Brexit and other symptoms, urgent treatment required – Part 2

The problem with most of what has been said during the Brexit debate by both parties, 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 purpos

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 70’s) and summarised in the Maltese saying “Nurik id-debba u nrikbek ilħmara”.

Also appropriate here is the saying “Missing the wood for the trees”. Mr Farage argued (and rightly so) that the real problem is that the people felt that control over their country was being lost, using the term ‘Sovereignty’. The only problem here is that just like in Greece and the rest of the EU, this was lost long before the crises even erupted. In fact, in the UK, it was lost the moment Mrs Thatcher started implementing her privatisation spree, and in European terms when the respective governments of most, if not all, of the EU states agreed (or were forced to agree) to the terms and conditions set by the IMF and World Bank (drafted on what became known as the ‘Washington Consensus’) in order to secure much needed loans. So in practice the IMF and World Bank (institutions created by the post war order to categorically forestall the recreation of economic misery imposed on postWWI Germany which led to the rise of the National socialist), together with similar ‘confidence’ hacks who aimed at excluding politics from the ‘means of production’ debate (which happened long before 2016), were in most part to blame for the Brexit results. This together with other factors of class and local politics created the required conditions for a significant mass of people to feel disenfranchised and thus the outcome was only a matter of time. So in reality all the UKOut campaigners needed to do is go on stage with a massive mirror and show the ‘king’ (i.e. the people) he was naked, the king in turn reacted in the only way he knew how and opted out. However, unlike the fable, in this case the OUT campaigners offered no clothes. Worse still they all ran away from the task which lied ahead, i.e. clothing the king.

The saving point here is unfortunately yet another truism, i.e. the cliché that the European Union is at a ‘cross-roads’. The term cross roads is in reality a misconception. The correct term should be a Y-junction in that the choice is very much binary, either continue in the way we are, which is clearly not working; or reinstate a pure Keynesian model which will see the dissolution of the massive statefunded corporates, heavy regularisation, and a major revision of the public-private contracts in which the state holding for companies providing infrastructural services, namely health, energy and transport would be such that real pressure can be exerted by the government. All this can be done using tax monies which are, at any rate, spent today in the form of: bailout to private banks and institutions, lobby-acquired, under-the table privatisation dealings and much more. Only then would political elections make sense and the electorate regain effective control over their sovereignty. As a small aside, one notes that this is in direct opposition to the way events have unfolded in Malta over the past seven years, with fast and irrational privatisations of the transport and energy sectors that no one saw coming, citizenship schemes, and the clear land-grab policy taking place today; all typical symptoms of some imposed conditions that someone accepted on the people’s behalf with no fuss. Furthermore, markers of flagrant corruption (a common side-effect of such rapid adaption of the laissez-faire policies, ref. Chile in the Pinoche days, Argentina under numerous Juntas, USSR in the Yeltsin days and the list goes on) are all the more visible, ref Panama papers etc.

So how to go about such a momentous task of regaining some measure of control? Well the first thing which one requires is a popular mandate to do so, ideally well informed. In this respect we have two precedents, the Greek bailout vote in 2015; (the closest in the direction of second the Brexit vote announced on 24 June 2016. It can be argued that the UK is in a much better position (in terms of resources etc) than Greece was in 2015 to pull this one off. If so, and the UK and European electorate is guided into correctly understanding the vulnerable opportunity they have been given, (which might have already been taken away from them by fast acting crisis capitalists already! [5]) and push for the adoption of what was, at the end of the-day, a UK-grown policy by 1st Baron J.M Keynes, then there really might be some hope. Otherwise if this experiment does fail miserably, it might look like the Brexit vote being a European version of the “Arab spring” and a step closer to inevitable disaster. The first oart of the article was published last week.