The Alternative Debunk: Far-right populism, privilege and coming to terms with change

Britain, as a country, is depicted around the world as the very personification of privilege. We are tea-supping, tradition-adhering, aristocracy-adoring, wearers of bowler hats. There are people in this country who are proud of that depiction.

That isn't really a recognisable image of Britain today. Except for the privilege. At the core of British concept of liberty is privilege: middle class affluence, home ownership, private schools, inherited wealth, the older sort of social networks.

This privileged middle sort have done well out of globalism - well prepared and adapted for the rising demand for high skill, education and flexibility. But in Britain, globalisation has seen both winners and losers.

As the cushioned middle class have gained, the fragile lives of the working class have been threatened. The old dependable industries have gone, deemed to costly. With them has gone job security, in the name of chasing efficiency.

Pressure to be productive has risen, even as security and stability has declined. It shouldn't be a major surprise that since the 1990s a new era of civil rights movements has sprung up, working to unite people and push back.

There is a point of view that it has also forced working class people to be seduced by the hate-filled, divisive, rhetoric of the far right - to get on board with populist movements that scapegoat refugees and immigrants and minorities.

However, the facts don't support it.

The reality: the far right isn't a working class movement. It never has been. In fact, populism tends to be better supported by the petit bourgeosie and the rich - with the backing only of a violent minority of working class people. Far-right populism is, at it's core, reactionary politics. It is the establishment pushing back against reform. It is about the fear of losing status amidst crisis - it is the moderately well off frightened of losing their privilege.

Something held up against this view are the voters who backed the latest President of the United States into office. Their lack of a college education was presented as a fait accompli of poor, white, racist and ignorant, working class men. But the facts paint a more complex picture. It is true that 70% of Fourtyfive's supporters didn't have college degrees - but then 71% of Americans don't have college degrees. And most of his supporters earn over the median income $50,000 a year.

Now, the middle class base of far right populism doesn't mean appeals are not made for support from ordinary working people. In times of crisis, the populist narrative finds fertile soil among people whose interests it does less to serve. It must be tweaked to include the working class in a narrative of privilege, but it remains simple, emotive and effective.

For the far right, and the privileged few who drive it, the impact of neoliberalism must have been a dream come true: post-industrial Britain, Wales and The North, Labour and left-wing heartlands, excluded from the benefits of globalisation - even as it dismantled the basis for prosperity under the old order.

Huge numbers of people left without job security, sometimes even social security. Communities stripped of their resources, their high streets becoming abandoned. All that was left was to exploit their fears and give them scapegoats.

The story is not an original one: of a majority that are going to lose their status and money to a minority, or minorities, courtesy of a discredited establishment - itself painted as a minority that no longer represent this fearful majority. Legitimacy is questioned. Mandates undermined. A web of emotive propaganda aimed at dividing society, turning the affluent in fear against it's fringes, to the benefit of a reactionary few.

This is the core of the narrative that divided and felled the Second Spanish Republic, used to justify a military coup. The toppling of the Weimar Republic. The upholding of first slavery and then segregation in the Deep South by Dixiecrats.

There have been few places, even in these times of a 'far-right populist wave', where populists have secured a broad base of public support - broad enough to make a claim of significant support from working class people. The barrier that seemed to have some significance was 13% - the level of popular support the far-right in Western Europe have struggled to break through. But the rise of authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe, threaten to make the West less an anti-populist bloc than an enclave.

There are more exceptions. The Fortyfifth President in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro as President in Brazil, and the FPO in government in Austria, the electoral success of Lega and M5S in Italy - these are among the few to have made major electoral breakthroughs in the West. But we know Fortyfive's supporters were mostly affluent and middle class. Are the supporters of Bolsonaro, Heinz-Christian Strache, Salvini and Grillo, much different?

In Britain, rising inequality has started to bite even the privileged middle class. Fears about pensions and wellbeing in old age, stress and pressure at work - core fears of the working class - are worrying Middle England. That made them the dominant supporters of Brexit, some 60% of all Brexit voters - to just 17% of Brexiters who were working class. Populism succeeded, with Brexit, in pulling the middle class apart from the working class, and turning them against the liberal democratic political establishment.

Under pressure and fearful of change, it is the middle class who are the movers of the times. The statistics tell us that when the working class face these crises, they don't vote - their feelings of disenfranchisment become inaction.

