstream left. And he said, there is no final victory. There is no final defeat. We're never going to be finally done.

What there is is there is to struggle. And it is a long one. So chin up, toughen up and crack on because there's work to be done. So I think that's been the kind of thing that I've seen and the sense that I've had, things that people have have you know taken taken a hard blow and we shouldn't downplay it we shouldn't pretend that it wasn't a disaster it was and it's and it's going to suck and it's going to

be incredibly difficult but hopefully this is this what this should be is this should be a spur to action it should be a spur to a massive uptick in local organizing in mutual aid in community organizing in you know just co-ops and community owned initiatives trying to build relationships and networks locally rather than having a kind of national party that seems to run everything power is going to have to be built from the ground up it's going to have to be built everywhere and it's going to be built outside of the constraints of parliamentary systems and I think that's something that's going to have to be taken really seriously from now on and you know if we have big powerful left-wing movements in one like in the UK for example that

that strengthens the left wing movements in the U.S., which strengthens, you know, anti-imperialist movements around the world, if you have a principled left-wing movement, of course. And so, yeah, that's important, you know. We see the failures and limitations of electoralism. We see how sneaky and fucking disingenuous, these centrist and neoliberals and right-wingers are. And so, you know, in the face of just a complete electoral breakdown,

I think the left really needs to continue to take very seriously the idea of building up dual power of working in our communities, doing mass work and building up our power outside of the electoral sphere, because we see they will pull out all the stops to make sure we don't even get a social democracy. I mean, you know, if they're willing to do that for social democracy, you just know what they're willing to do anything more revolutionary than that. But you are 100% right. Perhaps the silver lining is that the breaking up of the U.K., Scottish independence, a United Ireland, my God, those things would be wonderful if they came out of this terrible event. And I don't want to downplay the suffering that's going to come.

I don't want to use a silver lining to block out the realities of suffering on the ground, especially for racialized minorities, of victims of British imperialism, etc. But we have to find what good things still exist and take them and run with them. And so, you know, the U.K. being weaker is good for the world. The U.S. being weaker is good for the world. I always say, like, balkanization isn't inherently revolutionary by any means, but it certainly weakens these empires. And, like, the United States balkanizing into two, three, four different countries,

I mean, that could be nothing but good for the global proletariat and oppressed masses the world over. Like, I want to see the end of the U.K. and the U.S. as such. And anything that moves in that direction that breaks up their ability to dominate the rest of the globe, I think ultimately, ultimately in the long run, is a good thing. One more question for you, since I have you here, my wonderful, beautiful British friend. I hear this stuff about Prince Andrew and his connections to Epstein. I open up my news tab, and I cannot help. and learn the names

Prince Charles and fucking Megan Markle or whatever the hell her name is and I hate it so my final question to you John is when in the fuck

are y'all gonna get rid of this disgusting monarchy time is up come on absolutely he he Andrew especially has kind of I actually think that

that's really helped the anti-monicist position when you have this member of the royal family who goes who goes on TV and gives an interview where he says yeah

the reason that I I kept hanging out with this absolute monster is that I was too honorable. That was his, that was his words. He said he was, his mistake was that he was too honorable. And I think it's done huge amounts of damage to the credibility of the royals. And I think hopefully, hopefully we're not going to have this archaic, embarrassing institution around. And kind of British politics might stop fawning over this, this kind of hereditary, anarchic throwback. France had the right idea

of how you deal with the royal family frankly and I think we should remember that history has much to teach us beautifully said yeah so thank you so much for coming on John thank you for coming on especially on such short notice like I think I hit you up yesterday or the day before and we've made

this happen on you know very short amount of time so I really appreciate you being able to set things aside in your life to come on and educate our listeners and myself on what exactly is happening in the UK and as we talked about before we've began recording. We're due for another collab. I mean, we have a long tradition going back to the very early days of Rev Left where John came on on our Gothic Marxism episode almost three

years ago, I think. And yeah, it's crazy. We're coming up on three years of Rev Left, so probably two and a half years ago or something like that. You came on for your first ever episode, and then we've collabed multiple times since then. And we were talking about collabing on Antonio Gramsci. It's a thinker and, you know, a theorist and a revolutionary who I've wanted to cover a long time when Reve left haven't quite been able to make that happen. So I think now we can say that we're going to make it happen sometime in 2020, hopefully spring maybe of 2020. You'll come back on and we'll tackle Antonio Gramsci together. Does that sound good? That sounds incredible. That sounds incredible. And just like as a final point, I just want to say that, you know, given where we are in the UK

politics and given given the state of the US, I think internationalism now is is incredibly vital. I think it's been amazing to see so many people on the left in the states taking an interest in British politics and kind of rooting for a social democratic movement. And even if that is limited, I think having an internationalist left that believes in solidarity across the arbitrary lines of national borders is going to be vital. So solidarity to all of my American friends and comrades. Yeah. And thank you so much for inviting me on. Yeah, absolutely. It's a dark time for both of our societies. We send all our love and all our solidarity across the Atlantic to you comrades.

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