Brexit and Trump

This week was a tough one for anyone who is remotely progressive. 2016 was notorious for two things: celebrities dying young and the BBC losing the Bake-Off (no, I jest). The referendum result indicating that the UK should leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump. This week, both of these worrying developments in history came closer, as Trump was officially sworn in and Theresa May made a speech to the EU indicating her bargaining position on the terms of Brexit. I'm going to talk a little about both of them in today's blog, because they are associated with each other, I feel that they both stemmed from a similar sort of emotion, and because I believe that both will require the same area of solidarity in order to deal with them.

This week we said goodbye to Barack Obama, as President Trump was sworn into the White House. The end of Obama's tenure was slightly surreal for me - it seems that he is a suitably beloved President for many, with my Facebook newsfeed showing a swarm of pictures of him and his family accompanied by tributes reflecting on what a wonderful President he has been, and considering sadly the poor substitute making himself comfortable in Washington. I engaged briefly in an interesting conversation earlier about whether this glorifying is appropriate. I have not really agreed with much of Obama's legacy in the White House, his enthusiasm for drone strikes, his vast increase of the surveillance state and his introduction of harmful trade deals such as TTIP, not to mention his lukewarm attitude to his mostly-forgotten commitment to close Guantanamo Bay for good. Is it really a good idea to hold him up as an architect of a golden age? No doubt the immediate response to this is to compare him to what the regime of Trump is likely to hold, which is a reasonable position - it is human nature to look on things comparatively, and whilst Obama may have hardly been a saint, he is at least on the lesser side when it comes to autocratic and ruthless world leaders. I shan't be putting any pictures of him on my Facebook profile; nevertheless I can appreciate that he is a principled man, I am grateful for any social progress that has been achieved under his rule and I genuinely wish him, his wife Michelle and their daughters Malia and Sasha the very best for the future. (I also commend him for doing the right thing and announcing the release of Chelsea Manning, something that I ordinarily would have devoted an entire blog to if there was not so much else going on!)

And so, now we come to a Republican presidency. I say 'Republican' rather than 'Trump' because I'm very much unsure how long Trump will last. Not only is he at age 70 the oldest person in history to assume the Presidency, but his behaviour leads me to believe that he is likely to be impeached  at some point, or to lose his temper and storm out (assuming that no one assassinates him, which could be a realistic possibility in itself). One way or the other, I think it likely that Mike Pence will be the US President before too long - in fact, I have heard a conspiracy theory that this was the Republicans' intention the whole time, and that Trump was only a Trojan horse used to win the election. It concerns me how personal this has become - people aren't talking about parties, they are talking about individuals, and this seems to me to simplify the issue. As much as the thought of a man who boasts about sexually assaulting women and is apparently unable to string a coherent sentence together holding the most powerful position in the world makes me feel rather sick, focussing on that masks a much wider issue. We have a world where career politicians have run things for too long, the world's finances have been conducted by Wall Street and Westminster and people on the ground have realised that they aren't benefitting at all from this catch-22. A change is clearly desired, and yet somehow people firmly lodged into the establishment, such as Donald Trump, have perfected the art of coming across as outsiders. If we ever want a world in which decisions are made for people and not profit, in either this country or the world at large, the media needs to give platforms to people who speak the language of the people - at the moment, they are only doing that with individuals who are going to say the most controversial things, such as Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins and Nigel Farage, and this has resulted in frustrated individuals making electoral decisions that make no social or economic sense.

