Screenshot: Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, Saturday, September 9.You
\ndon\u2019t need me to tell you BREXIT is a dangerous mess. Ever since Theresa May \u00ad\u00ad\u2013
\nin that common sense tone which is a sure sign of ideology in Britain
\n\u2013 uttered the fateful words \u201cBREXIT means BREXIT!\u201d \u2013 we have been trapped on a
\nroller-coaster of unknowing. Grim rumours that the UK might become \u201cthe tax haven of
\nEurope\u201d or the \u201chostile environment\u201d apparently preferred by the Home Office,
\ncome and go and come again like flashes of lightning over our benighted landscape. The process
\nhitherto seems designed to show us and everyone else just how deeply polarized
\nbut also poorly represented we are as a people, and how broken our democratic
\nsystem. <\/i><\/p>\n
On Remember "Democracy", David Bernet, 2015. All rights reserved.Asked <\/i><\/p>\n Why the \u201cTake This Labour One What For My If We in Can\u2019t Will Screenshot: Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, Saturday, September 9.You don\u2019t need me to tell you BREXIT is a dangerous mess. Ever since Theresa May \u00ad\u00ad\u2013 in that common sense tone which is a sure sign of ideology in Britain \u2013 uttered the fateful words \u201cBREXIT means BREXIT!\u201d \u2013 we have been trapped on a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nthe eve of the EU referendum, I happened to find myself in a showing in London
\nof David Bernet\u2019s quintessentially European film, \u2018Democracy<\/em>\u2019, about the heroic struggle within the European
\nParliament to secure key digital laws protecting citizens and consumers from
\nbig data mining. Katarzyna from whom we heard earlier, stars in this epic tale,
\nalongside the heroic German Greens Jan Philipp Albrecht and Ralph Bendrath and
\nJoe McNamee, Director of European Digital Rights. This David and Goliath story
\nis actually a rare, gripping account in all its multilayered complexity, of a
\ntriumphant democratic law-making process. <\/p>\n
\nthat Dr. Schauble mantra from the Eurogroup meeting that Yanis quotes \u2013 that \u201celections
\ncannot be allowed to change an economic programme of a nation state\u201d? Well for
\nthose who haven\u2019t seen the film, Albrecht\u2019s mission as rapporteur is the direct
\nopposite. He argues, \u201c99% of the lobbying in Brussels is by companies\u2026\u00a0 but millions of citizens have their interests
\ntoo\u2026 No one has the right to claim their interests are worth more than that of
\nthe citizens.\u201d <\/p>\n
\nto raise our hands at the end if this film gave us more confidence or less in
\nthe EU that night, a large majority of that London audience said yes. I wanted
\neveryone I knew and didn\u2019t know to see it. Indeed there could be no better
\nintroduction to what is worth fighting for as Europeans. Not because, for Brits
\nreared on tabloid anti-EU propaganda, it was brilliant counter-propaganda.
\nLet\u2019s be clear \u2013 the picture it paints is of a democratic process in deep
\njeopardy from giant vested interests. Yet exactly because it was such an
\nunflinching record of the odds we are up against and the space for a political
\nalternative that really exists \u2013 here
\nwas everything that was missing from our BREXIT debate, and everything that we
\nEuropeans must be doing over the next two years, leading into the 2019
\nelections and beyond.<\/p>\n
\nurgency? Because all over Europe there are people like the British majority who
\nvoted for BREXIT, who need to know what is possible in politics and that they
\ncan do something about it, people who associate the threat to their jobs, security and daily
\nlives with the European institutions, simply because, for far too long, we have been
\ntold over and over again what is not possible, due to the out-of control forces that we are
\nencouraged to believe are all the more irresistible at the transnational level.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
\nback control\u201d was the message of the 2016 Brexit referendum, seized on at the
\nfirst opportunity, to express how fed up people were at the lack of accountable
\nagency, the lack of empathy, the technocratic disavowal of responsibility
\nbefore the socio-economic forces of austerity. As if on cue, only days
\nafter Theresa May lost her majority, in June, Grenfell Tower in the country\u2019s
\nrichest borough of Kensington and Chelsea, went up in flames \u00ad\u2013 its blackening
\nhulk an instant monument to the gulf between the authorities\u2019 shameless
\nneoliberal negligeance, and a disenfranchised global working class who could
\nget no-one to listen to or do anything for them.<\/p>\n
\nrejection of impotence that was BREXIT, might have remained at the level of a
\nfinger towards a world where all is said to be inevitable, had it not been for
\nthe snap elections in June. Here, not only did the Labour party come up with
\none of the most progressive social democratic manifestos in living memory, but
\ntheir new cohorts of activists launched a process of large-scale engagement