Yet there is hope in this analysis. There is common cause to be found between the middle class and the working class. They have the same fears and face the same pressures - though one is far more insulated from them than the other, and felt them later. There is a common platform to be found. One that can unite people on what they have in common: a desire for social security, for wellbeing at work and in old age, for a functioning local community - and a desire for opportunity.

The question left for progressives is, what party or alliance will be the vehicle for such a programme? Whoever they are, they need to get to grips with a simple fact: change scares people. Our answer needs to be bring them together in solidarity.

The Alternative Debunk: Trade, sovereignty and the World Trade Organisation

There is a line of thinking that runs, 'the real obstacles to trade in the twentyfirst century are no longer tariffs, but non-tariff barriers'.

It is a view that has been expressed by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Brexiter and Tory backbencher, as part of his reasoning for Britain leaving the EU. Breaking these non-tariff barriers, as luck would have it, was also the founding mission of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

If non-tariff barriers are an obstacle to the UK economy and trading on WTO terms would put us at the heart of an organisation working to undo them, it seems like a simple enough equation. It would appear to be a marriage of supreme convenience.

That view is, however, put to us by Britain's conservative and far-right establishment. That means it requires scepticism and further examination. So what are we missing?

Well, the first thing to note is that there is nothing simple about trade. Trade branches out into all aspects of international relations, domestic lawmaking and standards regulation, and as such encroaches on national sovereignty. And negotiations can take years.

The second, is that the 'non-tariff barriers' being referred to here are domestic laws and standards, created by sovereign parliaments and assemblies to regulate how things are made and sold in their jurisdictions - as well as subsidies favoured sectors.

Going blindly down the road that leads to the untrammelled trade that would-be barrier-breakers like Mogg would like, could lead to a place no one pursuing greater sovereignty had ever considered ending up. So let's be clear about where that road leads.

Background: Barriers to Trade

Historically, the old barriers were taxes - known as tariffs - put on imports. They would produce revenue for the national coffers and protect domestic production. Economics is never simple though, and tariffs were deeply entwined with foreign wars and domestic unrest.

Competition between nations over resources - resulting a mad scramble to occupy and to exploit, to invade and to seize valuable territory, even from neighbours - was the driving force behind war, colonialism and imperialism.

In Britain, the old barriers of tariffs mixed in a toxic brew with aristocratic landownership. The result was landlords with collosal power to inflate prices at the cost of middle class merchants and the working class who could barely afford the cost of bread.

That led to the Anti-Corn Law League, of which liberal free traders Richard Cobden and John Bright were leading activists, which in the 1860s fought to undo taxes on corn imports that poured subsidies into the pockets of landlords and starved ordinary people.

The Anti-Corn Law League eventually won out, but their campaign didn't bring a permanent change of mindset. Rather they influenced the Liberal Party, who continued to vie for power with the Conservatives who supported the system of tariffs.

While Britain went back and forth, other countries such as Germany and the United States used tariffs to protect their domestic industries from foreign competition - trying to catch up and compete with the British Empire, whose colonies allowed for the casting of a far wider net in which to find resources.

The international ramifications of this inward-looking national-oriented system were disastrous. On the foreign front, war between countries as they scrapped for resources. On the domestic front, poverty and civil unrest. It took two world wars, and the rise of democracy for that message to sink in.

Bretton Woods: Peace Through Interdependence

After the Second World War, delegates and economists from around the world gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to figure out how to achieve a lasting peace. What they struck upon was the core of what the free traders had been arguing for a century: interdependence.

The result was the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), unprecedented international cooperation and the largest surge in world economic growth in history as the Western economies recovered, interwined in peace.

From the 1940s through the 1970s, tariffs were cut and cross-border movement and free access to resources flourished. The predecessors to the European Union were founded on ending the French and German fight over access to, and control of, the Rhine Valley's resources.

Government intervention went hand in hand with this system. It was necessary to ensure tight regulation internationally and to correct market imperfections domestically - most recognisably in the form of the welfare state, aimed at ensuring citizens' economic wellbeing.

There were consequences, good and bad. International cooperation was joined by deep domestic links between states, industries and unions that played it's part in a prosperity that was more widely shared than ever before. Inequality was lower. The wealth gap narrower. Opportunity for social mobility was tangible.

And yet the deep corporate-state links meant that collusion was substantial, while international cooperation gave rise to multinational corporations - businesses with a power that reaches beyond the limitations of national jurisdictions.

WTO: Drive for Efficiency

At the end of the 1970s, stagflation brought to an end the soaring economic growth of the era. Global growth hit a wall that capitalism has been trying to find a way around ever since.

