Re: <nettime> Paul Mason: Britain's impossible futures (Le Monde diploma

Paul Mason wrote:

The left at a crossroads

By the end of February it is likely that May’s attempt to renegotiate Brexit will fail, stockpiling of food and medicines will increase, and sterling and growth will fall sharply. In an atmosphere of crisis, May’s bluff will be called. It is unlikely that all her cabinet members would remain in office if she sets her sights towards the finishing line of a No Deal Brexit.

To prevent No Deal, the cabinet is going the have to pull the plug on Article 50, or on May herself. For either May or her replacement, the option then would be to embrace Labour’s proposal of a customs union plus single market alignment, to get Brexit through with Labour votes. That would split British conservatism strategically, probably for decades.

There is however another an equally plausible scenarion which is that after May’s latest attempt to re-negotiate fails she will continues to pander to the Rees-Mog’s (ERG) hard right wing of the Conservative party (which is supported by the bulk of Conservative party members) leading her to grit her teeth and go down the hard-brexit “no-deal” rout and take us over the edge.

Why would she do that? A clue lies in May’s ’sisterly’ advice she gave when she sacked former Chancelor, George Osbourn on coming to power. She advised him that if ever he wanted to become PM he should go out and “get to know the party”. This offers an important indicator.. that it is not the MPs that matter most to her (or even economic future of the country). Her emotional priority is staying close and true to the instincts and prejudices of the dwindling population of of Tory members (about 124,000 members) in the country. This group are far more in tune with Reece Mogg, Johnson and yes Farage than they are with the majority of Tory MPs who fear what the reality of a no-deal Brexit would mean. In the end she might well calculate that either way the party will split but the split might be worse if she betrays he instincts of the Tory grass roots. So it may be the moment for us locals to start stock-piling...

For the Labour party the dillema is precisely the opposite as Mason so eloquently describes..

In the article Mason argues that it is not classic leftist arguments against the EU that determined his ‘luke warm’ attitude to a public vote that his party agreed to at Conference

but his belief that the moral authority of the refferendum result could not be dismissed. My memory however is that Corbyn was equally luke warm to the remain cause during the

refferendum campaign itself.. when asked out of 10 how enthusiastic a member of the EU he was ? He replied “7". True he participated in the campaign and showed up on the hustings

but if you compare it to the energy of his campaign for the party leadership and the general election he never really looked like he had his heart in it.

But othere may disagree on this...