Top predators like lions and tigers look impressive. And indeed they often are impressive - hunting down their prey and killing it with clinical precision and controlled ferocity. But the reality is that isn’t what they do most of the time. They get most of their diet from scavenging carcasses. Their large size and deadly teeth are mainly used to scare off smaller scavengers from the choicest parts of dead animals that they just chance upon.
Politicians are a lot like that. The ones at the top look like great statesment and the creators of the world we live in, and who drive society in the direction that their will determines. And from time to time, that is true. But most of the time they are simply looking for how they can get their bit of the zebra before leaving the the less tasty bits to the hyenas who will be along as soon as the smell of blood has been carried by the wind.
And so it is with Brexit. The people who were pushing for it have been driven off the kill by bigger predators. But the next step is the difficult bit, because Brexit has changed the landscape and we now need to adapt to it. The interesting thing is watching how the people in charge adapt. To practical people - and whatever you think of them that is what politicians are - the problems that are coming along are quite different to the ones they have been used to and the tools they are going to need are going to be quite different to what they have been used to.
The most obvious effect so far has been the remarkable transformation of the Conservative Party from advocates of a small state and market based solutions to a statist and interventionist organisation. This is, on reflection, an inevitable reaction to Brexit. It isn’t an obvious trajectory until you start to think about it. Take immigration as an example. If you want to control immigration you need to control quite a lot of other things as well. So for instance if firms can’t hire cheap labour from outside the UK then British people will have to do the work. That means at the very least that affordable housing will need to be provided in areas where labour is short. Well I don’t doubt that a neoliberal would be able to come up with some kind of scheme that leaves it to the market, but building social housing is the quickest and easiest way to do it. Council houses, on large estates, are back. A similar a process of logic will see rail being renationalised. If you need to get your native workforce to work efficiently you are going to need them to be as mobile as possible. Britain has few advantages as a place to do business but its small size and its rail network is one, but it is hard to see how it can be deployed without government intervention.
This isn’t something that is just going on in the Tory party. It was notable that once UKIP got big enough to have serious party conferences and debates, some pretty left wing policies started emerging. They were certainly pretty keen on the national health service for example. The Labour Party has already had the debate - though maybe in a different order. The left of the party has always been against the EU because it was a block to their idea of socialism. And they were quite right. And in fact, now we are having to think it through it turns out that it is also the case that being outside the EU not only allows socialism along the lines they have always advocated it actually pushes policy in their preferred direction.
I was a bit fed up in 2015 that it seemed that whoever I voted for we would end up with neoliberalism. Only two years later it looks like that whoever wins we are heading towards socialism. But that is the trouble with scavenging. You end up with whatever meal happens to drop in your path.
No comments:
Post a Comment