What sort of future will emerge from the post-Brexit result dust cloud?
The post-Brexit referendum UK is looking shell-shocked. Or rather, the Westminster political class is. The Leave camp turned out to have no post-win plan , and the Remain camp to have no contingency. The Tories – the party nominally in the driving seat - don’t know whether they’ll be led into the Brexit negotiations by a Remainer (the vast majority of their parliamentary number) or a Leaver, and Boris Johnson, the Tory Leave camp’s biggest star, looks like he’s back-peddling with all his might against the tide that swept his campaign to victory. The Labour opposition, rather than step into the vacuum, has decided to self-combust.
Only in Scotland does the political class have any sense of direction, although here too there is a tide that they have to ride. Having set in motion a plan to keep Scotland in the EU, Sturgeon has raised expectations amongst her party faithful and the wider pro-independence movement that indyref2 is immanent. The faithful may be jumping the gun.
Scotland in the EU and the UK
A closer reading of Sturgeon’s statement in the wake of the referendum result suggests that her immediate goal is Scotland as an EU member region of a Brexit UK. Even Alex Salmond, no longer at the helm but widely respected in his party and thought to be less inclined to caution about indyref2, on the special edition of Question Time on Sunday talked not about calling indyref2 but about Holyrood having the right to call it if it saw fit.
The fine distinction was promptly missed by opponents and supporters alike. Salmond has said that the Brexit vote has made Scottish independence inevitable. He may be right, but the timescale is still far from settled. And voices cautioning that Remain votes do not in any case necessarily translate to Yes votes need to be heeded. The Survation poll in today’s Daily Record is one poll, in the immediate wake of the Brexit result, and though that poll gives a majority for independence it does not give a majority for calling indyref2. The case still needs to be made, as Nicola Sturgeon, in her Bute House address, demonstrated she was fully aware.
How will capital react?
The reaction of capital is less readable. George Osborne emerged from his bunker this morning to try to show there’s a steady hand at the tiller, trying to perform the same manoeuvre as Sturgeon: to reassure business that change will be minimal. Except that he can only deliver a very short period of no change, since he was forced to admit that adjustment in the UK economy needs to await the new prime minister. So even if business nerves were in any way mitigated, business is still being left to take its own longer view.
Those of a Lexit persuasion still hope that this shock to the system will allow for a realignment in the relationship between labour and the capitalist class. Capital is of course a relationship rather than a fixed entity or immutable object, and we are all part of that relationship. That relationship was hitherto defined in the UK by the neoliberal-inspired rules of the EU, but with those rules all but gone and before new ones have a chance to be written by the managerial class – our politicians – the working class has its opportunity to make its presence felt and redefine the relationship. That is the theory.
Listening to the messages
In essence it is correct, but the challenge is that the far right is making its bid to be seen as speaking for the English working class. The result, it is saying, is a vote of confidence in their message, and vindication that their concerns are the concerns of the majority. This needs to be challenged. But it will not be effectively challenged by painting all Leave voters as racists and bigots. On the Leave side of the panel of Sunday’s Question Time, the most coherent voice was that of Giles Fraser. We deprecate the message from voices like his at our peril.
Shaping the future
Furthermore, in Scotland we need to ensure that we do not simply look to a managerial solution to the vacuum. If we allow business to dictate the terms of Scotland’s new shape, or allow our political class to interpret business’s terms as synonymous with “stability”, then we will have missed an opportunity. Remember that despite the strong majority for Remain in Scotland, that should not be interpreted as uncritical enthusiasm for the institutions of the EU. Like in the rest of the UK, lots of different motives lay behind the way people voted. The simple question asked on the ballot paper was not the nuanced questions of their own making that the electorate chose to answer.
Now is not the time to simplify our demands. Independence for Scotland is not a goal in itself, just as Brexit for England and Wales is in itself is no sort of vision of the future. It is up to us in all parts of the UK to put colour into those futures and to give them shape.
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