This week, Theresa May made a speech outlying for the first time her objectives for the Brexit deal. It has taken six months for the Government to give any sort of explanation of its position on this at all, and the speech itself amounted to something which for various reasons does not amount to a good bargaining position. The blogger Thomas G Clark has quite a few articles on his excellent blog Another Angry Voice explaining exactly why May's speech was so poor, but to clarify concisely, it essentially amounted to a series of completely unreasonable demands, and a thinly-veiled threat to turn the UK into a notorious tax haven if these are not conceded to. The EU is highly unlikely to agree to these requests, both because they would not be beneficial for its place in the world at all and because the UK is in a much weaker position than May seems to believe, but even in the slim chance that it did agree, the beneficiaries would be major industries, not including anyone below the super-lucrative. Either way, we are in a situation which is going to benefit very few people, and certainly not the majority of the 52%, whose will we apparently have to stick to at all costs. The lack of intellectualism throughout this whole charade would be funny if it wasn't so serious. There are some quite legitimate concerns with the conduct of the European Union, but none of them were examined in detail either in the run-up to the referendum or in its aftermath. From the very start, the referendum was a ploy of David Cameron's to ensure his return to power in 2015, and it backfired. There is no serious analysis behind any of this; the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum involved a clear explanation of how Scottish independence would work. There was no such plan for Brexit; clearly British people were not considered intelligent enough to be able to make informed choices, and therefore the powers that be had to rely on trite soundbites. At this stage, most politicians seem to feel that remaining loyal to the uninformed 'will of the people' takes precedence over assessing what the Brexit plan actually entails, and this is something I find incredibly dangerous.

Whilst we're about it, I need to talk a little about my reaction to Labour's position on this whole thing. Earlier this week, the Guardian deliberately published a misleading headline suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn intended to whip his MPs to vote for the final Brexit plan irrespective of what is in it. In fact, Corbyn did not say anything of the kind - no decision on this has been made, nor can be until the plan is published, and quite rightly so. Having said that, I am really not impressed with Corbyn's overall attitude towards the triggering of Article 50, which he discussed during an interview on The Andrew Marr Show. It pains me to criticise Corbyn because I generally find him to be a real breath of fresh air in British politics and I may well vote Labour at the next general election assuming he is still heading it then, but I think he has this wrong (though he's not the only one). I think that right now what is more important than the vote on the final Brexit plan is the vote to trigger Article 50, which Theresa May intends to do at the end of March. What the majority of MPs and political leaders seem not to understand is that voting against the triggering of Article 50 does not equate to betraying the will of the electorate, because it could still be done at a later time. Someone who was sceptical about the Tories' ability to negotiate a good deal for the United Kingdom would be quite within their rights to be, and if they voted against Article 50 as a result this would reflect the fact that at the moment we are not in a strong place to strike a bargain. It is not the same as voting against ever leaving the EU; but if we ever do (and it is still an 'if') we need to be confident in the people leading the negotiations. Theresa May has backed down on her initial intention to bar Parliament from voting on the final Brexit deal (not that she has had any choice) but everyone seems very reluctant to speculate on what will happen if it is voted down. Setting ourselves a time limit of two years whilst we have people whose approach is to demand utterly unreasonable things under ridiculous threats seems to me to be a very foolish thing to do. I won't deny that there is a very large part of me that hopes Brexit never happens; but at the moment, this is eclipsed by concern about the negotiating tactics are using. I'd be open to leaving if we were going into this sensibly - in the meantime, I feel strongly that we should put off triggering Article 50. I will be writing to my MP (Labour's Thangam Debbonaire) and possibly to Corbyn to express this. It's another example of a black-and-white viewpoint clouding what is more important, and we should not take any chances on this.

The progressions of the Brexit plans and the inauguration of Trump are both things that have people the whole world over incredibly concerned, and with good reason. I feel that it is important right now that as activists, we devote our time to epitomising a regime of mundialization - 'an ideology based on the solidarity and diversity of global citizens and the creation of supranational laws, intended as a response to dehumanizing aspects of globalisation'. This is not normally a term used in reference to a community without a leader, but in this case I think it is quite clear the world over that no one is going to lead us in a progressive mindset, so the progressive community has no choice but to do this ourselves. Everyone can do this in different ways - writing blogs like mine, going on demonstrations, even just having conversations with people - but if anyone needs some support, let me link you to a great video I came across recently by commentator Myles Dyer. 2016 was a horrible, horrible year, and 2017 promises to be difficult as the impact of decisions made last year begin to affect us all. I'd like to invite anyone who is remotely motivated to make a difference in the world to join me in realising and taking all opportunities to create social change within our society. I hope that together, we can be the progressive force the world needs.