Every year for nearly 70 years, the Guardian has collected the best of its journalism into a book – the BEDSIDE GUARDIAN. This year, Bedside Guardian 2019 is edited by Aditya Chakrabortty with Paul Johnson, deputy editor, alongside Jonathan Freedland, Zoe Williams Emma Graham-Harrison. The editors were kind enough to ask me to write the Foreword. As it reflects my take on 2019, I thought posting it here might be an apt sendoff for 2019 – a year that will be remembered but not for all the right reasons…
Foreword
‘The government has failed – it’s time to go back to the people.’ The rousing title of the Guardian’s editorial at the beginning of the year was aimed, of course, at Theresa May’s dog’s Brexit. Alas, its wording carried a universal truth, suiting, as it does, the current situation not only in Britain but also the United States and the European Union, not to mention Brazil, Argentina, India etc. etc.
If one conclusion emerges
from revisiting the past twelve months, it is that governments have failed
almost everywhere. As a result, there is an urgent need to go back to the people
if we’re to stand any chance of finding answers to our existentialist crises – be
they climate catastrophe, social misery, geopolitical threats to peace,
involuntary migration, or other assorted forms of depravity.
The past twelve months were
not the worst of times. And they certainly were not the best of times. Rather,
the past year has proved depressingly predictable to anyone who has observed,
since 2008, our steady global slide into a postmodern 1930s. The failure of our
governments, as highlighted by the Guardian’s editorial, felt almost inevitable.
With its roots in France’s National Front, Italy’s Lega, Hungary’s and Poland’s
governments, a paradoxical Nationalist International emerged on the strength of
Brexit and Trump. The rise of Vox, Spain’s neofascists, proved that
recalcitrant nativism is not confined to Europe’s northeast. Bolsonaro’s
triumph in Brazil and Modi’s domination in India show that the North Atlantic
is a part of a larger disaster, rather than a special case.
Stiffen your upper lip, you are not alone – a
message to British friends
When I speak to my
despairing British friends, I feel a need to lift their spirits. Not out of
solidarity, but because they have no reason, I believe, to feel more
downhearted than the rest of us. While their anguish is understandable, I tell
them they have good cause to stiffen their upper lip and, despite Boris, Nigel,
Labour’s divisions and the overall sorry state of the House of Commons, to
remain relatively upbeat about British democracy. I remind them that one of
nationalism’s hidden
symptoms [SL1] is a creeping feeling of inverse exceptionalism – a
false sense that our country, our democracy, our parliament is in a worse state
than our neighbours’.
Inverse exceptionalism is a
great gift to xenophobic populists as they can weaponise it with the promise to
make our democracy great again, to make us proud again. Thus, my unexpected
message to British friends: you are not in greater trouble than we are. We all
live downstream. The toxic algae engulfing you in Brexit’s wake is a general
condition that we all suffer from. If anything, having immersed yourselves in
it since June 2016, your democracy is perhaps better suited now to be tough not
just on Brexit but also on the causes of Brexit, which can be pinpointed both
within and without the British Isles. In short, stop feeling sorry for
yourselves, desist self-absorption, and let’s join forces to help the people
take back control. In Britain. In Europe. Everywhere.
I know that, during the
past twelve months, it was hard to resist the spectre of national humiliation.
Theresa May’s strategic error of agreeing to Brussels’ two-phase negotiation
(first, London gives the EU everything and only then will the EU discuss
London’s demands), coupled with red lines that boxed her into an impossibility,
guaranteed the former Prime Minister’s abject defeat. However, the UK media did
you a disservice by setting the British Prime Minister’s foolishness, and the
House of Commons’ divisions, against a fictional EU that is rules-based,
democratic, united and, above all else, competent – a European Union, in other
words, that could not be further from reality.
