Brexit Britain waltzing with titanic Trump?

First response 09.11.2016

'Another day' – group email as news came in of surge for Trump

Nightmare coming true as day dawns. Brexit Britain drifting into orbit round a Trump America. Two drunks dancing in the debris of democracy. A lopsided, ill-founded democracy collapsing under its own weight. Trump, Farage and Johnson are no Samsons pulling at the pillars of the temple....

Our 'social democracy' is not social at all. Liberty, equality and fraternity do not prevail in the reality of working life as most of us know it. What we actually experience, across all the hierarchies of corporate business and public service is a top-down system of authority, reward and privilege. And this is reflected in our stripped out 'communities'.

Individual and collective efforts and rewards are misdirected. Minds misinformed by charlatans who turn us against other enemies to save themselves.For the past generation, since the end of the 1970s and the blurring-out of the red peril, the proceeds of commonwealth have been shifted out of jobs and wages into profits and top salaries. While a few at the very top got very rich, money chasing money over the rainbow, most people have fallen behind, if not actually poorer then struggling to keep up – another day older and deeper in debt. Reality, not fantasy.

The people who voted against the present system are right in that at least, although their rage is misdirected and their supposed saviours contemptible.Those of us who think we know better, and in many ways do, have only ourselves to blame. Our wisdom, like the proceeds of our knowledge industries, has been largely kept to ourselves.as it trickles our way.

Now, like the people in Mosul, Aleppo or what used to be Calais, we must somehow regroup and rebuild wherever we find ourselves... Another day, another tide, another freer, fairer commonwealth, if only we have time.

Greg

Kevin Otoo's response from Manchester:

I guess we don't get to choose who our Samson(s) will be. Most of all I like the two drunks dancing...

Here at the corner

Where the daylight bends

Into the darkness

Where the night begins

This is the place

The place we make amends

In this chance encounter

Between two old friends

This danse macabre

Where each life depends

On the one beginning

Where the other ends.

Ps.  Don't forget Delilah's contribution! Best wishes to you and Ada as always

South Wales Evening Post 12.11.2016

Race for the bottom?

Trump and Farage hobnobbed on their treks to the White House and wilderness respectively. Now I wonder what's to stop our Brexit Britain, cut loose of the EU, from drifting into a  new role as cannonball to a loose-cannon USA?

What could that mean to us?

Trump says he wants to bring basic industries back to US rust-belts, derides the outsourcing of carmaking to Mexico. Might he not want to repatriate GM from Luton or Ford from Bridgend?
But perhaps he would prefer to subsidise some kindred spirits in British politics and get the RAF flying in sync with US missiles and drones to 'bomb the shit out of Isis' ?  Who else might get hit? Would that have to go through parliament this end or could Mrs May cite royal prerogative again?

If Trump carries out his threat to wind NATO down, while the UK turns its back on joint EU defence, will the British government cling more tightly to a lop-sided 'special relationship'?  Already we depend on US warheads and guidance systems for our 'independent' Trident defence. Our intelligence networks are shared. Who calls the tune? Can we be sure that Britain wont serve as forward base or catspaw if things turn sour between Putin and Trump? With us in line for any counterblast?

The people who voted for Brexit and Trump were rightly fed up but wrong to fall for the lies and scapegoats fed to them. 'Shooting ourselves in the foot' may be one way of putting it. Except that the tommies who put bullets through their boots were set on getting out of bloody mud not into it.

If the dollar collapses, will sterling go with it? How low, and at what cost in prices, jobs and pensions?

If the US reopens coal seams to revive old mining towns, will UK or Welsh leaders be tempted to follow suit, and forget about climate change? A race for the bottom is hard to stop, A new Atlantic cynicism could sink the Swansea Tidal Lagoon as it waits for government funding, and a whole new range of forward-looking jobs.

Greg Wilkinson

To Observer 14.11.2016

Written in response to Will Hutton's lurid Trumph lament https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/13/america-trade-deals-donald-trump-nafta-isolationism

Can it be correct that 'free trade' as we know it 'spreads democracy, peace and capitalism' Or does this assertion reflect the contradictions, confusion and complacency that have brought the process to a momentary halt?

Wasn't globalisation spread by capitalism as well as spreading it?  Was capital ever democratic? Does it not thrive on war as well as peace? Can a system that transfers global wealth from those who have less to those who have most have 'underpinned our collective prosperity.'

How social is a social democracy that ends where real work begins? Who voted to automate or export their own jobs, or redouble pay for bosses and bankers to 'compensate' for the damage they do to others?

If 'trade is the lifeblood of humanity,' that blood is liberally shed in several sorts of frontier war. At home the conflict resonates across fault-lines of race, religion and class, as climate chaos goes unchecked..