\nwith local publics, complemented by a wave of party and non-party grassroots supporters
\nof an emerging progressive alliance politics. Ordinary people stopping other
\nordinary voters in the street to talk about politics is not something many have
\nseen before in much of the UK. But now we too had a glimpse of the energies
\nunleashed in the Scottish independence referendum, or emerging out of the 2011 social
\nmovements into frontline innovative politics in Ada Colau\u2019s international
\nnetwork of fearless cities. Watching the Grenfell Tower survivors organise
\ntheir fightback for political and existential recognition was another lesson in
\ndignity and democracy for us all.<\/p>\n
\nand their progressive allies, using their initiative to salvage a recognisable,
\nbottom up \u2018politics\u2019, have given Britain a chance to pose a supremely political
\nquestion: what is the room for manoeuvre for advancing social justice, turning
\nthe tide against the worst effects of the financial crash and its extractive
\nneoliberal aftermath? <\/p>\n
\nkey factor in this room for manoeuvre we are beginning to understand better has
\nonly emerged in recent months. Research
\non both sides of the Atlantic shows how
\nsusceptible our mainstream press has been to an alliance of big data,
\nbillionaire friends of Donald Trump and the disparate forces of
\nthe Leave campaign in
\nboth the US elections and the BREXIT referendum, and how fear-mongering over
\nimmigration and Islam, targeting different parts of the population with their
\nradical right messaging, was successfully fomented on a major scale by some of
\nthe most sophisticated communicators of our era. <\/p>\n
\nare these people up to we might ask? As has been pointed out, among others by Alan Finlayson in a groundbreaking
\nessay in the London Review of Books, much
\nof the political content of Brexit demands \u2013 ethnicised nationalism, economic
\nprotection \u2013 is in flat contradiction to their political outlook. They are
\nglobalists through and through. Take Arron Banks, the insurance millionaire who
\nfunded Leave.EU, who describes his as a \u201cvery simple agenda: to destroy the
\nprofessional politician\u201d. The politics of continuing referendums and recalls
\nthey advocate aims at stalling action by elected politicians and public service
\nprofessionals alike, \u201cdraining the swamp\u201d to leave the way clear for a new kind of nihilistic governmentality, where the ebb and flow of
\nmood and opinion in big data can be surfed and any useful wave amplified and
\ncapitalized upon. In this hyper-political
\nanti-politics,
\npolitics reduces to perpetual theatre. <\/p>\n
\nthem, Brexit will make it easier to remove legal and political obstacles to the
\nestablishment of this new regime, through an increase in the power to win
\nsupport of those who own the data. (Can we be sure that a Ukipised Tory
\nGovernment intent
\non hijacking the Brexit binary referendum choice for a \u2018hard Brexit\u2019, will
\nscruple to misuse the inordinate powers they have given themselves to amend EU
\nlaws as they are converted into UK law, for example, on the
\nretention, processing and sale of our personal data? Will we see those Democracy <\/em>digital rights agreed in 2016, coming into effect across Europe in 2018, in full force in the UK? This vulnerability
\nof 40 years\u2019 worth of lawmaking is at the centre of this
\nweek\u2019s key battle over parliamentary scrutiny of the \u2018Repeal Bill\u2019.)<\/p>\n
\npoint is this. The anti-politics I\u2019m talking about is predicated on one key
\nassumption about the relationship between people and knowledge. That in this
\ndigitalised world, the people do not need to know and understand about their
\nown conditions of existence, as they are the thing to be known about and
\nmanipulated accordingly! <\/p>\n
\nthis is the enemy, then a politics dedicated to what people as agents of their
\nown fate can make possible together, overcoming the barriers of fearmongering
\nand hatred, is what I believe DiEM25, ably led by that generator of political
\nalternatives, Yanis Varoufakis, wishes to serve. So I am here to ask, can the BREXIT rebuff to the mainstream
\npolitical agenda in Britain and Europe be turned into an opening for the
\ntransformation that we all so urgently need?<\/p>\n
\nDiEM25 are glad that recommendations for a substantial transitional post-Brexit
\nreferendum period, backed by our movement\u2019s entire membership from London to Warsaw,
\nhave been embraced by key players in Britain\u2019s political class, starting with
\nJeremy Corbyn\u2019s Labour party. <\/p>\n
\nwe take this new opportunity for adequate democratic process and scrutiny far further
\nin generating European alternatives and the experience of democracy in action? The UK must play a key role in the
\nopen-sourced, democratic, transparent and radical transformation that Europe needs.<\/p>\n
\nwe succeed? I'm not sure. But I am sure that what is possible, including a
\nreferendum on a transformed UK rejoining a transformed democratic EU, will only
\ncome about if we are in this fight together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"