I was asked by an informed commentator what my predictions for the UK economy might be yesterday. The predictions were requested to cover the political as well as economic spheres.
The discussion took place for 90 minutes. I will not replicate it all here. Instead I focus on some key issues.
First, there will be no general election. The remote chance of this has been killed by the TIG.
Second, there will be no second vote, because no majority for it will be found in the Commons.
Third, this means Remain is now off the table. The UK is leaving the EU.
Fourth, I could not say how the UK will leave the EU and still doubt that anyone can. Overall I rate no deal much the most likely option because of the absence of a majority for anything else. But May might still, just, get her way from MPs desperate to avoid no deal.
Fifth, either way the UK's economic prospects are grim, although they are worse in the case of no deal.
Sixth, either way there will be major unrest in the UK. No deal will create a furious backlash from people promised a promised land who will very definitely not get it. The same people will be deeply angry with May's deal when they realise that it is not a final deal at all, and the process will just roll on and on and on, with little immediate apparent change. Remainers will be keeping their heads down. These reactions might be ugly and unpredictable. The failure of normal government is possible, and who knows what might happen then.
Seventh, assuming that a semblance of order can be restored after Brexit, the economy will still be heading for massive change. This would be happening without Brexit. The decline in car buying; mobile phone buying and so much more; as well as debt stress, are all real phenomena. What they suggest is that we have an economy that is realising that its practices are unsustainable, come what may. A debt crisis is likely, and with it bank and pension fund stress on very large scale, which could trigger recession in its own right.
Eighth, the risk of the suspension of normal government in the UK is high to deal with post-Brexit chaos. Assuming that the risk of neo-fascist government is avoided, assisted by anger at those likely to lead such an arrangement over their failure to deliver on Brexit promises, then a left off centre government that leaves beyond the social democratic and democratic socialist belief in the growth of material well-being as the sole indicator of success is possible when this situation ends.
Ninth, in that scenario a Green New Deal is likely to emerge as a significant narrative. The drive for full employment, which a new-fascist government would deliver in different ways, would be the motivating factor driving support.
But this, and tenth, in turn will demand substantial change of UK financial institutions from government (PR), to the central bank (the end of inflation targeting, our tax authority (a shift to genuinely progressive tax bases) and much more.
What I did, then, suggest, was a scenario of rapid and deeply disruptive change, whatever happens. We're in for a bumpy ride, come what may.
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A bumpy ride sounds like you still get there in the end. Are you sure about that Craig?
Who is Craig?
So sorry Richard, I had also been reading Craig Murray and conflated you!
Forgiven!
You could also factor in the effects of potential break-up of the UK, although it may take some time for it to fall apart.
For a number of reasons, I have long felt that NI might be the one to cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down: the absence of an NI Legislature and direct rule by Westminster has resulted in budgets frozen for the last two years and the impacts of population growth and inflation are starting to hurt. There are also indications that the NI, which voted to Remain in the EU Referendum, is gradually shifting towards favouring unification with the Republic. Add in the maverick nature of the DUP on which May’s Gov’t is dependent for lobby-fodder, the smouldering “Ash for Cash” scandal and you’ve got an increasingly unstable situation, where removal of support for May could bring down the UK Gov’t.
Scotland’s situation has been widely discussed here and there is nothing to suggest that its direction of travel has changed. That leaves Wales where a very recent development has been the formation of a group to work towards Welsh independence. That’s currently a long way off, but if NI and Scotland split off, it will accelerate the debate in Wales.
If all that comes to pass, the political, administrative and economic impact on England will be massive and, I suspect, incalculable.
To suggest England will be humbled is to understate things, by a mile
Indeed England – used advisedly – will be humbled, given that it is the United Kingdom that has an automatic seat on the UN Security Council, with its accompanying veto.
Little England, aka RumpUk, will hardly be able to argue it could keep that status, which would go, I would say, to one or other of the countries it fought in WW2 – Germany or Japan.
That would really be “taking back control”, wouldn’t it?
I find your prognosis deeply depressing. Regardless of one’s leave/remain views, I think almost everyone agrees that there are many different forms of leave, from granite hard at one extreme to brino at the other and no one route commands majority support. As a result, whatever is done will be contrary to the wishes of most people in parliament and the country as a whole. In such circumstances, the only sensible thing to do is that which can most easily be undone and leaves all options open for the future, i.e. withdraw the Art 50 notice and we all go back to where we were three years ago.
For a government to do anything else and for any MP to support them in doing so, knowing that it is against the wishes of most of the people and damaging to the health, wealth, happiness and wellbeing of the country and the people in it, is treason and should be prosecuted as such.
If in the future, a political party really wants to leave the EU, it can put it in its manifesto, set out exactly what it will mean, suffer proper scrutiny during a general election campaign and if elected, do what it said it was going to do. At least it will have a degree of democratic legitimacy that the current situation completely lacks.
