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Manage New Post Logout Login Home to the blog of UK Hip Hop artist Akala My thoughts on the EU referendum Hey people i'll be on Channel 4 tonight debating the EU referendum with Paxman and all the rest... here are my basic thoughts ahead of time... Some thoughts on the EU Before I get into my own opinions on the subject I would first like to note the astoundingly banal and generally poor standard of debate from both sides in this campaign. Ranging from complete lies and scaremongering to disregard for experts and their pesky little ‘facts’ to half truths and outright racism and in the past few days some from both sides attempting to marshal the murder of Jo Cox by a right wing terrorist (of course our ‘free’ - read Murdoch - press refuses to call him that) to support their respective positions before her body is even cold in the ground. Really generally gutter stuff. When did we become this anti-intellectual, this unconcerned with knowing actual facts and this easily duped by a political class who will almost certainly still be rich a powerful on June the 24 th either way? Or were we always made of such stuff? I also think the public should be deeply suspicious as to why we are being asked our opinions on this particular issue when we were not asked regarding austerity, the bankers bailout or Iraq, Libya, Syria in fact clear and massive public opposition was actually actively ignored as with countless other issues. So whilst I am pro-remain, just about and with great reservations and no illusions about what that actually means; it’s a vote for the current neo-liberal status quo –I admit that this is a coke and pepsi style choice, organic non-gmo orange juice is not an option. The British Nation State is not some anti neo-liberal social alternative to the EU; in fact the UK was the pioneer of neo-liberal economics in Europe and the city of London remains the center of European finance. There is of course a progressive people led anti-austerity, anti corporatist, anti-imperialist case for leaving the EU and if that strain of argument were even close to an audible voice in the campaign and if our current political trajectory was not one of the most regressive in the Union I may have well been swayed to join the leavers. But as it has played out the leave lot have appealed to good old fashion fear of the ‘other’ to rile up support for their cause at a time when the ‘others’ are being left to drown in the sea in droves, sensitive humane stuff. Some of the people of this island do have a great tradition of pro people radical internationalist politics (anti apartheid struggle, the suffragettes, chartists abolitionist movement etc.) but this tradition has always been marginalized and oft persecuted by the state and it’s certainly not that tradition that has been empowered in this ‘debate’. And whilst I can recognize the political achievement in bringing a continent that had constantly been at war with itself to relative peace and stability the EU is indeed a corporatist, neo-colonial entity, a subject to which we will return later. However legitimate criticisms do not legitimise lies… We have been told constantly by the leave lot that the EU is undemocratic and that poor little bullied Britain is subject to the random whims of Brussels. This is simply bullshit and anyone who can be bothered to do an internet search on the structure of and relationship between the European Council, The European Commission and the European Parliament would realize that the EU is probably as ‘democratic’ in its decision making process as the UK, with our House of Lords, our Monarchy and our City Of London Corporation – to say nothing of the oil/arms industry lobbies - arguably more so. In addition there are whole sectors of the EU arrangement that the British Nation state has opted out of in a way no other member nation has been able to such as the single currency, the Schengen no border zone and EU law on migration and asylum. The British government has also repeatedly shown its frustration with the EU rights for workers. Which brings us on to one of the elephants in the room that no one in this mess of a debate seems to have brought up. Iraq. The Brexiters keep telling us that Britain’s ‘sovereignty’ is compromised by being in the EU (this is just legally untrue by the way) and that Britain is not free to make its own decisions blah, blah, blah. Perhaps these people were in a coma during 2003 when several EU member states, much of the UN and of course British public opinion (there was also that small matter of lack of evidence for the very thing that the war was justified upon) were all against invasion and yet the British elite and their US cronies went ahead anyway and more recently the UK Government decided to drop bombs in Syria without so much as parliamentary approval. Does any of this sound like a small bullied little victim of the dictates of Brussels? Not really, it sounds more like one of the most regressive states in the EU (yes us, the UK) by many factual indicators (arms exports, prison population, child poverty, basic educational attainment etc.) want to be ‘free’ to be even more regressive. ‘We’ – a certain section of Britain - want our country back. I can almost hear them singing Britannia rules the waves, bless them they think it’s 1851, when in the real world India has just put a rocket on Mars for 10% of the cost NASA can with a whole bunch of women scientists and while still technically a ‘third world’ country. The world is complex and for people brought up to believe they are great simply because they came out of their mothers womb on a particular patch of the earth it can be hard to adjust to the reality that ‘greatness’ takes actual work. Back to the EU it is not the liberal, harmless, beacon of human rights that its most ardent supporters purport it to be. It is an imperialist behemoth that collectively imposes grossly asymmetrical trade relationships on Europe’s former colonies and it has immense collective amnesia about how it came to be so wealthy. This neo-colonial economic relationship with the Global South massively contributes to the poverty, instability, conflict (and of course resultant migration) of large parts of the globe, whilst the EU poses as the worlds shining light for spreading democratic ideals. Interestingly I have not seen any of the main voices for Brexit raise this continued economic exploitation of the South as an issue, much less as a reason for leaving. It does not seem to even be on their radar. Back to how it seems Brexit under the current circumstances would affect everyday people. Lets just deal with the facts; most economists of many school of economic thought are against Brexit. Legal experts, (I am being told that UK law firms are already re-registering as Irish in case of Brexit) the majority of scientists all seem to think it a bad idea and I would agree with Mr. Gove that we should ignore the well paid experts if we had a great national moral conviction that we were leaving for moral, humane reasons that would genuinely better the planet, but that’s not what we have. Even far from the political mainstream prominent activist/lawyer/reparationists like Esther Stanford-Xosei are clear that the EU for all its imperialist unity and actually partly because of that unity (Berlin 1884 anyone?) is a better structure within which national minority groups can wage their respective human and peoples (group) rights struggles than an isolated British nation state at this point in time. So where does this leave us? With the big I world, immigration, immigration, immigration. We can try and deconstruct all of the other arguments as intellectually as we like but this debate has been so visibly dominated by this omnipotent fear of the other coming over here ‘stealing our jobs and taking our women’ that we must address it. People are to be heard claiming that 500 million people now have a British passport as if the red book was inher...