29 March 2019 – a famous day in British history. Why? Well, er…dammit, I can’t quite remember – just seems like an ordinary day, to be honest. Possibly, though I don’t like to brag, it’s because today’s the day when I finished the complete first draft of my book manuscript – surely a date to rank with the finest in our nation’s history? But I’ve got a funny feeling that’s not it. Aha, got it, by Jove! Today’s the day when Britain throws off the shackles of its vassalage to the European Union and strikes out alone – a sovereign and independent nation once again.
Except we haven’t. At their summit, EU heads of government allowed us to eke out another fortnight to try to come up with even the semblance of an idea as to how to exit in such a way that the country doesn’t crumple in a heap. It’s all a far cry from newspaper headlines of two years ago like ‘Give us a fair deal or you’ll be crushed’. Watching the Brexit process unfold was initially like a slow-motion train crash where you could pretty much predict the damage that would occur as it screeched along the rails, but now it’s gone fully off-piste and keeps careering into things you scarcely expected were in danger. Where it ends, there’s no telling.
I’d been planning to write a kind of comedy Brexit guide for the perplexed, but it just feels too ghoulish – like laughing at people as they go down in a sinking ship, even if it was their own choice to scuttle it. Besides, where to begin and where to end? The breakdown of the two major parties, an election that didn’t go well for anybody, a zombie government repeatedly bashing its head against the wall, constitutional crisis, a paralyzed parliament bereft of party discipline, trouble in Scotland, big trouble in Ireland, economic hemorrhaging, ferry companies with no ferries, senior politicians advocating an Anglo-Spanish war, other senior politicians resigning after gaining parliamentary assent for their own policies, junior politicians making creepy requests for information on academic teaching concerning Europe or suggesting that expressions of support for the EU are treasonous – a word that has suddenly returned to the political vocabulary on both sides of the divide, though on one side more than the other. A conspicuous absence of any real notion about what the exact benefits of Brexit might be. And an issue costing so much political time and money that other, more important, issues are in abeyance.
Nope, it’s all too much for me. So let me just home in on a few points of particular interest to this blog.
#1: An implicit and sometimes explicit question that often invests my writings here at Small Farm Future is whether the present structuring of the global political economy has much chance of enduring into the future given the various looming crises we face globally and locally. My general feeling is no, though I’ve annoyed people over time on here for my ‘no’ being either too firm or not firm enough. Well, I now submit Brexit as a kind of pilot study to suggest the implausibility of ‘yes’. A small dollop of undigested nationalism combined with a side-twist of haughty neoliberalism to dramatize the difference between the haves and have-nots has been enough to plunge the state in one of the richest countries in the world into a full-on political crisis. What hope of avoiding deeper crisis when larger economic, biophysical and political issues confront us? True, the government has handled Brexit with astonishing incompetence from start to finish. Higher caliber politicians wouldn’t have got us into this impasse. But these are the people we elected. I don’t think it’s safe to assume that bigger crises will call forth wiser heads.
#2: Brexit has been a textbook case for the way rightwing populism (RWP) operates. It’s wholly different to the forms of agrarian or left populism I’ve advocated on this blog, to the extent that the shared moniker is misleading. Here’s the page from the RWP rulebook: organize plebiscites that invite the assent of voters to a very general question (“Should the United Kingdom leave the European Union?”). Mount a mendacious publicity campaign, funded if possible with money of dubious provenance from abroad, to promote the preferred RWP choice. Then, if the electorate opts for said choice by a narrow margin that splits it more or less 50-50, pronounce that the result is “the will of the people” and dogmatically pursue an extremist interpretation of it in the teeth of any kind of wider debate or compromise. When you combine the probable future crises mentioned in #1 with the divisiveness and ill-will generated by #2, the prospects for devising a politics equal to the impending crises we face seem slight.
#3: A point I’ve often made on this site is that the global economy is structured unfairly to the benefit of a small group of wealthy countries. To a considerable extent this now works through complex forms of organizational capital and technocratic global governance. The Brexit process has laid this bare. The Brexiteers have fulminated against bureaucracy and technocracy in favor of national sovereignty, but it’s increasingly clear that ‘national sovereignty’ can’t deliver the kind of economic goods to which we in Britain, even the poorest of us, have been accustomed. I don’t think this bothers some of the main Brexiteers, because what they want is a low-regulation business environment based on low-paid and precarious labor. But I think it ought to bother the rest of us. A particular aspect of this dynamic has been the far greater power wielded by the EU acting as a united bloc against the UK, including the way it’s protected the interests of Ireland which historically has been bullied by the greater might of Britain. When you step outside your friendship group, the world can be a cold place.
#4: Since about half the EU budget is spent on agriculture, Brexit is clearly going to have a big impact on issues at the heart of this blog, but it’s too soon to say what they’ll be. As an economic power bloc the EU, like the US, is a malign force in global agriculture, but a UK exit in the absence of plans for sustainable national food security is unlikely to bring much benefit nationally or internationally. The Common Agricultural Policy will be mourned by few, but despite its manifest failings it seems probable that British farmers will be economically worse off after its demise, prompting a further hemorrhage of small and medium-scale farmers from the industry. Despite Michael Gove at DEFRA clothing himself in a new suit of green, it also seems probable that Brexit Britain will open itself up and align itself regulatorily with the USA. “Chlorinated chicken” is already a phrase in the public consciousness. We ain’t seen nothing yet. And before anyone waxes too lyrical about the impediments thrown up by CAP to the small farmer, it’s worth remembering that successive British governments have consistently used what discretionary powers they have under it to bolster large-scale commodity farming at the expense of small-scale, locally-oriented food sovereignty.
oOo
But let me try to work up a positive scenario out of this Farage farrago. The EU has its own problems – in the Eurozone, between east and west, between north and south. The fact that Britain was mercifully free of most of these makes Brexit all the more idiotic, but the problems aren’t going to go away with our departure. The fear – and probably for me the main reason to stay in – is that without the EU, Europe will descend into a poisonous broth of nationalist conflict, a place it’s been before that didn’t turn out too well. But it’s possible that the sheer haplessness of the nationalist mythologizing around Brexit and the collapse of the Tories as a united party of government will inoculate us against it in the UK for some time to come.
The weakened economy and damaged credibility of central government may also prompt greater local and regional self-organization of the kind we sorely need to see us through in the future. Perhaps even the outlines of what elsewhere I’ve called the supersedure state may begin to emerge. So when combined with probable future food and energy crisis, there’s a chance that we may yet wrest the phoenix of an outward-looking small farm future from the ashes of Brexit. But the stakes are high, and the obstacles many.
By Paul – Flickr: Gibraltar Customs side of the Spain-Gibraltar frontier, Winston Churchill Avenue, Gibraltar, CC BY-SA 2.0