Finally, can we please also agree never ever, ever to have a referendum about anything ever again.
Yes
I take it you are speaking, in this instance, on behalf of England…?
Do I have a right to speak for England
I fear your pessimism is close neighbour to reality, Richard, but on one point I do not – yet – quite agree.
It may be wishful thinking, but there does just – if only just – remain a slight chance that the Commons may force a new public vote. Some MPs, by the slightest of twitches, have begun to show signs that they realise that a mega disater is rumbling towards not only the country (about which they have seemed to care little) but also towards themselves and their careers. If – and I admit it is a very large ‘if’ – this realisation continues to grow as public demonstrations mount, then we may yet get a motion which will get an extension to Article 50 and then/or in the same motion, a referendum on a/the/May’s ‘deal’ v. Remain in the EU. Another large ‘if’ (or two?) may then see the beast buried – if not with a stake through its heart, at least in sufficient obloquy not to rise from its grave for a very long time.
Having spent a career reading, researching and teaching about politics, power and the collapse of an imperial power it is an eerie experience to find oneself living through the arrival of nemesis. Certainly, with or without the merciful relief of a death-bed turn to Remain, the ‘Union’ is certainly dust – and it may well be that the shock(s) delivered by that series of departures may just shake South Britain into new and greener political alignments, which will certainly also be needed in a reunited Ireland and in my independent Scotland.
Of course you do..!
Under first past the post voting, we might-almost certainly- have a party with a majority of seats but not votes.
What will happen to the UK is all guesswork, but none of it is positive.
The situation will be very volatile, economically, socially, and politically, as you mention.
I’m convinced Scotland will want to look for closer ties with the EU, it’s in its interest and it voted to remain. Why should it accept to suffer a recession.
I don’t know about Northern Ireland, but a resurgence of unrest in the absence of a government, and in the continued presence of forces always ready to benefit from fear and chaos, is possible.
Wales is a very long way from splitting, it has depended on Westminster for far too long, it has an Assembly which, though functioning, would need to mature too quickly into full government. So England&Wales, which both voted to leave, can have their way, their recession, which should keep the population under control for a while…too busy to survive.
The mess is impossible to measure. A recession might still cause social unrest, fascists always feed on that. I’m not sure England as a whole could resist it, even if Remain cities do, the propaganda machine, which includes parts of the BBC, is there to prop up the ERG and acolytes.
I’m afraid democracy has allowed these forces to thrive, take hold of the press, the Internet, all popular propaganda tools to brainwash people and make them repeat their mantras until they can no longer think at all, or even see what’s in front of their nose.
An example of this lemming-style blindness is what is happening with Honda.
Yes there are changes in fortunes due to rising environmental awareness and legislation, but Honda itself reported in the Japanese media that the Brexit uncertainty was indeed a decisive factor to leave the UK, where they had invested and planned to develop their new electric models. Still, Swindon people and workers swear blind this decision had nothing to do with Brexit, because the press they read says so, the BBC says so, the government says so.
This brainwashing is powerful, it works all the better when popular culture and education have, over decades, overinflated a sense of importance and exceptionality, and intentionally or not, neglected critical and independent thinking.
The landing will be all the harder.
Agreed
What you failed to mention are the political consequences of Brexit. It is seen as inevitable now that the UK will go four ways, and as someone alluded to, the demise of England and its relegation at the top seat of the UN. The world will look at us stunned.
I’ve got to say that I just do not know what is going to happen now. I really don’t – even horizon and all that.
I still have the view that Parliament will finally tell May to sod off about her BREXIT deal but only once the can-kicking comes to the end of road. And it hasn’t yet.
We know that May’s deal is not really a deal, since the other side quite rightly disagrees with it. So technically there is no deal actually. A deal is usually between a number of sides – not one!
There are some silver linings in all of this though. TIG could very well put paid to May’s BREXIT. What they might offer the electorate and British democracy (or what is left of it) is less concrete, seems more of the same and very weak.
But the other bit of silver is that we have agreed here for some time is that the monolithic parties that are Labour and the Tories are finding it harder to hold together and maybe we will come to the conclusion one day in the not too distant future that PR might be the best way forward to manage a growing number of more diverse political interests? Asking for something so grown up in our country as it is now might seem stupid but you have to have some hope placed somewhere!
The other silver lining for me is the Commons Committee report on social media. I look forward to the day that action follows since we now have an official verdict that the dark side of the net and SM is not contributing positively to democracy and even life choices like whether to have an inoculation or not.
