Myself I don't care about Labour, not even about Corbyn the "stupid people" liar any more. So I read that article as a critique of brexit more than one of Labour. I did not like these bits...
Arse to Elbow said:
The "question of identity" isn't really a question but a presumption, and one that trivialises actual conflicts of identity in places such Northern Ireland. For all the talk of a divided nation and ruined Christmas dinners, Britons are not being obliged to choose an identity in an environment where the consequences can be fatal. Yes, an MP was assassinated in 2016, but the idea that people are taking their lives in their hands when they mention Brexit in an unfamiliar pub is ridiculous. Regarding yourself as European is an affinity, like being a liberal, rather than a socially-imposed identity, like being brought up as a Catholic or as a native German-speaker. Citizens of the UK will be no less European outside the EU than the citizens of Norway or Switzerland
Being or even feeling European is just not something anyone wants to shoot each other over. Complaining that people
identifying as European (rather than just
being it as a matter of fact) 'trivialises' sectarian and identarian conflicts elsewhere suggests that identity is only important when it creates conflict, not when it doesn't. So if you want to be listened to, just start shooting people. Then your struggle for identity will be one that can
be trivialized, rather than just being trivial. That's fucking toxic.
Also anyway, there's and always was a strong undercurrent of
I'm not European I'm British! in the leave campaigns I encountered. Not always stated explicitly but it was always there. And then again, British exceptionalism has been a key part of
our 'European project' since 1975.
Arse to Elbow said:
The idea that the EU is non-ideological, that it embodies "rational argument" and implicitly the Enlightenment, is itself pure ideology.
I love this one, as if the idea
Britain Knows Better isn't ideological, the whole shit show is ideological. The nation state is ideological. Representative democracy is ideological. Accepting or denying the validity of a referendum is ideological. This is the Newton's cradle analogy I made. Back and forth, tit for tat, the least meaningful thing anyone can say on the subject.
Arse to Elbow said:
Wren-Lewis's last point - empathy for EU migrants - probably counts a lot for a small number of people with direct personal involvement or a strong sense of ethical obligation, but it isn't a priority for most voters for whom empathy with Latvians is no more salient than empathy with Laotians. This doesn't make them xenophobic or callous /...
Yes, it does, and accepting in any way the notion that not having been born within the bounds of this sceptred isle makes your needs and experiences less important than ours is fucked, utterly
fucked. As a matter of fact it's a major Leave argument on the left, that Fortress Europe's policies of keeping outsiders outside is thoroughly evil and ought to make any right-thinking person want to leave the EU. And yet, here are the same assumptions:
Doesn't matter about Lativans because they're no more important to most people than Laotians, and that's OK because we have personal circumstances that make us vote one way and if that fucks the foreigners' personal circumstances well never mind, they're foreigners. They can just go home.
Did I misread?
And in an apparently left-wing piece ffs.
Then,
Arse to Elbow said:
To claim that empathy with migrants is a major motive is to make the classic error of assuming that what matters to activists is necessarily representative of broader social movements, ironically a criticism routinely levelled at the left. Together with the emphasis on EU patriotism, it also suggests that remainers are driven more by emotion than rational calculation, ...
People even here voted Leave in part because of sympathy with migrants - the ones being excluded from the EU and dying in camps around its margins. So what exactly is this guy's argument, that they lacked rational calculation too?
I mean, I might just stop there because this is just illustrative of the entire Brexit fuck up. It's not actually about leaving the EU, it's just about sticking it to our enemies at home.
