Upstream - Sneak Peak: What's Really Going on Behind Brexit? (Richard Seymour)

Episode Date: June 21, 2016

Brexit? This Thursday Great Britain is poised to vote on whether or not to leave the European Union. The decisions and politics driving this referendum are complex, important, and might surprise you. London-based writer, activist, and broadcaster Richard Seymour gives us the lay of the terrain. Our full interview with Richard will be available soon at our website: http://www.economicsfortransition.org

You're listening to an Upstream Sneak Peek with writer and activist Richard Seymour. First of all, there's always been a chunk of both the left and the right that has been highly hostile to the European Union for obvious reasons. It's a centrist, neoliberal sort of pro-business bloc. And the right and left would have different reasons to oppose it. The right on sort of sovereignty grounds, grounds of controlling migration, racial grounds, you know, those sorts of things. But also in part, and of course, it depends what social class you're looking at, but on the right, there are those who believe that the European Union holds back British strength and power in the world. They believe that it holds back the pound and that it holds back the city's dynamism

and that if Britain only oriented in a hyper-Atlanticist way toward the United States and towards more global centres of profit and accumulation, Britain would be a lot more powerful. That's their belief. And you've got people from UKIP and others who've said, if we were not part of the European Union, we could have joined NAFTA, we could have signed up to something like TTIP long ago. So it's not just a kind of isolationist thing, although there are elements of isolationism and little England patriotism, but it's also part of a very, very free market ideology. They believe the European Union is, if anything, not neoliberal enough, too social democratic.

So that's part of it. And the left, by and large, since the 80s, has lined up behind the European Union. Not all of it. The radical left has always had a critique of the European Union, but the majority of the institutions of the labour movement and of the Labour Party have rallied behind the European Union as the last defence of certain social rights that are minimal, but they're taken for granted within the context of the European Union. They're guaranteed in law in a context in which Mrs. Thatcher was absolutely devastating the left and the labor movement. So if you were a trade union leader in the mid-1980s and you were getting hammered, one of the responses to that was to embrace what was called the new realism.

The new realism meant that you didn't try to fight the government, you didn't try to fight employers, you tried to negotiate the best deal you could in the given status quo. And that meant lining up with Europe. So there is that. And then, of course, there is the radical left who are still, not very many of them, it has to be said, but there's a radical fringe that are still those not very many of them it has to be said but there's a radical fringe that's still for brexit and they argue that even though in the short term the major

beneficiaries of the uh of brexit would be the radical right there would be the racists would be the nationalists there is the potential that um brexit would create a crisis in the conservative party a split um that it would create a crisis in the Conservative Party, a split, that it would disorganize them and create opportunities for the left. But more generally, in the long term, the weakening of the European Union would weaken the power of the business class, would weaken the power of those neoliberal organizations and institutions, and would give the left more openings. So that's the lay of the terrain, if you like. So let's move over to United States politics now. So we've heard you draw parallels between what's going on with Brexit

and also the fear-mongering campaign tactics of Trump. Can you talk a little bit about the parallel there? Okay, well, fairly straightforwardly, I think that, and I'm not sure what the research says about the USA, but certainly in the UK, the research tends to suggest that those who are most susceptible to this kind of resentful nationalism that has been growing for some time are not necessarily the poorest, not necessarily one class or other, but sections of different classes whose life trajectory has been on the decline. And that's what we see with UKIP. What's very interesting about them is that they're the one party in the UK that genuinely has a cross-class basis. They have a significant amount of support from medium to large employers. They have a significant amount of support from the lower middle class.

And they have a significant amount of support from a certain group of skilled and semi-skilled workers. So in the U.S., my understanding from looking at the polls and so on is that Trump actually is also quite cross-class. I mean, this is often represented in the media as if he's overwhelmingly dependent upon the white working class. And this is a bit of a cliche here as well. But I actually think if you look at it, what you find is he's disproportionately reliant upon those who are higher up the income brackets and actually disproportionately drawing support from people who've been through college. That says something. So I think what's happening here is in part that large clusters of people from different social classes, often with highly regionalized experiences of decline, are gravitating to the radical right as a defensive maneuver to attack the ascendant

cultural forces, particularly those cultural forces that are demanding equal rights for LGBT, that are demanding equal rights for women, that are demanding some forms of economic redistribution. So, of course, the energies behind Trumpism began, I think, with the McCain campaign, and then very shortly after that with the Tea Party. And it was really very much organized a kind of racialized anti-socialism. You know, the idea that Obamacare was essentially equivalent to black people taking your stuff, you know. And behind that, there was a narrative that, well, these feckless black people and the poor, they borrowed recklessly, they spent recklessly, and they drove us into crisis, and now we're suffering, and you're going to tax us and our property to pay for them. That's essentially the logic of this. That's the resentment, the kernel of resentment behind all this.

And of course, that's some of the basis for the support for neoliberal economics. And that's very similar to what's happened in the UK. Although the racial dynamics are slightly different, it's much more focused on migration. It's a very similar type of compound..