Simon Jenkins reckons politicians do not know what to do about SM. And he maybe right in that it is the same old weak liberal conundrum of balancing individualism with collective control – a big problem in this hyper-individualised world we have created. We (especially liberals – and I’ m not one by the way) need to be more honest about human nature and accept that human beings have many negative as well as positive traits that means that personal human freedom is something that needs to be supervised collectively. We are not all angels. Whereas we think that we behave rationally around money (rationality here meaning that some of us have a tendency to collect as much of it for ourselves as possible) when we look at the social and environmental impacts we find that we are acting irrationally because we are making an enemy of our future whether with pitchforks or climate change.
Out of such social and political low points as we are in come new ideas – and our host RM (top man) has done much to layout in some detail what those ideas could be here on his blog.
So, a new political ideal for me would be a party of political thought that is more successful at balancing the rights of the individual with that of the collective but not based in the old Left or Right wing.
Rather it would be the child of what Neo-liberalism has taught us about greed and short termism and addressing the economic and environmental consequences we now face as a result. Such a new party or political movement also has to understand money – how it is exchanged, the positive power it has as well as the negative, its creation, management and distribution.
Money is for everyone. And we are all entitled to at least enough and let no individual’s (or corporation’s) desires and ambitions thwart the rest of us of having enough or using that money sensibly.
So there you go – I’ve cheered myself up a bit and hope if you have read my input it might have cheered up some of you too.
🙂
I disagree with one point above.
“there will be no second vote, because no majority for it will be found in the Commons.”
The People’s Vote is not a destination; it’s a tactic to break the parliamentary deadlock and as such I think is very much in-play, no matter that there is not now a majority ready to pull the trigger on it. All it will take is:
1. The Labour leadership caves to membership pressure and supports a referendum amendment. I think John McDonnell will be crucial in this, though that’s only judging by his public positioning. Like May, the leadership don’t want their hands on the People’s Vote, any more than they want it on No-Deal. But as long as it comes from the backbenches it has a chance.
2. Sufficiently many remainer Tories (which, in parliament is actually a majority of the party, however much they try to dissemble before their membership) switch to supporting the referendum. They will do this to prevent No-Deal, on the understanding that Labour will allow May’s deal to proceed if that deal is ratified by the electorate. Theresa May herself may end up accepting the referendum, once all other options are exhausted and No-Deal has been taken out of her hands by Parliament.
All this may not happen before 29th March, I can see an extension followed by further months of delay and obfuscation by May, as more and more Conservative members despair of a parliamentary solution.
I don’t claim this is likely. But I don’t find it *unlikely*. What am I missing?
The lack of parliamentary will
No one has mentioned the damage a hard Brexit will do to the Irish Republic (we handle most of their trade) and the Pas de Calais region of France (which handles most of ours). If there is going to be anger on the streets as well as in parliaments, that’s where it will start.
I’m afraid the chickens are well and truly coming home to roost, due entirely to parliament as a whole failing to understand that there is meant to be a very significant difference between a referendum and a election. A referendum, as I understand it, is meant to indicate for any group, large or small, whether there is an appetite among its members to make a serious change in its working arrangement. It would be normal to expect the proposed change to be supported by a large majority, of the order of two thirds, before a decision could be made by its leaders to implement the change in question. For example, in the referendum which took us into Europe originally, there was a majority of well over 70% for the idea that we should join. The referendum result from 2016 showed a very small majority , 52-48 in favour of leaving the EU, and would not have been used to indicate sufficient enthusiasm for change.
Sadly, whoever made a ruling that the referendum should be treated like the result of an election, i.e first past the post, needs his or her head examined. Would a majority of only one vote in the 32 million who expressed an opinion have been good enough to decide that it was the will of the people? Of course that would have been absurd, but no more absurd than accepting a small majority as if it was mandatory.
All I know about the background to the decision to accept any majority as being mandatory, is that parliament was asked the question but refused to even debate the issue.
I’m afraid that this suggests that our MP’s, as a whole group, are seriously lacking in the IQ department, and are about as useful as a flock of sheep in making serious decisions on our behalf.
Major constitutional changes should never by passed by small majorities. James Madison and the other drafters of the US constitution had sufficient wisdom to prevent such folly. Madison recognised that without such checks to what I would term ‘banal-autocratic democracy’ (what Quinton Hogg memorably termed ‘elective dictatorship’), the Republic would not the first political crisis in the new state. The Americans learned this from observing the British Constitution in action, from the inside. We have not.
Ironically the Scottish Devolution referendums tell another tale. The first Devolution referendum, in 1979 approved devolution by 52/48 (would you believe it?), but it failed the test of a late amendment in Parliament inserted to prevent it passing solely by such a narrow majority; the requirement it failed was both to have a majority and be approved by 40% of the electorate; less than 40% of the electorate voted for it. This amendement was very unpopular in Scotland at the time, but the Scots are cautious enough to resist over-reaction. They waited until they could deliver the decisive majority. I think it was wise. I believe that a narrow majority for Devolution, if forced through on the ‘margin’ would have seen Scotland descend into the acrimony into which British politics has fallen, with bitter consequences since 2016.
