Brexit and other symptoms, urgent treatment required – Part 1

I wish to share some observations, and air some views which are rarely expressed in the main stream media and therefore are largely ignored in public discussion when events such as those which unfolded recently with respect to the Brexit referendum take p

Ipropose to start this short “exposé” by clearing some common misconceptions so as to arrive to the crux of the argument in as short a time as possible, one must appreciate that misinformation (or more precisely information-bias, i.e. the partial withholding of information from listeners) is the key element in stirring the masses especially so during identity and anger politics campaigns such as those carried out recently in the UK and currently across Europe. While I must apologise to the well-informed reader, I promise to keep this first section as brief as possible highlighting only what I regard as the key dangers and incongruencies which surrounded and continue to surround the current political debate. I hope this swift clearing up will allow me to reveal that the principle ailment which hit the European shores has nothing to do with what was (and still is) dished out by the political establishment in terms of identity politics, but more to do with the wilful embrace of laissez-faire economics by such an establishment over the past 20-30 years. Such policies led to the betrayal of the original principles set out by the founding fathers of the Union and slowly but surely allowed for the reestablishment of the flagrant economic, social and therefore educational inequality experienced by Europe today to levels close to (or arguably worse than) those experienced before the First World War. Due to the brevity of the letter, there might be instances where the proposals sound reductionist. I must apologise for this, however a lot of what is written here can be found in the references below for further reading. So taking the Brexit debate as an example and a spring board to launch us into the stagnant waters of European politics we begin.

I start off with some dangerous public outcries which are by now clichés but which nonetheless saturated the Brexit debate and are still saturating any debate in the EU right now: “Democracy isn’t working”, or “democracy did its worst”, “Immigrants [European] are taking our jobs”.

In the case of the Brexit referendum, a 72.2 per cent turnout was recorded. As turnouts go this is quite a high number, so surely one cannot discuss democracy-deficit. In this case, the democratic process worked fine. On the contrary, the ‘information’ campaign carried out by both sides did not, leading to the second and third remarks. It is quite interesting to point out the first trend of “manufacturing of consent” (to quote a term coined by N. Chomsky and E. Herman in 1988), very similar to what happened in 2004 when the public was stirred (by no small means via the public media, the BBC in particular, as then proved by public inquest) in believing that the war in Iraq was essential, echoing previous events such as the rise to power of the National-Socialists in Germany and sending the BEF in aid of ‘allies’ in Europe before that in 1914.

With respect to the migrant job scare, one must first note that the jobs claimed by EU workers are primarily of the skilled, highly skilled or professional type required for the functioning of the economy. Secondly, such job opportunities are dwindling across the EU due to the mentioned laissez-faire style of administration, which saw massive privatisations and the emigration of the manufacturing base in the UK (and Europe). Without the need to support production, together with the implementation of such for-profit-policies to the educational system, a watering down of basic educational standards started happening, with mean student performance in core subjects such as Mathematics and English dropping year after year, (not to mention the universities’ mediocre standards in fields such as Engineering). All this led to the fact that the required skilled labour is now difficult to find locally and most of these jobs started being out-sourced to ‘foreigners’ because no local alternative could be found. This is also true in Malta as anyone interested in employing the services of skilled/highly skilled workers might attest.

Now to some half-truths and relativistic talk: “The UK contributes 13 billion GBP yearly to the EU only to receive circa 4.5 billon in return” [1], [2]. In this remark, not mentioned are the following facts: the tax revenue per annum in the UK (as of recent times – post 2009) is to the tune of 500 billion GBP, the income and skill-set generated via EU projects is not even accounted for.

More interesting are the comments by the leading figures in the debate which are not to be underestimated, namely: Mr Gove’s (now politically deceased) remark “to make Britain Great Again” and Mr Farage’s (retired) comments in the EU Parliament in week 22, 2016 [4], claiming that the vote reflected a rejection by the people of the “multinationals and the merchant banks”. Not mentioned in Mr Gove’s comment is that to make Britain Great Again (as for the rest for the EU) calls for the reestablishment of a manufacturing base in the UK and therefore skills set and proper education for the scope, which will need much more than the remaining 150 million GBP per week (considering his pledge to give 100 million GBP to the NHS and the UK net contribution of 250 million a week [2]) to start with. On the other hand, what Mr Farage failed to mention was that the same economic model used in the EU is the same that has been employed by the UK since the Thatcher years, i.e. Chicago school-based policies aimed at privatisation and de-regularisation of the market with the interesting side-effect that the few friends get richer and the population unemployed or poorer at best.

On the other side of the debate was the fear and scaremongering that a UK-OUT would, without a shadow of a doubt, translate in reduced access to the free market (not necessarily a bad thing) and person mobility, both minor issues which have been solved in the past for countries like Norway and Switzerland.

Thus the problem here is that even though the comments are in themselves true and reflect what the people across the UK (and the EU) knew all along as being the solution to the current purposelyprolonged crisis, such solution, in terms of the total rejection of the laissez-fair state was not even mentioned. Rather the EU worker and the pittance of EU membership were to blame. This was therefore, like many before it, the perfect sabotage of the democratic process which has been in development over the last 40 years (starting in Latin America in the 70s) and summarised in the Maltese saying ‘Nurik iddebba u nrikbek il-ħmara’. https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eumembership-fee-55-million/ https://www.theguardian.com/news/ datablog/2010/apr/25/tax-receipts1963 http://www.economist.com/news/lea ders/21701478-triumph-brexit-campaign-warning-liberal-internationalorder-politics?spc=scode&spv=xm& ah=9d7f7ab945510a56fa6d37c30b6f 1709 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= MlN9o3g-yuA N Klein “The Shock Doctrine, the Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, Knopf Pub. Canada, ISBN 9780676978001