Screenshot: Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, Saturday, September 9.You
don’t need me to tell you BREXIT is a dangerous mess. Ever since Theresa May –
in that common sense tone which is a sure sign of ideology in Britain
– uttered the fateful words “BREXIT means BREXIT!” – we have been trapped on a
roller-coaster of unknowing. Grim rumours that the UK might become “the tax haven of
Europe” or the “hostile environment” apparently preferred by the Home Office,
come and go and come again like flashes of lightning over our benighted landscape. The process
hitherto seems designed to show us and everyone else just how deeply polarized
but also poorly represented we are as a people, and how broken our democratic
system.
On
the eve of the EU referendum, I happened to find myself in a showing in London
of David Bernet’s quintessentially European film, ‘Democracy’, about the heroic struggle within the European
Parliament to secure key digital laws protecting citizens and consumers from
big data mining. Katarzyna from whom we heard earlier, stars in this epic tale,
alongside the heroic German Greens Jan Philipp Albrecht and Ralph Bendrath and
Joe McNamee, Director of European Digital Rights. This David and Goliath story
is actually a rare, gripping account in all its multilayered complexity, of a
triumphant democratic law-making process.
Remember
that Dr. Schauble mantra from the Eurogroup meeting that Yanis quotes – that “elections
cannot be allowed to change an economic programme of a nation state”? Well for
those who haven’t seen the film, Albrecht’s mission as rapporteur is the direct
opposite. He argues, “99% of the lobbying in Brussels is by companies… but millions of citizens have their interests
too… No one has the right to claim their interests are worth more than that of
the citizens.”
"Democracy", David Bernet, 2015. All rights reserved.Asked
to raise our hands at the end if this film gave us more confidence or less in
the EU that night, a large majority of that London audience said yes. I wanted
everyone I knew and didn’t know to see it. Indeed there could be no better
introduction to what is worth fighting for as Europeans. Not because, for Brits
reared on tabloid anti-EU propaganda, it was brilliant counter-propaganda.
Let’s be clear – the picture it paints is of a democratic process in deep
jeopardy from giant vested interests. Yet exactly because it was such an
unflinching record of the odds we are up against and the space for a political
alternative that really exists – here
was everything that was missing from our BREXIT debate, and everything that we
Europeans must be doing over the next two years, leading into the 2019
elections and beyond.
Why the
urgency? Because all over Europe there are people like the British majority who
voted for BREXIT, who need to know what is possible in politics and that they
can do something about it, people who associate the threat to their jobs, security and daily
lives with the European institutions, simply because, for far too long, we have been
told over and over again what is not possible, due to the out-of control forces that we are
encouraged to believe are all the more irresistible at the transnational level.
“Take
back control” was the message of the 2016 Brexit referendum, seized on at the
first opportunity, to express how fed up people were at the lack of accountable
agency, the lack of empathy, the technocratic disavowal of responsibility
before the socio-economic forces of austerity. As if on cue, only days
after Theresa May lost her majority, in June, Grenfell Tower in the country’s
richest borough of Kensington and Chelsea, went up in flames – its blackening
hulk an instant monument to the gulf between the authorities’ shameless
neoliberal negligeance, and a disenfranchised global working class who could
get no-one to listen to or do anything for them.
This
rejection of impotence that was BREXIT, might have remained at the level of a
finger towards a world where all is said to be inevitable, had it not been for
the snap elections in June. Here, not only did the Labour party come up with
one of the most progressive social democratic manifestos in living memory, but
their new cohorts of activists launched a process of large-scale engagement
with local publics, complemented by a wave of party and non-party grassroots supporters
of an emerging progressive alliance politics. Ordinary people stopping other
ordinary voters in the street to talk about politics is not something many have
seen before in much of the UK. But now we too had a glimpse of the energies
unleashed in the Scottish independence referendum, or emerging out of the 2011 social
movements into frontline innovative politics in Ada Colau’s international
network of fearless cities. Watching the Grenfell Tower survivors organise
their fightback for political and existential recognition was another lesson in
dignity and democracy for us all.
Labour
and their progressive allies, using their initiative to salvage a recognisable,
bottom up ‘politics’, have given Britain a chance to pose a supremely political
question: what is the room for manoeuvre for advancing social justice, turning
the tide against the worst effects of the financial crash and its extractive
neoliberal aftermath?
One
key factor in this room for manoeuvre we are beginning to understand better has
only emerged in recent months. Research
on both sides of the Atlantic shows how
susceptible our mainstream press has been to an alliance of big data,
billionaire friends of Donald Trump and the disparate forces of
the Leave campaign in
both the US elections and the BREXIT referendum, and how fear-mongering over
immigration and Islam, targeting different parts of the population with their
radical right messaging, was successfully fomented on a major scale by some of
the most sophisticated communicators of our era.
What
are these people up to we might ask? As has been pointed out, among others by Alan Finlayson in a groundbreaking
essay in the London Review of Books, much
of the political content of Brexit demands – ethnicised nationalism, economic
protection – is in flat contradiction to their political outlook. They are
globalists through and through. Take Arron Banks, the insurance millionaire who
funded Leave.EU, who describes his as a “very simple agenda: to destroy the
professional politician”. The politics of continuing referendums and recalls
they advocate aims at stalling action by elected politicians and public service
professionals alike, “draining the swamp” to leave the way clear for a new kind of nihilistic governmentality, where the ebb and flow of
mood and opinion in big data can be surfed and any useful wave amplified and
capitalized upon. In this hyper-political
anti-politics,
politics reduces to perpetual theatre.
For
them, Brexit will make it easier to remove legal and political obstacles to the
establishment of this new regime, through an increase in the power to win
support of those who own the data. (Can we be sure that a Ukipised Tory
Government intent
on hijacking the Brexit binary referendum choice for a ‘hard Brexit’, will
scruple to misuse the inordinate powers they have given themselves to amend EU
laws as they are converted into UK law, for example, on the
retention, processing and sale of our personal data? Will we see those Democracy digital rights agreed in 2016, coming into effect across Europe in 2018, in full force in the UK? This vulnerability
of 40 years’ worth of lawmaking is at the centre of this
week’s key battle over parliamentary scrutiny of the ‘Repeal Bill’.)
My
point is this. The anti-politics I’m talking about is predicated on one key
assumption about the relationship between people and knowledge. That in this
digitalised world, the people do not need to know and understand about their
own conditions of existence, as they are the thing to be known about and
manipulated accordingly!
If
this is the enemy, then a politics dedicated to what people as agents of their
own fate can make possible together, overcoming the barriers of fearmongering
and hatred, is what I believe DiEM25, ably led by that generator of political
alternatives, Yanis Varoufakis, wishes to serve. So I am here to ask, can the BREXIT rebuff to the mainstream
political agenda in Britain and Europe be turned into an opening for the
transformation that we all so urgently need?
We in
DiEM25 are glad that recommendations for a substantial transitional post-Brexit
referendum period, backed by our movement’s entire membership from London to Warsaw,
have been embraced by key players in Britain’s political class, starting with
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party.
Can’t
we take this new opportunity for adequate democratic process and scrutiny far further
in generating European alternatives and the experience of democracy in action? The UK must play a key role in the
open-sourced, democratic, transparent and radical transformation that Europe needs.
Will
we succeed? I'm not sure. But I am sure that what is possible, including a
referendum on a transformed UK rejoining a transformed democratic EU, will only
come about if we are in this fight together.