{"id":2154,"date":"2016-06-27T10:50:11","date_gmt":"2016-06-27T08:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=2154"},"modified":"2016-06-27T10:50:11","modified_gmt":"2016-06-27T08:50:11","slug":"too-many-heads-stuck-in-the-sand-on-brexit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2016-06-27\/too-many-heads-stuck-in-the-sand-on-brexit\/","title":{"rendered":"Too many heads stuck in the sand on Brexit"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are some heads stuck deeply in the sand at the moment. Typical were the\u00a0dismissive responses to my piece\u00a0Brexit and the diseased liberal mind<\/a>.\u00a0I had focused on one exceptional piece by one Guardian writer, it was claimed.<\/p>\n

I chose Zoe Williams’ article because it is\u00a0fully representative of liberal reaction to Brexit in the British media. I could have cited hundreds of other examples \u2013 not least just about everything currently appearing\u00a0on the BBC.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0Williams and the rest of the media are not making these arguments in a vacuum. After all, much of the Labour shadow cabinet has just resigned and the rest of the parliamentary party are trying to defy the overwhelming democratic will of their membership and oust leader Jeremy Corbyn. His crime is not that he supported Brexit (he didn’t dare, given the inevitable reaction of his MPs) but that he is not a true believer in the current neoliberal order, which very much includes the EU.<\/p>\n

Here is what one of the organisers (probably a shadow cabinet minister) of this coup-in-the-making says<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The plan is to make Corbyn\u2019s job as leader extremely difficult in the hope of pushing him to resign, with most MPs refusing to serve as shadow ministers, show up on the frontbench in the House of Commons, support him at PMQs or formulate policy under his leadership.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was presumably said with a straight face, as though Corbyn has not been undermined by these same Blairite MPs since day one of his leadership. This is not a new campaign – it has simply\u00a0been\u00a0forced to go more public by the Brexit vote.<\/p>\n

Labour MPs do not just want to oust a leader with massive support among\u00a0party\u00a0members. They have hamstrung him from the outset so that he\u00a0could not\u00a0lead the political revolution members\u00a0elected him to begin. And now he is being made to pay the price because he privately<\/em> backs a position that, as the referendum has just shown, has majority support.<\/p>\n

This is where we on the progressive left are, and the Brexit vote is a huge challenge to us to face facts. We want to believe we are free but the truth is that we have long been\u00a0in a prison called neoliberalism. The Conservative and Labour parties are tied umbilically to this neoliberal order. The EU is one key institution in a\u00a0transnational neoliberal club. Our economy is structured to enforce neoliberalism whoever ostensibly runs the country.<\/p>\n

That is why the debate about Brexit was never about values or principles – it was about money. It still is. The Remainers are talking only about the threat to their pensions. The Brexiters are talking only about the role of immigrants in driving down wages. And there is good reason: because the EU is part of the walls of the economic prison that has been constructed all around us. Our lives are now only about money, as the gargantuan bail-outs of the too-big-to-fail banks should have shown us.<\/p>\n

There is a key difference between the two sides. Most Remainers want to pretend that the prison does not exist because they still get privileges to visit the living areas. The Brexiters cannot forget\u00a0it exists because they are never allowed to leave their small cells.<\/p>\n

The left cannot call itself a left and keep whingeing about its lost privileges while\u00a0denouncing\u00a0those trapped inside their cells as “racists”. Change requires that we first recognise our situation\u00a0\u2013 and then have the will to struggle for\u00a0something better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are some heads stuck deeply in the sand at the moment. Typical were the\u00a0dismissive responses to my piece\u00a0Brexit and the diseased liberal mind.\u00a0I had focused on one exceptional piece by one Guardian writer, it was claimed. I chose Zoe Williams’ article because it is\u00a0fully representative of liberal reaction to Brexit in the British media. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,57,51],"class_list":{"0":"post-2154","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-britain","8":"tag-europe","9":"tag-left-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}