700,000-strong People’s Vote march denounced by regressive “left”

By Andrew Coates at Tendance Coatesy:

It’s just a ‘big business agenda’, says Socialist Worker:

Huge march for a ‘People’s Vote’ boosts the big business agenda  by Sarah Bates.

The People’s Vote is a cross party alliance with warmongering spin doctor Alastair Campbell giving leadership. Many people have pointed out that as director of communications and spokesperson for Tony Blair’s Labour Party he ignored a march against the invasion of Iraq which was three times the size of Saturday’s.

The organised left were largely absent on the march although there was a number of Labour Party banners. There was virtually no trade union presence.

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Whatever the individual motivation of marchers, it is a vehicle to deliver the big business agenda of defending the single market and the neoliberal, racist EU.

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…the People’s Vote campaign is a desperate bid by sections of the ruling class to maintain the status quo.

The Morning Star carries on in the same vein:

Their patronising demand for a “People’s” Vote, with its implication that extraterrestrials or farm animals voted to leave first time round, oozes New Labour marketing style.

Whereas obstacles were placed in the way of the Stop the War Coalition in 2003, from media misrepresentation or censorship to Blair government attempts to prevent marchers gathering in Hyde Park for fear of “damaging the grass,” the neoliberal media, including the BBC, has been wholeheartedly behind the People’s Vote project.

Neither of these two accounts mention the Left Bloc on the March, organised by Another Europe is Possible.

Walsall Wadical Giles Fraser takes another approach,

The pious Padre’s answer for the Walsall unwashed?

Giles Fraser on People’s Vote:

If you are not religious, you may not like the following parallel. But the core appeal of Christianity is that it imagines a God that is not distant, but that has made himself close to ordinary lived experience by being born as a human in a shed, and has lived among us. This is a God that seeks closeness to people in their concrete reality, so much so that they call Him “Abba”, an intimate term that is better translated “Daddy” than the stern Victorian-sounding “Father”. Today’s global capitalism is a very different sort of religion. In theological terms, it is a form of Deism: a distant god that creates everything but does not intervene in the world. It is a god with whom there is no interaction.

The emotional core of Brexit, and the reason I remain a passionate Brexiter, despite all its problems, is that it seeks to collapse the distance between power and ordinary people.

A proper report from the left:

Workers’ Liberty on the 20 October anti-Brexit demonstration

Workers’ Liberty went on the People’s Vote demonstration on 20 October with placards (see below), red flags, banners, stalls, and chant sheets.

Ours was the only organised left-wing presence on the demonstration. The full count is not yet in, but we must have sold about 300 copies of Solidarity on the demonstration, as well as books, pamphlets, etc., and collected contact details from many people who want to keep in touch.

We distributed the “Left Against Brexit” leaflet produced by the Nottingham and Sheffield Left Against Brexit groups.

We distributed chant sheets. We joined the “Left Bloc” organised by “Another Europe is Possible”, and most of the bloc took up our chants. They were the only chants anywhere on the demo to go beyond “we want a people’s vote” and “bollocks to Brexit”, as far as we could tell.

The demonstration numbers are reported as 700,000, and it was certainly huge. The speakers at the end were more on a Lib-Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru wavelength than left-wing: the middle-of-the-road Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, was probably the most left-wing.

There was hardly any Labour Party presence as such. We came across many Labour voters and Labour members on the march. Like the majority of Labour supporters and members, according to many polls, they oppose Brexit, and are unhappy with the Labour leaders’ fence-sitting on the issue.

There were very few banners from Labour Parties or union branches, or indeed from any organisations, on the huge march. The marchers were on average a more prosperous, more Lib-Dem-ish crowd than those who join other leftish protest marches, and non-white marchers were a smaller minority than they are in London’s general population; but given the huge overall size of the march, it was also a big turnout of non-white marchers.

Our aim now is to expand and step up the activity of the network of local “Left Against Brexit” groups.

For a broader analysis:

Lexit Undermines the Left  by Dr Peter J. Verovšek:

In addition to betraying the international principles of socialism, the left case for Brexit is also an example of bad political judgment. To start, it is unclear that EU regulations are the primary fetter on traditional socialism today. Many EU member-states manage to be much less neoliberal than the UK, endorsing precisely the policies – including virtually free university tuition and public control over rail and other transport infrastructure – that the Lexiteers desire and which European law does nothing to hinder.

Moreover, while the EU may frustrate some leftist initiatives, within the UK European regulations actually often serve leftist goals by protecting consumers, worker’s rights, and the environment. The situation is different in Greece, where the EU has indeed enforced brutal market liberalisation. However, England is not Greece and the EU’s effects differ depending on the national context. This explains why the majority of the UK’s left-wing parties (Labour, Green, Scottish National, Plaid Cymru, SDLP, Sinn Féin and Left Unity) and trade unions not only campaigned for Remain, but also continue to oppose Brexit.

Most importantly, the case for Lexit ignores the right-wing roots of the EU referendum. It is true that the left case for Brexit is not based on the kinds of xenophobic, intolerant, anti-migrant rhetoric that exemplifies support for Britain’s exit from the EU on the right. However, supporting the same policies as the far right means that Lexit can conceivably be coopted by these unsavoury elements.

This fear is not merely theoretical. The rapid transformation of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) from a Euroskeptic party focused on the problems of the euro into a far movement sets a worrying precedent. In arguing for the breakup of the Eurozone, the AfD quickly attracted voters and support from the ultra-nationalist right. As a result, a movement that started out making cogent economic arguments – arguments many on the left share – soon turned into a vehicle for ethnic hatred and nationalism as its leadership of academic economist was replaced by supporters of the far right and anti-migrant protesters.

The same outcome threatens the British left if it abandons its international, cosmopolitan orientation. In trying to woo Brexit voters by promising to limit immigration to the UK the left also distracts from its actual diagnosis of the pathologies of the present. Insofar as Labour truly believes that an overreliance on market mechanisms – such as deregulation and privatisation – is to blame for the current situation, it needs to make this argument without scapegoating migrant workers in order to woo English nationalists.

Conclusion

Does this mean that the EU is a social democratic paradise? By no means. Like many on the left, I oppose European directives requiring competition in the provision of public services, court decisions that imperil international collective bargaining, as well as its suppression of Greek democracy. However, these are problems and policies that are best opposed from within the EU.

Given the global nature of contemporary problems – including rising inequality, capital flight and tax avoidance, as well as global climate change – it is irresponsible to abandon supranational European political institutions that offer some hope for politics to ‘catch up’ with global markets. Instead of counterproductively supporting Brexit, the British left should push for change within the EU where it can make a real difference at the global, systemic level.

This post represents the views of the author and neither those of the LSE Brexit blog nor of the LSE.

Dr Peter J. Verovšek is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics/International Relations at the Department of Politics, University of Sheffield.