The next phase for trade would be driven by the overthrow of the careful system of controls and regulations. The Bretton-Woods system had fostered within it the huge multinational corporations that now, as growth stagnated, threw their weight behind the Reagan-Thatcher system and the deregulation boom.

It was struck upon that, even with tariffs world wide brought down to historic lows, there were yet other barriers to doing business that might be limiting growth. Beginning with the Uruguay Round of negotiations, the drive was now achieve maximum global efficiency through the elimination of non-tariff barriers.

The GATT was superseded at this point by an organisation founded on and dedicated to achieving these goals - these new underlying principles. This was the World Trade Organisation, the WTO.

If Bretton-Woods and the GATT was about achieving peace through interdependence, achieved by a gradual reduction in tariffs, then the purpose of the Uruguay Round and the WTO was to take that interdependence and use it as leverage to eliminate non-tariff barriers and pursue market efficiency.

As with the Bretton-Woods model, there were consequences. One of the most obvious impacts has been the global stagnation in wages for low-skilled workers in the new era - with labour embattled, their hard won rights being undermined and squeezed.

Not all of this is the result of globalism. But the benefits were not widely enough shared, technology undermining rather than enhancing workers' security, and gains were often made through doors being opened to exploitation. Income inequality accelerated.

In the now

The body known as the World Trade Organisation is the arch-mover of globalism. A forum for diplomats and lobbyists, it is where the negotiations are done for deals that break down not only borders, but the so-called non-tariff barriers - in reality, domestic laws and standards that protect the quality of products.

The groups of elite Brexiters, most of them very wealthy, who are selling the idea of leaving the EU on WTO terms, have hitched onto the back of the campaign for national sovereignty. But leaving on WTO will do nothing to enhance sovereignty in terms that most people would recognise.

Within the EU, the UK has a say alongside other members on how it interacts with each of them and how it's domestic standards and regulations are set, while also having a say on how the whole EU bloc interacts with trading partners around the world.

Exiting the EU will downgrade the trading relationship between the EU and the UK. And if the UK reduces it's standards to attract new trade with other non-EU countries, it will make it harder to trade with the EU - as most of the EU's trade barriers depend on products meeting their high internal standards.

Any change of policy will require long term negotiations with the more than one hundred and fifty WTO members - all of whom will want their say to prevent their own trade being adversely affected. And let's not forget the WTO mission to reduce non-tariff barriers.

The drive to align standards within the EU has been one of getting countries to agree and enforce the highest common denominator. On the outside, the only 'advantage' to be gained is through the pursuit of the lowest common denominator on standards.

Whether it's the banning of plastic packaging to regulations about what chemicals can be used in the production of food, from the regulation of working conditions to the terms upon which businesses can receive subsidies or support - there is money to be made by opening the doors and lowering regulations.

But the reality of trade on WTO terms means few countries actually negotiate on their own. Most have spent decades building mutually beneficial deals and blocs - like EU - to increase their influence and reinforce their position to protect domestic conditions.

Switzerland and Canada have spent the better part of twenty years trying to negotiate their trading relationships with Europe. And the North American countries - USA, Canada and Mexico - have been back and forth over how to organise their trade for mutual benefit.

Even at present in America, their far-right President upset and forced a renegotiation with the countries neighbours by trying to reestablished protective tariffs to favour domestic production - a move that hurts trade partners and pours money into the pockets of the wealthy domestic business and land owners.

In such a complex web of negotiations, the confrontational approach of Brexiters and their supporting organisations - like the IEA - who have argued for ligitigation at the WTO to force the EU to lower it's standards, is unlikely to win the UK any allies.

In the future

The WTO was established in 1995 as the product of the Uruguay Round as the forum for negotiating global trade and as an arbiter for settling trade disputes. It has been the forum where successive agreements have been negotiated to reduce countries' tariffs and pursue deregulation of domestic standards.

In pursuing those goals the WTO has been accused of undermining the sovereignty of member nations with it's rules - much like Brexiters have loudly and virulently alleged of the EU project.

People who supported Brexit have hoped the UK might use it's historic influence protect some domestic sectors, but any such provisions would immediately irk other WTO members whose export opportunities would be limited.

The reality is that a No Deal Brexit, exiting onto WTO terms, does nothing to improve Britain's sovereignty. It means trading much as we do now, but without our open access to the Single Market - and the investment boost that gives us - and any EU specific deals through which we had previously enjoyed trading access to third party countries.

