Smokeandsteam out of interest which country or countries in the world would you point to as places we should strive to be more like, now we have this freedom, in the way they run their ‘national economy’?
As I pointed out earlier in the thread…
Put in its simplest form the benefits of Brexit can be summarized as: greater democracy and democratic control over the national economy, the removal of undemocratic constraints on state aid, planning, investment and management of the economy, more progressive immigration rules and an escape from a doomed EU neo-liberal project which will inevitably lead to further political and economic union and which will inevitably lead to further withering away of democratic accountability and control. As night follows day right wing populism will continue to grow across Europe in response.
Some of us can see that - in the midst of a cost of living crisis and recession - that the debate about how we should respond to it will deepen and sharpen. Questions about public ownership, nationalisation, planning, democratic control are everywhere. The trade unions have scored spectacular victories and disputes are happening now across the economy. A general strike is back on the agenda. The range of levers that government can pull – procurement, import and export control, public ownership, regulation, investment in infrastructure, subsidies for new industries, trade policy – are easier, simpler and made more possible without the dead hand of the Troika (the ECB, the EU and the IMF).
As I said in post #10797:
What would be a disaster for the left, compounding other disasters, would be to now swim along with liberalism in assuming that the answer and the necessary debate about these systemic problems is best done through the prism of the EU. What is needed instead is a vision for what a better economy: based on economic justice, collective bargaining and a generational shift in money and wealth away from the 1% and back towards the rest of us: and to consider how that might be achieved post Brexit. Neither the EU or the existing order in the UK offers anything like this.
As we are on the Brexit thread I will say again that its real tragedy was the defeat of a disorientated Labour leadership and a manifesto that at least pointed in that direction, and would in a post Brexit economy have taken a small but seismically important step away from the path we've been on since 1973. As for those who say an alternative vision is too ambitious and can't be done I'd point out that the left used to possess such ambition and ideas and went out and argued for them and stood by them:. In fact, in 1973 the Labour Party's Alterative Economic Strategy set out an economic plan - also ground in an anguished debate about the EU - based on a political understanding of economic policy as class struggle and aimed to impose greater working class political control on each of the forms of capital. A similar approach is needed in 2022 to unpick the damage of the last 50 years.
It is only possible to deny these possibilities now exist if you assume that Britain will have right wing governments in perpetuity. That Truss and Starmer are undefeatable. I don't accept that for one second. It's bizarre that people on here get away with it, given that we came within a few thousand votes of a Government in 2017 that would have been genuinely social democratic. Their authority diminishes with each new crisis and their utter lack of a vision or credible response, the desire for change as the perma-crisis lengthens and deepens.
The other, equally ludicrous charge, is to pretend that having left the EU in 2020 with a dysfunctional tory government (elected in no small measure to due to Labour Remainers) and the worst pandemic in living memory that a) everything that has gone wrong is due to Brexit and that b) there are no benefits and the proof is the last 2 years. Both arguments deliberately evade the facts of a global capitalist economic crisis and empty out the need for struggle and organization on our side: pre-requisites' for change in our favour at every point in history.
It used to be the left who welcomed change and the right that wanted things to remain the same. Now now. The inability to envisage what a progressive government or even better us could do - and the concomitant - meek and craven argument that the arrangements that existed up until 2016 were the 'best we can hope for' is indicative of a colossal and profound political disorientation.
That
bimble is what I’m fighting for. Not to copy what other countries are doing.
