The Uses Of Disaster
The Shock Doctrine of Brexit.
Theresa May is a politician on the edge. After two years of bungled negotiations, she has whipped out a deal that literally no one seems to like — not even her. She grimaces in defence of her own political legacy like a magician at a child’s birthday party, rummaging in their own top hat in the certain knowledge that the rabbit is already dead. None of this should surprise us. She’s spent her troubled premiership trying to fend off competing critics and appease vested interests with vague, contradictory promises impossible to actually deliver. The DUP are unhappy. The frothing hard-Brexiteers are unhappy. The far right are unhappy. Many rightwing remainers are unhappy, from inside the party and outside. The left, obviously, is unhappy. And everyone is for a moment united in bewilderment.
But with the vultures circling, May and her team know that defeat of the bill would likely spell an end to her leadership — and strengthen the case for a general election just when the Labour party are edging ahead in the polls. All political careers end in defeat — but some end more dramatically than others, much in the way that a car journey ends when the car slams into a brick wall. So, she has taken a leaf from the thousand shameless plutocrats before her — that where popularity fails to galvanise obedience, fear works just as well.
The message is clear: either it’s this deal, or no deal at all — a choice between reluctant pragmatism and national suicide. But here’s the thing — the ruse is paper-thin.
Reports from her team, and admissions from the newly-rehabilitated Amber Rudd tell all. Scaremongering about the possibility of a No Deal is attempting to terrify the nation — its markets, its electorate, and the more pusillanimous reaches of the Labour party — into passing a bill they hate for fear of avoiding a nightmarish No-Deal scenario which would see planes grounded, trade blocked, and millions of citizens scrabbling to stockpile food and basic medicine.
May and Rudd have both admitted that if the deal was to be rejected, then the decisions would fall to parliament — whether to press for amendments, or to trigger the kind of ‘substantial political change’ Michel Barnier has indicated would provide sufficient grounds for renegotiation, or extending or revoking Article 50. In either scenario, parliament has the power to slap amendments on any bill to prevent a No-Deal situation. If they want to. For a political caucus known to get hot and heavy at the idea of parliamentary sovereignty, May’s acolytes now balk at the idea that it could prove their undoing. Clearly, parliamentary sovereignty looks a lot more appealing when you’re sovereign in parliament.
Given the mechanisms of parliament, No-Deal seems unthinkable. But it is nonetheless, possible. Those hard-Brexit Tories willing to sink the deal from within — Dominic Raab, Esther McVey, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the rest — have done so because it is not quite vindictive enough to workers or careless enough with environmental or consumer protections to realise their fantasy of turning Britain into a neoliberal nightmare-scape of ‘Singapore on Thames’, where capital roams free and citizens are locked into penury and debt. (Setting aside for a moment the sheer craven instinct to distance themselves from a toxic deal for which they are partly responsible.) And to realise this policy platform, the economic shock of a no-deal Brexit may actually prove useful. Where the idea of disaster is a useful tactic for May, the shock of actual disaster may prove a useful reality for her party opponents.
The EU has played a far from glorious role in protecting UK workers — it’s not the panacea that some liberals make it out to be. Nonetheless, it remains the case that vast swathes of our laws our laws and practises are woven into to the huge iron heart of Europe’s bureaucracy — and a sudden Brexit promises to rip out all of those stitches at once. In the shock of a no-Brexit, legislative gaps can be plugged with the most. In the midst of economic and constitutional chaos, those at the helm would find it easy to push their radical reforms through. A country suddenly stripped of human rights laws, environmental law, worker protections, consumer protections and trading regulations, a country scared enough to accept parliamentary despotism — it’s a playground for hard-Brexiteers.
No-Deal is a risk of course. But one many are willing to take, insulated by their wealth from the cruellest reaches of whatever economic disaster could be visited on the country by crashing out without a deal. Eye-watering wealth is a kind of lifelong crisis insurance which makes it easier to take fabulous risks with other people’s lives. (To see this in action, look at Kim Kardashian and Kanye hiring private firefighters to protect their house from wildfires whilst their poorer neighbours blazed. To see this in action, look at the 2008 financial crash. To see this in action, look at the First World War).
This is the kind of nightmare politics-without-people that many Left Remain voters feared when they ticked the No box despite their reservations about Europe. Whilst the Lexiteers diagnosed the EU as a fatally neoliberal institution, designed to smother any socialist ambitions in the UK, the ambitions of the Tory stewards made it likely that Brexit would be a killing cure; a brain bleed requires a trip to the doctor and not the guillotine.
Of course, some industrialists are still terrified of a no-deal future. Sometimes we talk about ‘capitals interests’ as if they are monolithic — as if great battles both metaphorical and gruesomely literal haven’t been fought to sort out the conflicting interests of capitalists. Such a battle is currently being fought over the future of Britain. The interests of finance capital are not necessarily the same as private healthcare companies, or those of the automotive industry or the tech sector. The interests of arms manufacturers are not necessarily those of US agribusinesses to whom Liam Fox, arch-partisan of untrammelled free trade, is determined to flog off UK agriculture.
To wrangle with these competing interests, the stewards of British capital are forced to confront the questions of — what kind of industries will be prioritised? What kind of labour the economy will be founded on? What kind of settlement will be founded between state and capital interests, and how these are enshrined? Is this settlement is best helmed by the the supra-state of the EU, or by Britain’s age-old coalition of international capital and domestic aristocracy?
And these questions aren’t new. They have defined the slow and steady financialisation of the British economy over the last fifty years, the rise of new industries and the collapse of the old. But Brexit lends them an unusual urgency. Precisely because of the tempting contours of different disasters which, for them, look a lot like opportunity.