The main possible benefit would be, as Rees-Mogg himself has claimed, would be in slashing trading tariffs - ostensibly, it would seem, with the US, India and China. But the only way that would have any impact would be if our non-tariff barriers - our food standards, for instance - where lowered substantially as well.

And allowing our domestic policy to be driven, slashed, by the demands of overseas corporations who want to pour lower standard goods into the UK - likely undermining domestic businesses - is unlikely to be seen as an increase to national sovereignty.

If Britain could even manage to unilaterally start slashing it's tariffs and standards to attract America and Chinese suppliers - over likely objections and litigation in the WTO - the cheaper supplies would be of much lower quality, taken on at the cost of major damage done to domestic supply chains.

The post-war world has achieved interdependence on an historic scale. It cannot now be undone. Our predecessors choose to give up total sovereignty for that interdependence and the peace it brought. No one should be under any illusions: an exit from the European Union on WTO terms is another aggressive step into, not away from, globalisation, which does not restore sovereignty.

As we stand our sovereignty is pooled. We take part in building a consensus in Europe that affects our domestic laws. The future under a WTO/Hard Brexit will not restore sovereignty, and may even instead undermine it as domestic laws are driven by what opportunity it sells to our trade partners. These are the extremes of what is on offer when discussing Brexit. Neither will turn back the clock.

The Alternative Debunk: Populism, democracy and where it ends

In refusing to rule out further votes on her Brexit Deal - should it be defeated in the Commons - Prime Minister Theresa May has doubled down on a stubborn stance. Adamant that she has a Brexit mandate, May won't countenance a challenge to it.

Whether she likes it or not, that puts the Prime Minister in the same camp has the hardcore Brexiters, who argue that the first referendum was the final say - however flatly untrue that stance may be when it comes to UK constitutional conventions.

In a time when interest and participation in democracy has been slipping, when democracy has been increasingly under assault from fake news and far right populism, it is unhelpful when the Prime Minister coopts their arguments.

Populism and democracy

Populism is a word that gets thrown around in the media, being used to refer to popular movements of left as well as right. But it's not accurate to equate the two.

On the left, popular movements are increasingly horizontal, cooperative and reflective of a belief not in a single struggle, but in the commonality between different struggles to shake off inequalities that affect people based on their identities - ethnicity, sexuality, gender - and stand together in solidarity.

On the right, popular movements are emotional, exclusionary and 'competitive' - highlighting difference between groups of people and pitting them against each other, even against good sense. These are the so-called 'populist' movements. It is a populist idea that one vote is enough to settle something in a democracy.

Like he idea that the referendum ended the conversation, that the will of the people was crystalised in one popular vote - which is clearly undermined by the fact that any political party could stand at a future election on a manifesto to stop Brexit, and upon winning a majority have the right to implement it.

The populist sentiment is a trap that Theresa May fell into the moment she tried to claim the referendum mandate for her own government. It was aggravated by the fact that she hasn't been able to covert the referendum result into a Parliamentary majority - functionally necessary to delivering any change.

With the referendum vote in her pocket, Theresa May triggered a snap election and stood on a party manifesto that promised to deliver Brexit. But she failed to win a majority. And in that failure was exposed the problem with the referendum in the first place: there wasn't, and still isn't, a party of Brexit with a Parliamentry mandate to deliver it.

Lincoln and the Union

In a democracy, the ideal is that even those who lose out most in the result of a poll will be able to appreciate the importance of respecting the will of the majority - it's a key aspect of democracy. Populists have been quick to label their Remainer opponents as undemocratic sore losers.

However, with the Brexit referendum, the populist Brexiter side has exploited their temporary majority and failed to respect the fact that majoritarianism is two sided: yes, the will of the majority needs to be respected. But democracy also means that the will of the majority can change. There is no final say.

The trouble with that fact is that it doesn't quite have the emotional reasonance of 'one vote and done' - it doesn't feel as good. It doesn't feel as cathartic. Yet it's at the core of why a minority should respect the will of the majority. Some day, you may change their minds. You may be the majority.

In an old biography of Abraham Lincoln, there is a discussion of his view of the importance of the political union and disavowal of secession. He had questioned the right to secession, asking, "Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain itself?"

Following Lincoln's stance against secession as undermining a democratic political union, his biographer asks:

"...if by democratic government is meant the rule of the majority, may there not be occasions when the majority is tyrannical or where the division of opinion between majority and minority is so acute, that the minority is entitled to leave?"