The choice now is not between more of the same and 'a new dark age of closure, protectionism and nationalism'. If 'trade and exchange are foundations of civilisation', then the nature of the goods on offer and fairness of the deals must also count. Civilisation, national and global, has other golden rules. 'Do as you would be done by' and 'nothing human foreign to me' hold good in many languages. Now's the time for humankind and commonwealth to reconnect across the fragile space we share. Greg Wilkinson

20.11.2016 That letter was NOT included in  today's Observer, all though they made that Hutton article Big Issue on their letters page. Some other good letters, though none of them went for the central contradictions in a 'social democracy' that oversees and/or overlooks a self-serving authoritarian economy. Perhaps I was wrong to make such a direct attack on  the doyen of Observer columnists, and to clutter up my letter with direct quotations (two reasons why a letters-editor might prefer easier reading.)  And I didnt make it clear enough that growth CAN create more wealth for more people even as it increases the depth and pain of inequality between them. What hurts about poverty, once you've got enough to eat, is precisely its relativity.  Still my radical squib may have helped to shift the balance of selection left
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/nov/20/big-issue-economics-free-trade-wealth-benefit-globalised-crash-2008

BACK TO BREXIT

South Wales Evening Post 28.06.2016

The swing from Labour to Leave in South Wales and other old industrial heartlands was a cry of pain and anger. For more than a generation aging Labour voters have put up with the loss of well-paid jobs and dignity as heavy industries collapse, and low-paid services cant fill the gap.Talk of economic recovery falls flat on bleak experience. EU-funded schemes may seem like adding insult to injury. The leave vote, like many other cries for help, is a deeply damaging own goal, but UKIP and the leavers didn't get everything wrong.

Immigration was never the root of our problems, but successive governments of centre-left and right have allowed or assisted a remorseless transfer of wealth from industry to finance, wages to profits, poor and middle incomes to the super-rich. As ever, the working majority earn less than the average wage, and economic statistics since 1980 confirm the experience of people who never see them. The media, who repeat lies or balance them with half-truths should hang their heads.

The trickle up of wealth and income is not just a local problem. In or out of Europe, and round the world, we're up against is a systematic misappropriation of the commonwealth. Global markets, banks and corporations exist not to feed the people or do good, but to make money for those who already have it. The EU might have given us a better chance of turning this noxious tide. Wasn't it the UK that blocked some EU curb on tax havens, and tariffs on Chinese steel?

But the die is cast, we are where we are. Now is the time for liberals and socialists, reds. greens and nationalists to combine forces for economic and social justice. We should also reach out to those who turned to UKIP for some good as well as bad reasons. It's worth remembering that Hitler's Nazi divisions set out as 'National Socialists, including many former Communists.

Boris may boast of 'bringing back democracy' but it's up to people like us to walk the walk. Democracy begins at home and where we work. Whatever happens to the UK economy, petrol, food and house prices, we can all buy British, or Welsh. We can transfer such savings as we have from casino banks to more democratic building societies and help fund mortgages. At work we can join unions for fairer shares and demand a place in the boardrooms where decisions are made and cakes are cut.

Among ourselves, as well as in party-politics, UK or EU, we can still do more together than apart. For common sense and human kindness, in the only lives and world we've got.

Greg Wilkinson

Meanwhile...

Observer 19.06.16

'Workers must be given say in how businesses are run'

(their headline, set beside a joint letter from Labour, Liberal and Trade Union leaders warning on consequences of a Brexit vote)

If capitalism isn’t good, that’s no accident. Capitalism is not about doing good but making money from human or other resources (“Capitalism’s claim to do good looks shaky if there’s little to prevent it being a force for bad”, Business). It’s the core of capitalism, not just the culture that needs to change. Parliamentary democracy has bypassed or incorporated old pyramids of wealth and power. Unreformed career ladders of promotion, reward and authority span private and public sectors – finance, industry, media and education, political parties and government.

To counter this convergence of wealth and power requires more than strong unions. What working people need is their own voice in the direction, management and reward of companies and industries that depend on them.Greg Wilkinson

https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2016/jun/18/letters-capitalism-give-workers-a-say

Guardian Weekly 12.08.2016

Exploitation is the culprit (their headline)

No it is not globalisation that causes “less affluent, less educated, mainly white people” to feel themselves marginalised (29 July). Poor whites feel marginalised because they are poor and marginalised, not by globalisation but by the exploitative economy that drives it at whatever human cost.

The beggar-your-neighbour system that its friends and foes call capitalism enables those with wealth to buy up whatever human and other resources they can turn to profit, and drop them when they can’t. Dead simple: buy cheap, sell dear, keep the difference and do the same again.

Capitalism may be globalised but it’s a very British disease. Fourteenth-century peasants revolted against serfdom, only to find themselves marginalised by sheep and enclosures. Luddites smashed the machines that made their manual skills redundant. Rebecca rioters in Wales attacked new toll gates rather than pay to use old rights of way.

Scapegoating of foreigners and immigrants is nothing new either; it’s sometimes prompted by those who might otherwise feel the heat themselves.

High talk of globalisation helps fuel fears of immigration. It distracts from the real case in need of treatment: a dysfunctional economic order that still evades the logic and law of social democracy.Greg Wilkinson