DAVID Cameron may have been the worst prime minister since Anthony Eden, but I must admit, the man could jibe. He was a master of public-school debating put-downs, a rhetorical bully with style and panache. Arguably his pithiest and most quoted one-liner was a scathing assessment of Tony Blair: “He was the future, once.”
In 2016, as Cameron left office after the abject failure of the Brexit referendum, he was gracious enough – or proactive enough – to admit that the jibe was now back on him: “I was the future once”.
Today, Blair, Cameron and their intellectual descendants are united behind the People’s Vote campaign, which styles itself as a new political project. But there’s a simple problem. The campaign isn’t the future, it never had an opportunity to be the future, and it can’t possibly claim the future. Just like the Brexiteer fantasy of Empire, the People’s Vote is an impossible attempt to recover dusty old glories. And there’s nothing exceptional about that.
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All across Europe, populists are ripping the old neoliberal order to pieces. The People’s Vote is simply the most visible effort to rediscover a rose-tinted centrism, and if you want to know how it ends, ask Emmanuel Macron, the man who is about to lose to Marine Le Pen. He was the future quite recently, but not anymore.
How did we get here? After the Cold War, intellectuals hailed a new era of freedom as capitalism swept across the planet. We had reached the End of History, many claimed, and ideological disagreements were dying out. We had found formulas that worked, so why bother disagreeing? Neoliberal ideology, institutionalised by the World Bank, the IMF and, yes, the European Central Bank, equated personal freedom with market freedom, liberty with shopping. The distinction between consumers and citizens, they said, was as stale as a British Rail sandwich.
Most career politicians grew up in this environment. Some were enthusiasts, some were sceptical, but all of them had one thing in common: They had known nothing else. And things were getting better. It was the 1990s. Britannia was cool. New Labour were sweeping out dusty old Thatcherism. Financially, it was the era of the “Great Moderation”, of no more boom and bust.
“I hear people say we have to stop to debate globalisation,” Tony Blair complained at the time. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”
Nothing epitomised this inevitability like the European Union, moving successively, step by step, to greater integration, although, even back then, the public was hardly bubbling over with enthusiasm. Of course, New Labour did once stop to debate globalisation, when Gordon Brown, pictured below, put the kibosh on Britain joining the eurozone, which is, then and now, the epicentre of the European project, and the most systematic effort at imposing a laboratory of neoliberalism in the developed world.
Not coincidentally, Brown’s grumpy insistence on “six tests” was the smartest move New Labour ever made. If Britain had joined the eurozone, I can’t imagine Britain’s humanitarians defending the honourable record of “social Europe”.
I don’t pretend that the last four decades were all miserable. Humanity has made huge advances. Take infant mortality rates over the last three decades. Or literacy. Or disease prevention. These metrics all indicate undeniable progress in science and education. But I will dispute the mainstream interpretation of these facts, because, far from being consequences of our economic system, they happen in spite of it.
Since 2008, the price tag of capitalism is undeniable. Climate crisis, endemic poverty, and a resurgent far right are its most obvious consequences. The mechanisms of social solidarity, mutual support and popular engagement in politics has been crushed under its weight.
But it’s not just the old communitarian virtues that are dying. Our sense of the value of freedom is withering too.
A remarkable number of people, including millennials, having grown up under untrammelled capitalism, express a preference for dictatorship or military rule. They’d happily sacrifice their vote for some security. Perhaps that’s because they see how little their freedom is worth in practice.
The freedom celebrated since 1989 has meant subordination of our lives, our time and our intellects to the whims of unaccountable corporations whose power dwarfs most nation states. Facebook and Amazon are only the latest behemoths to leave a ravaged democracy behind them. Enron, Halliburton, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Murdoch empire, and many other corporations have developed power that makes politicians look pathetic and foolish by comparison.
This brings me back to Brexit, an unpleasant roar of reaction against a generation of failures. Because let’s be clear, the globalisation we grew up with didn’t work. Many Brexit voters are deluded about many things, but on this they are correct.
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The People’s Vote, so it claims, asks for a simply democratic right, to let the people decide. But scratch the surface and its intellectual leaders are the same people who sold democracy and degraded freedom and made meaningful choice redundant: Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair, pictured blow, Nick Clegg, George Osborne, Anna Soubry, Jo Johnson. They were the future, once, some of them. But they represented a particularly dystopian future: A cyberpunk world of winking neon signs and multinational corporations, where democratic decisions had no impact, beyond replacing one set of untrusted, powerless careerists with another.
The People’s Vote asks us to restore this known dystopia, at the expense of the unknown Brexit dystopia. It asks us to surrender the meaningful nature of a referendum, to return to democracy without consequences. Worst of all, it asks us to let the Tory Brexiteers off the hook, rather than forcing them to own (and eat) their words.
Many good people support the People’s Vote, for reasons I understand. But good intentions are easily corrupted. I have friends in politics who started out as extremely reluctant Remainers – fully aware of the neoliberal flaws of Brussels, horrified by Greece and Catalonia, appalled by the European Commission’s “concentration camps” on the Mediterranean, and so on – who now wave EU flags and proclaim the virtues of the single market and free trade.
The People’s Vote is a one-way bridge away from any possibility of a meaningful political future into the rose-tinted la-la land of 1990s nostalgia. By contrast, for all the horrors of Brexit, it hasn’t emboldened the ruling class or the British state, it has done the opposite. With a left-wing Labour leader and a huge movement on the streets for Scottish independence, we have forces and we have options. This could be a surprisingly bright moment for democracy – if we can stop our friends and allies falling victim to a toxic mix of pessimism, melancholy and uncritical unity.
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