Lincoln had argued that adhering to majority rule, properly held in restraint by constitutional checks and balances, was not only a good, but a safeguard against the severed consequences of undermining majority rule - chaos, disorder, the threat of war.

As Lincoln said, "that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets." To Lincoln, elections and majority rule held out always the possibility that the majority might be persuaded and would change it's mind at a subsequent election.

That while a minority must adapt and integrate to the majority conditions - and could, perhaps should, be helped along to do so - it would still be able to seek to peacefully win over the majority. Laid plain, that democracy, that majority rule, was never to be seen as final.

May and the Union

Theresa May has her own Unionism. For her part, it has driven her to pursue a particularly single-minded path. One that does not really account for, especially, the divergent path upon which Scotland is travelling compared to the rest of the UK.

Theresa May has caught herself in a difficult position, of jealously holding one union while dissolving another - in opposing one secession while enacting another, a confusing circumstance of competing sovereignties.

Arguing against dissolving the British Union, while also arguing for the permanence of the referendum vote, May finds herself caught in an inconsistent position - that the Union cannot be dissolved, but it also will not allow for the changing of minds.

That position undermines the point of democratic majority rule. As Lincoln argued, the preservation of the Union is in large part achieved by acknowledging that there is no end point to a debate - that there is no definitive, inalienable vote.

Theresa May has pulled out all stops to protect her position, the mandate she claims and the policies she pursues, especially Brexit. The result has been that she has turned to the arguments populist right for justification of her actions - the Brexit was a final vote, there can be no change of position.

Legitimising the positions of the populist right is a very dangerous game to play, but as Conservative leader Theresa May inherited a legacy of taking advantage of the over loud and amplified grumbling and scapegoating of the far right.

The Conservatives have spent a long time courting the rise of the far right, feeding off the populist energy to attack Labour and the Liberals. But it's a source of energy that comes with a high cost, giving light and air to emotive scapegoating.

From the beginning, the Conservative plan for a referendum - spawned of a need to satisfy the right-wing energy it was exploiting - didn't really factor in the possibility that the Leave campaign would win the public vote.

Conservative leader David Cameron resigned, having backed Remain as the Prime Minister in a deeply pro-Remain Parliament. With no Parliamentary majority for Brexit, the country was thrown into political turmoil - which May has tried to navigate.

Her failing was to try and do so without a proper constitutional mandate, gained in the form of a Parliamentary majority from an election with an explicit Brexit manifesto commitmnt. She waited too long to pursue that, trusting instead to exluding Parliament in favour of using executive power to forge ahead.

Democracy never ends

When the question is settled, the post-Brexit Union will be defined by this period in time. Disrespect for democratic process, political division, ignoring or exploiting well-established constitutional conventions - all of these things will feed into the new shape of the British Union, whether it remains European for the long haul or ultimately pulls away.

Theresa May has allowed the far-right populist view of democracy - as a competition not a compromise, pitting ideas against each other for mastery - to infect the mainstream and take route in the public consciousness. These represent lasting damages inflicted in pursuit of short term political goals. May will have to reflect on that.

The reality is that the referendum vote could never have been binding, but the view it expressed needed to be respected. That has never really happened. Theresa May and the Conservatives didn't go to the electorate for a Brexit mandate until a long time after the fact. By then, moods had begun to shift.

Brexit was always undermined by the absense of a mandate to deliver it - a party, or parties, explicitly elected on a manifesto commitment to deliver it, awarded the power by the electorate to do so in the form of a Parliamentary majority.

Now, with the deal an unsupportable mess, public opinion is polling as even less inclined. And Parliament remains ill-disposed towards Brexit. Saying that there is no justification for further votes undemocratically protects the power of a majority that may now have become the minority.

Is a second referendum, the People's Vote, the answer?

The first referendum resolved little, as it didn't produce the political conditions within the constitutional framework to deliver on the 'Brexit mandate'. Can another referendum do anything more than simply affirm one of the positions?

Another referendum will still need the explicit mandate from an election to deliver on the public will, if it is to have the legitimate power to implement the decision. In the end, the only way out of this mess is to return to democracy.

Populism sees an end to democracy in the satisfaction of it's own will - the realisation of it's own supremacy. But democracy, to be a valid basis for political union, has no end point. There is no definitive say. Only limited mandates that expire.

The Brexit mandate is close to expiration - largely thanks to the failures of the Conservative party, who brought forward the first referendum and failed to empower it. What comes next must be instructed and empowered by the people.