Business as usual for bubbles within bubbles
John Lanchester has an excellent article in the latest issue of the London Review of Books called Brexit Blues. This is not another shirt-shredding piece in which a cosmopolitan liberal bemoans the actions of the deluded masses who voted to tear Britain from its place at the heart of Europe. What it is, in fact, is a beautiful summary of the political context that made such a vote so inevitable.
I read the article this morning and it reinforced some of the feelings I had after attending a breakfast panel discussion yesterday about the effects of the Brexit vote on the UK’s tech business sector.
In reality, it became a discussion of the London tech sector but that was to be expected. The panelists and the audience were people who, for the most part, worked in — or were connected to — the tech sector in London.
More depressingly, in the light of the Lanchester article, the dominant message from the panelists was that, whether the UK leaves the EU or not, the key thing will be to continue much as before. So, the message sent by almost 17.5 million voters, therefore, was something, if not exactly to be ignored, at least to be circumvented. The very idea of continuing exactly as before is, in this context, almost obscene. It smacks of a despotism — or a parallel reality — that considers the voters unimportant.
In essence, the political decision to leave the EU was seen only from an economic point of view. Tech business, so dependent on the young for both energy and ideas, is already captured by the neoliberal project and sees only profits and growth as its purpose. It counts only thos among the young who join the team. Here is Lanchester:
“One of the things you notice, travelling around the country talking to people about economics, is that young people in particular feel they are living in an economic system rather than a political one. They think about jobs and paying the rent and whether they will ever own a home and, increasingly, about student debt, and they don’t see politics as having anything to say to them about those issues. That’s because the economics are the same irrespective of which political party is in charge.”
The tech sector will continue to rely on skilled migrants and seek to exploit free trade for its growth and profits. There was no talk of using tech to alleviate the issues that caused so many to vote ‘leave’.
At one point, there was mention of creating a national digital training scheme to ensure that sufficient numbers of the digitally skilled would be available to meet the demands of tech businesses in the coming years.
Suggestions were made that much of this digital training could be aimed at those in areas who have lost jobs through the decline of heavy industry and manufacturing. In almost the next breath, the UK was praised for labour laws that make hiring and firing so much easier than in places like France. A perfect encapsulation of the bubble in action. Here’s an apposite Lanchester quotation:
“The word ‘precarious’ has as its underlying sense ‘depending on the favour of another person’. Somebody can take away the things you have whenever they feel like it. The precariat, as this new class is called, might not know the etymology, but it doesn’t need to: the reality is all too familiar.”
Here’s another, for good measure:
“To be born in many places in Britain is to suffer an irreversible lifelong defeat — a truncation of opportunity, of education, of access to power, of life expectancy.”
The tech sector in London is a bubble within a bubble as much as the financial sector. Its natural constituency, for all that it looks inwards for a market as much as outwards, are those working across a global tech sector. London may very well be ‘open for business’ and remain open for business, no matter what happens in the next few years, but this is unlikely to be mirrored by hashtags proclaiming #Sunderlandisopen or #Swanseaisopen.
This navel-gazing attitude, so typical of many business sectors, bodes ill for any attempt at reclaiming a national sense of industry. The free market fairy continues to hold sway; profit and growth remain the only economic drivers in the game. Those who voted to leave the EU — whether in the hope that it really would contribute to some economic improvement or, more likely, to stick two fingers up at the business elite who consider them to be surplus to requirements — will soon discover that their vote will do no more than change the rules and the changed rules will continue to favour those running the game.
It’s probably worth ending with a final Lanchester quotation. This one is a stark statement of what the voters were expected to base their decision on. Of course, facts were probably the last thing on anyone’s mind.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a time in British politics when so many people in public life spent so much time loudly declaring things they knew not to be true.”
