UK politics: waiting for the penny to drop

By Pete North - June 12, 2021

Brexiteers of the Tory kind on Twitter are playing all kinds of interesting games with numbers – particularly trade statistics and GDP projections. We can all do that. We can all play games with graphs and tell ourselves pretty little lies.

But then if you learned anything at all from the Brexit era, it is that GDP counts for shit, especially at the bottom, and trade in goods alone is not a useful indicator – and especially at the moment with Covid distorting and obscuring the picture.

I’m not going to argue the toss with those people though. They’re wrong. It will be a long time before they can admit it and they will argue to the death that even serious decline is nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit. This ain’t my first rodeo. You cannot reason someone out of something they were never reasoned into.

The point about Brexit, though, is that it hits many of the areas of trade most people are only dimly aware exist. Particularly trade in services which many would struggle to even define. It goes well beyond financial services and the city. We’re talking real world impact to real jobs across the country.

In due course, we are going to see mounting unemployment in sectors usually insulated from it. We are going to see food inflation ripping through the system, though some of it will be obscured by temporary dumping. A clear picture is not going to emerge for a while yet. There are plenty of markers, but things have to go a long way down before we start seeing serious change. That’s when things are going to get interesting.

As we outlined earlier, there is a battery of social problems in the background – issues which have long been ignored or downplayed, and issues this supposedly right wing government has absolutely failed to address. With any economic downturn comes, usually, an increase in inter ethnic strife, and having allowed some communities to evolve in parallel, we are likely to see deadly rivalry.

Worse still, we are likely to see a growing sense of inequality. In places like Bradford it will be acutely obvious that it’s the white working classes who’ve been short changed having been encouraged to live on welfare with weakened families as a result of various social revolutions.

Muslim families, however, less dependent on the state with strong family connections and a much loser relationship with tax and business law, and a sideline in narcotics distribution, will find themselves better insulated against economic upheaval. There we will see a sense of resentment that will evolve into ethno-nationalism. Bradford, Halifax and Keighley have in the past been BNP strongholds, and I sincerely doubt much has changed. If a renewed BNP party emerges, it will do quite well.

I’ve been predicting this for some time, not least because the Tories have failed to convert the Brexit sentiment into any meaningful change. They seem to think that ending free movement of people is the full extent of the Brexit mandate. Technically it may be, but politically, not so much. The ledger is not yet balanced.

All of this is coming to a contact point in the near future. There are too many disparate stresses on politics, exacerbated by Covid and Brexit and the political class is hiding from it. It’s a wonder they’ve got away with it as long as they have. One suspects, though, this is as much to do with a largely politically indifferent population who as a rule prefers politicians to do politics for them.

Fundamentally, we have a trivial, selfish, unserious population, which thinks it can opt out of politics and the country will run just fine. They will have to learn anew that politics is not a spectator sport. Sadly we have a nation of slow learners. I am absolutely convinced things have to get a while lot worse before they get better and I’ve long suspected only a rude wake-up call would be sufficient for people to wake up. It is partly why I thought Brexit was necessary.

In the interim, for a decade or more, Brexit is not really going to make life better for anybody. There will be some winners but mostly losers, but if in the near future it causes us to address the longstanding political decline and the collapse of party politics, then it’s not all for naught. It’s more than we would have done had we stayed in the EU and continued to sweep the issues under the carpet.

The British problem is that we have a public that abdicated from politics, passing its own obligations to the politicians, for whom it all proved to be too complicated, too boring and too damn inconvenient, so they in turn handed it to Brussels to the point where nobody now knows how anything works, and when it comes to something like Covid we lack the means to implement something like test and trade locally because the machinery of good government is no longer present.

Having abandoned our politics, our supposedly mainstream parties are now merely corporate branding and political battles are now over the intellectual property rights of the brand. We no longer have meaningful party politics. The weakness and intellectual paucity of our parties leaves them wide open to be captured by minority fringes, leaving us at the mercy of ideologues who would otherwise get nowhere near power.

The one thing just about all of us can agree on is that the current political settlement does not work and the party system doesn’t serve us. We have a smattering of lefty minority parties as a mainstream alternative to an intellectually derelict Labour party, and a fragmented populist right surfing on the fag end of Brexit.

In this I am not persuaded that proportional representation is any solution in that it only really serves as a lifeline for the largely unpopular minnow parties who have nothing much to say to the public at large. If the public want change they are going to have to organise and make it happen, and they have to realise it won’t come by voting for the usual suspects and it won’t come if they wait around for someone to do it for them. Ukip proved that change can happen under FPTP but you have to do the legwork.

For the moment, though, there isn’t much point. I could set up yet another right of centre party from my desk here and now, but until the ground is fertile for renewed party political challenge based on organic and authentic definitions, it’s a complete waste of energy. In a while, though, if the penny drops just how badly the Tories have betrayed conservatives, and just how rotten Labour is, there might be a glimmer of hope. If not, then Britain as we know it, is finished.