David Gray’s article in UK’s The New Statesman has an interesting and somewhat compelling perspective on Brexit, the EU and US and British (and world) politics.
This is a very long article, that doesn’t seem to get to its point very quickly… Care to summarize?
I do suggest that you summarize the article and draw a conclusion from it.
Otherwise I will close this thread.
[ /Moderating ]
I’ll take one for the team by wading through this article, which spends much of its effort discussing specific UK politicians, and excerpting some sentences which point at its more general message.
Political leaders on both the left and right pursue pro-business pro-globalism policies. Voters turn away to embrace populist policies of anti-immigration and anti-globalization. This led to Perot’s populist message in 1992 and the message gets stronger.
(Hard economic conditions may be partially driving the xenophobia and anger, but I doubt such “populist” policies will improve economic conditions.)
The article addresses the fact that in practical terms is there not (operationally) a real net economic or lifestyle positive for much of the domestic mid and mid-lower tier working classes in industrialized nations relative to the globalization efforts the elites promote as an adjunct to the “hyper capitalism” of western democracies. They see immigrants willing to work harder for less competing for their jobs and the elites encouraging (or at least not effectively discouraging) this influx of competition. They see high levels of unemployment and no movement in their economic prospects.
Economic gains for these classes have been stagnant or negative for decades and their concerns are ignored or characterized as racism and ignorance. This is causing the industrialized working classes in Western democracies to lose faith in the power of hyper capitalism and to demand greater controls on immigration, globalization and domestic issues they see eroding their economic and cultural lives.
The main thrust of the article is that elites on both the conservative and liberal sides are missing the real point to this working class revolt and are mistakenly ascribing it to ignorance or racism etc. when in fact it is driven (mainly) by a number of economic factors and has been long in coming, and western hyper capitalism is not necessarily going to be the way things are run into the future.
Knowing that one reason for the Brexit Leave vote winning was to strengthen the National Health Care, (that point being a lie from one of the Leave groups BTW) I do not agree with the overall view of the Opinion piece. It also misses that most of the younger population was in favor of remaining. Point being that I think that in reality the reverse of what he expects is coming in the future.
It also does not help that he claimed that Spain would oppose Scotland joining the EU as a separate nation because Spain has fears about regions like Catalonia separating too, the big flaw on that is that Spain could not block it.