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| Fighting neoliberalism! Distilling the core message. |
This week my mother in law got her Irish citizenship thru. Both my mother and father in law have a long relationship with the Netherlands. My mum and dad have recently bought a home to retire to in Andalucia. My auntie and uncle retired to Spain 15 years ago. My cousin lives there too. I have several mates who live in the rest of the EEA. My next door neighbour is an Irish Belgian. A number of my comrades, neighbours and friends are rEEA/EU citizens. I have been a socialist since I became an adult.
I have visited or passed thru most of the countries in the EU. I have never once considered myself British - as a state, I've always felt the United Kingdom is a compound colonial crime. This to me seems as simple and logical as breathing air, or rolling my Rs - why would I want to be trapped here, if there is no progress on Scotland becoming a democracy?
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| A popular movement for hard Brexit? |
I have long been interested in, as a result of being Scottish, and trying not to be a complete idiot, how a polyglot society can have a monoglot world view stamped on it by state power.
The EU has played an important role in fighting back against Nation state imperial Nationalist chauvinism towards sub-state nation and regional and minority languages. It helped, alongside a longstanding popular movement, to cajole the UK into adopting devolution against a Prime Minister in Tony Blair who deeply resented the idea.
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| Some more #Lexit. |
Today we see very clearly in the starkness of the Brexiteering scions of society: they are the shits - the Tories, the racists, the 'no to indyref2' bottom feeders, who in Aberdeen, seek to wreck Aberdeen, because they despise the poor, despise change, despise foreigners.
These people have presided over the biggest rise in hate crimes in recorded history. They have terrorised minorities. They have described 3,500,000 or so people living here in this state as "immigrant labour" - the party which claims to represent labour has been most forceful in explaining that they are the reason employers have lowered wages, casualised industries, jeuked social responsibilities, attacked collective bargaining, and swicked the taxman and their employees out of countless millions that they have given shareholders, but it's the workers fault the party of labour say. Just like it is women's fault they entered the workplace, and lowered wages (I heard nobody say, yet)?
And in so doing they have empowered the most right wing political movement since Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech set loose a very similar reactionary movement, and their supporters have not so much whimpered a note of contritibn.
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| Some more of the progressive consequences of #Lexit |
Indeed they think attacking and destroying the lives and plans of millions is an entirely honourable thing to do, because many workers back them. And many of those workers are salivating at the entirely inaccurate idea that if they sack and deport the "immigrants" those jobs would go to "the native born".
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| Who will listen to the forgotten white working class? |
I'm sickened by it all. What sickens me most is that people who claim to be socialists are gravitating more and more to ideas which an gramme of backbone would ensure they'd never countenance.
Apparently the EU is neoliberal, the single market is neoliberal, freedom of movement is neoliberal, so a neighbour, a comrade, a friend, a colleague - their existence is neoliberal. So they'd back a nativist movement whose core ambition is 'repatriation' (ethnicly cleansing the UK) because they've told themselves a childish morality tale sufficient in black and white thinking that they are unable to recognise all these millions of souls that they are desperate to do harm to as somehow fully human like them, with lives, families, futures and needs.
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| More opposition to neoliberalism! Fab. |
Not only that, these "comrades", these "socialists" have done this during a febrile time of the rise of the right, just this weekend backing the party of "labour"'s attacks on migrants which were tactically designed to put clear xeniphobic water between them and the Tories on free movement, bouncing the Tories into a more extreme anti-immigrant position this week.
So much for the left wing opposition - they are acting more like a right wing ginger group, riding a wave of populist resentment against immigration, forcing the right wing coup that has taken the Tories into ever more extreme positions. I have come now to the point where I literally cannot stand 'the left' and their rudderless ambulance chasing, they venal inability to recognise international political, diplomatic and economic complexity and interdependency, or above all their total inability to parse the politics of the situation or seek and cite historical example.
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| And if we send them home, then the bosses will be nice to the workers again, wages will rise, and there will be jobs for all. That's totally how capitalism works, right? |
They are helping to lead us all into state and a society the likes of which Enoch Powellites would have considered a great victory. They have airbrushed out the fascist assassination of a pro-immigration MP. They have ignored, minimised or explained away a massive rise in hate crimes, an imperial dismissal of Scottish and Irish democracy. They have collapsed a peace process in Ireland. They have legitmised the terrorism, attacks, and indeed murders that many vulnerable minorities have experienced as a result of this 'movement' they are tagging along with. The worst part of it is that they cite that the 'native working class' is for this, and so that means it's progressive, as if that same 'native' working class was up in arms and universally protesting about imperialism, chauvinism and genocide in this fousty empire's glory days.