In the 2016 EU referendum, by forcing through a major constitutional change (with personal loss of citizenship rights in the EU at stake) on a narrow 52/48 majority, Parliament has failed to cope with the acrimonious political ‘fall-out’ created by the political divisions and deep resentments that have inevitably followed. This was an avoidable disaster, but it simply proves that the much vaunted wisdom of our British constitution is not wisdom, after all; but proof of the constitutional senility of the British state.
The second Scottish Devolution referendum in 1997 comfortably produced an unarguable majority for Devolution (74/26 for Q1, 64/36 for Q2), and did not produce the political crisis we now see in Britain; the majorities were decisive: although there is still a small rump of unreconciled Unionists in Scotland who would despatch Holyrood in the twinkling of an eye; if only they could (although few elected political representatives of any Unionist party are willing publicly to acknowledge this constituency). Major constitutional change requires a decisive majority if it is going to work. Period.
Interesting John.
I think that in Scotland things are much easier for independence referenda in that it is quite clear what the people of Scotland think about England! There is a justified (and long held) mistrust of Westminster that goes back years – opinion in Scotland has coalesced around that I think to deliver the sort of majority you describe.
So the Scottish experience although instructive, cannot be seen as some sort of outlier or even justification for the use of referenda to settle these issues in my view. There is a long and unique history between Scotland and England being played out here.
However, in England and Wales it is a different story. The issues here are to do with divide and conquer tactics of the Tory and UKIP parties (and others).
Both parties have played with fascism by over-emphasising small local disgruntlements and effectively nationalising them in most shameful way.
You seem to say that these differences flowed on from the referendum but I would say that they were already there.
The EU has been slandered for years in the media by English politicians; the Tories have managed to blame everyone but themselves for the economy since 2010; UKIP and Mrs May stirred up issues around immigration and then the abuses around the use of social media kicked in. All before the referendum.
All in all then an environment not fit to hold a referendum in, in my view. And still unfit. Perhaps for ever. Referenda can only work in some situations and the subject matter has to be chosen carefully.
The people have to genuinely feel things about the subject – not have the feelings cynically manipulated out of them by fascists.
I found the Irish referendum on same sex marriage to be a very genuine and rather moving in a way – here was a subject matter that was of interest to the people – not of politicians, but the politicians seem to have done their job by enabling people to have their say. Great stuff.
England and Wales are extremely divided places now and referenda must remain off the agenda in my view. Lets play Rugby Union instead (what a match last night in Cardiff!!).
Just how more aware are people now about the consequences of BREXIT – even a good one? I’m not so sure – I just can’t tell. If we have another referendum and all we get is 52% Remain and 48% Leave – what does that tell us? It tells me that it is still too close to do anything and we shouldn’t go there.
Parliament needs to step in and take control.
It might do yet. But then again, it might not.
Some subjects are referendum free zones and EU membership is one of them, such has the debate been corrupted.
An interesting response, but I think it misses my main point; which is not about Scotland. My essential argument is not about referendums either, but rather about the political use of very narrow majorities of any kind to decide major constitutional issues. Narrow majorities are fine for normal politics, where decisions made by one Government may be readily overturned by the electorate at the next election; never more than a few years delayed. Constitutions are different. Narrow majorities should never be used, howsoever ‘democratic’ the process may superficially appear (whether in Parliament, Senate, General Election or Referendum) to make fundamental changes to a Constitution. It is an extremely bad idea; and it is dangerous. It also sets precedents, that are then difficult to move, not least because they become ‘constitutional’.
“You seem to say that these differences flowed on from the referendum but I would say that they were already there”.
No, I didn’t. I made no claim about their pre-existence. Indeed I made a point of referring to the rump of Unionists in Scotland still unreconciled to Devolution; and if the opportunity arose, would use any majority, however brief, however small to extirpate Holyrood (and I am sure a few currently silent politicians on the matter, would readily enough jump on the bandwagon, either to extinguish Holyrood, or reduce it to handling local bin collections if such an opportunity arose).
Of course there are all kinds of feelings, attitudes and prejudices held by diverse groups of people; no matter what the political result of a referendum or election. Following a heavy defeat they may suppress their real thoughts, but not change them. They are politically dormant, not dead.
If you kick over a stone you will find all kinds of things lurking there, which will readily enough thrive in the light and air you provided; especially that provided by our pernicious media. My argument is that in our grossly imperfect, and imperfectable world it is best not, gratuitously to kick over the stone; unless you are prepared for the consequences.
Aside from that, while I feel your pain and appreciate your frustration, frankly I could not make much of your argument.
“the Republic would not survive the first political crisis in the new state.”
Fluffed the keyboard dexterity test, yet again!
No mention of fiscal run on city of london, major motivation for brex .unthinkable or unfeasable . Brextirpation … taxing the mind …