Who should we blame for the bizarre and humiliating indecision in which the Mother of Parliaments finds itself, having kept the government in power when it cannot deliver its programme?
Well, first, the cabinet, for failing to force the Prime Minister to listen – as she finally claims to be doing – or at least to bend a little to those around her.
Second, the EU leadership for their inflexibility, for failing time and again to compromise effectively, or to understand what the UK needs to stay inside the EU.
Third, the creaking UK parliamentary system that regards negotiation as some kind of pathetic anathema.
Like everyone else – except those whom Yeats said were “full of passionate intensity” – I have little idea what can be done now to rescue the situation. But I am coming to the conclusion that Jeremy Corbyn may be right that the way forward will have to be a general election. This will only be helpful when all the splintered parties – the real ones, not the old pretend ones – fight under their proper labels. If people want no deal, they will then be able to vote for that option.
My main problem in that eventuality is that I would be unsure who to vote for – my own party’ s rhetoric is almost as irritatingly self-serving as everyone else’s.
Welcome to the Radix blog in 2019! Make a new year’s resolution to help us build the intellectual foundations for a new radical politics. Sign up to get email notifications about anything new in this blog.
Stephen Gwynne says
The Brexit interregnum and ecospheric sustainability.
The dilemma is whether national policy sovereignty is required or radical subsidiarity implementation within the EU.
The fact of the matter is that National economies need to restructure towards sufficiency models and away from growth models if we are to take a precautionary approach towards ecospheric sustainability. This means disconnecting with EU neoliberalism and instituting Progressive Protectionism in order to manage ecologically degenerative flows of people, capital, goods and services.
Living within the biophysical limits of national ecosystems is the first stage of realising ecospheric sustainability in order to reinforce ecospheric responsibility. Green infrastructure and essential ecosystems need to be distributed evenly across national territories as far as possible in order to maximise resilience. The current EU model acts to concentrate grey and green infrastructure which reduces resilience and increases the risk of collapse.
Nature works through diffuse territorialism and thereby spreading risk.
Remainers are essentially driven by anthropocentism and global human well-being with limited actual regard for the natural systems upon which we depend.
Indeed, the effects of nonlinear emergent properties of natural systems requires global cooperation but not a single global community that inevitably results in concentration rather than diffusion. National diffusion is a fundamental pretext for both resilience and sustainability.
In this respect, I’d argue the EU needs to be broken up to enable national diffusion as does the US and China. In other words, regional integrated centralised blocs that function on cosmopolitan principles are much more prone to collapse compared to diffuse national territories that seek global cooperation on the basis of communitarian principles.
nigel hunter says
You sound like you are condemning the political system we have. If so I agree. It is time to utterly change the ancient system we have that has outlived its use and drag it into the present or ,even look ahead to what the country should look like next century.