Our rotten state will be replaced

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As a Guardian email notes this morning:

A no-deal Brexit would rip about £260 a year from the average UK household budget, analysis predicts. The Resolution Foundation and Sussex University academics say “just about managing” families in the UK's poorer regions have the most to lose from trade negotiations failing, with significant price rises forecast on a range of goods, including 8% for dairy products and 6% for meat, while car prices would jump 5.5%. The study found that the impact of rising prices would add 1.1% to the cost of living for the poorest 20% of households, against 0.8% for the richest 20%.

So the Rees-Moggs of this world will see little impact from crashing out of the EU but very unsurprisingly many families living on the borders of getting by will be very hard hit.

Last night I was in discussion at Norwich Quaker Meeting with George Lakey and a lively audience. George openly supports passive civil disobedience to oppose the power of economic elites. That is how the Nordic economic model developed. One audience member suggested we have already seen a form of that in the Brexit vote.

I disagreed: that was the token gesture, in my opinion; almost the equivalent of signing an online petition. The real opposition will come when people have simply had enough of the imposition upon them by a corrupt elite hanging on to power in an obviously illegitimate democracy that hands them authority in a way that society clearly does not want.

When will that tipping point arise? I am not sure. It did in Iceland after 2008. It will here, I suspect, after and as a result of the next crash. At that point the fact that the old will have died and that the new is waiting to be born will become too apparent to be ignored. And then peaceful demonstration that makes clear that those who have thought themselves able to rule must give way to those with the publicly backed authority to do so will become too strong to resist.

Peaceful revolutions do happen. They are the way to consign a rotten state to history. We are living in a rotten state. It's just a matter of when and not if its time to be reformed will come. But I am confident it will.


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