Blind, mad or Blairite: UK will not survive politicians like these – Joyce McMillan

The British state faces a perfect storm that threatens its existence unless politicians come to their senses, stop the Brexit nightmare and embrace policies like the Green New Deal, writes Joyce McMillan.

UK is beset by institutional blindness of Corbynism, denialist madness of Tory Brexitism and neoliberal Blairites (Picture: Ian Georgeson)

There is something faintly comic about the history of the idea of a new centre party in British politics; if only because so many Westminster insiders seem to fancy the prospect so much, and yet have been so unsuccessful, over the decades, in bringing it to fruition. The outstanding example, of course, was the 1981 launch of the Social Democratic Party, featuring four Labour “big beasts” – David Owen, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers – who had lost patience with the left-wing Michael Foot-led Labour Party, and set out to create a new force, to which they believed those British voters not impressed by Margaret Thatcher’s free market conservatism would rally in their millions.

By the end of the decade, of course, it was obvious that they had been wrong; Margaret Thatcher had won two further general elections, the centre-left was hopelessly split, and the SDP had been forced into a merger with the Liberals, from then on the Liberal Democrats. Yet failure or not, the dream of a new “radical centre” still wanders the corridors of Westminster like some appealing wraith, haunting the pages of the Sunday press, and spawning frail offspring like the Change UK party, launched in February, and already down to five MPs from its original 11.

And now, the latest fond dream of government from the centre has been outlined by Ed Davey, one of the contenders for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats, who says that after parliament has passed a vote of no confidence in the new Tory Prime Minister set to emerge next month – an event which he seems to see as inevitable – then either Yvette Cooper or Hilary Benn, as “centrist” politicians from the biggest opposition party, should be supported by the Lib Dems and SNP in forming a government of national unity, to call a second EU referendum, followed by a general election.

Now to say that this idea currently has little traction, in public debate or anywhere else, is to understate the case. Yet something about the sheer desperation of Davey’s implausible suggestion reminds us of the dire state in which UK politics finds itself this summer, at a moment in global history when historic decisions are being made, and future paths are being chosen, while Britain bickers over its fantasy Brexit bake-off.

This week alone, yet more reports and statistics have been thumping across desks at the UN and elsewhere proclaiming the end of the age of neoliberalism that failed us so comprehensively during the financial crash of 2008, and has since been far too long a-dying. In many countries, voters are in full revolt against an international system long infected with neoliberal dogma, and are demanding governments that care for their people first; the only problem is that many of those movements seem – in a chilling echo of the 1930s – to care only for one people, ever more narrowly defined.

In countries like the UK, which embraced austerity too enthusiastically, vital local services are collapsing, life expectancy is falling, rates of suicide and mental illness among the young are rising, and the number of children living in poverty, on clearly inadequate household incomes, has become a national scandal. And beyond all of that, we in the West now face the challenge of taking massive collective action to revolutionise our economic and energy system within less than a generation, and to rebuild our civilisation on a more sustainable basis; or seeing our habitable world overwhelmed within the lifetimes of those now young by rapid global warming and climate chaos. Small wonder that politicians of moderate mind dream of the kind of government that might bring people together to confront these challenges; and to end forever the dangerous, time-wasting fantasy that leaving the European Union will help us one single jot, with any of these pressing issues.

The problem with the UK’s centrist dreaming, though, is that it is not, at this point, nearly radical enough to confront those problems with convincing solutions. The last thing anyone in Britain needs, in 2019, is more Blairite talk of a bit of neoliberal economics, combined with a slightly more compassionate approach than Theresa May could muster. On the contrary, we need a Green New Deal, radical restoration of key areas of public spending, and quite possibly a new Bretton Woods settlement to end the hegemony of out-of-control global markets, along with a shift in economic measurement from crude GDP to genuine measures of human wellbeing; we need the kinds of policies that are seen as too radical by many in the SNP, never mind among Westminster “centrists” like Chuka Umunna and Ed Davey.

And this, of course, is where the crazed nostalgist tragedy of the Tories’ current obsession with Brexit – and hard Brexit at that – collides with the other current tragedy of UK politics: the failure of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, despite its strong engagement with many of the radical and urgently necessary ideas outlined above, to understand the institutional shape of the 21st century world in which they will have to be implemented, including the vital importance of the EU as a source of agreed supra-national legislation in a globalised world. Between them, these twin failures – the institutional blindness of Corbynism, and the denialist madness of Tory Brexitism – have created a perfect storm for the British state, which many international commentators do not now expect it to survive.

Those of us who live here may have a clearer view, of course, of the close bonds and profound inertias that still keep the countries of the UK stumbling on together. Yet of this we can be sure: that if the UK does still exist in its present form in ten years’ time, it will not be because of some new jumble of initials financed by wealthy donors and dressed up as a centrist political party; but because one of its existing powerful political forces has come to its senses, pledged to put a stop to the nightmare of Brexit, and set the whole country on a new track that can rightly be recognised as progressive, creative, sustainable, and capable of offering its people some hope, at last, for a better common future.