Back in 2015, three days
into my tenure as finance minister, the President of the Eurogroup, comprising
the finance ministers of EU countries sharing the euro, threatened me with
Grexit if I dared insist on challenging the self-defeating, inhuman austerity
programme our people had just rejected in a democratic election. Shortly
afterwards, at my first Eurogroup meeting, Wolfgang Schäuble, my German
counterpart, declared that elections cannot be allowed to change previously
agreed economic policies, to which I responded that his words were music to the
ears of Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks who think along similar
lines.
In short, the enemies of
democracy and common decency are in power on both sides of the British Channel.
So, my message to British friends is: stop wallowing in self-pity and, instead,
join us in a common, transnational movement to build a democratic Europe.
A universal condition
Our condition, we must realise, is truly universal. Yes, as Patrick Kielty says in his article on p.000, an EU official said the UK needed to be taken care of ‘like a patient’. But so too should almost every country I know of, including those firmly within the EU. With the possible exception of China, the planet’s major economic zones seem to be governed either by regimes trying their best to resemble the Weimar Republic’s last days or by politicians, Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini for instance, who seem worryingly inspired by the organised misanthropy that followed Weimar’s collapse.
The aftermath of the
European Parliament election of May 2019 was quite telling about this state of
affairs. The day after the election, the European Union’s ‘liberal’
establishment were breathing a sigh of relief that the extreme right did not
fully dominate the European Parliament. Readers of Europe’s mainstream press would
be forgiving for missing what would have, a few years before, been declared a
shameful result and, indeed, a global emergency: the extreme right had actually
won the elections in France, in Italy and in the UK. Only sorrow should
flow from our establishment’s readiness to celebrate the smallest of pickings,
namely that the fascists did not win everywhere.
Meanwhile, as described in
Ed Pilkington’s piece, every day on the other side of the Atlantic, Presidents
Trump and Bolsonaro deploy a lethal blend of machismo, fear and loathing with a
dexterity not seen since the early days of Mussolini. Worse still, their
Nationalist International has a clear plan for the world, in sharp contrast to
progressives who are more disorganised than ever: a transactional world
comprising reactionary countries divided by lethal borders – as described in
Patrick Timmons’s vivid article – but connected by bilateral deals that bypass
all democratic mechanisms for limiting the power of multinationals with
gigantic investments in fossil fuels, in wrecking national health systems, and
with a transparent agenda to level all forms of worker solidarity in their
path.
How did we end up like this?
Capitalism changed in the
1970s. The United States turned from a creditor nation to the largest consumer
of other people’s net exports. Germany, Japan and, later, China grew on the
back of America’s trade and budget deficits. In turn, German, Japanese and
Chinese profits flowed back to Wall Street, in search of higher returns. This
recycling system broke down because Wall Street and its UK sidekick, the City
of London, took advantage of its central position to build colossal pyramids
of private money on the back of the net profits flowing from
the rest of the world into the United States.
This process of private
money minting by Wall Street and the City of London banks, also known as financialisation,
added much energy to this global recycling scheme. Under the cover of its very
own ideology, neoliberalism, and with political support provided first by
Maggie Thatcher and soon after by Ronald Reagan, financialised capitalism
generated huge, ever-accelerating levels of demand within the United States, in
Europe (whose banks soon jumped onto the private money-minting bandwagon) and
Asia. Alas, once the bubbles burst, it also brought about its demise in the
Fall of 2008 – our generation’s 1929.
The only significant
difference between 1929 and 2008 was the speed and determination with which
central banks came to the aid of the financiers. While the majority, in the UK,
in the US, in Greece, in Germany too, were treated to the cruelty of austerity
and associated ignominies such as universal credit and means-testing (as
Francis Ryan describes on p.000), the central banks printed mountain ranges of
public money to re-float the failed banks, especially in the UK and in the US.
Expansionary monetary policy succeeded in creating a semblance of recovery
while, underneath the surface, austerity was destroying our communities –
Patrick Butler discusses this on p.000, as well as Helen Pidd and Jessica
Murray on p.000.
The European troika,
Greece’s Golden Dawn, Brexit, Trump, Salvini, Germany’s AfD, the shrill demands
for electrified border fences and so much more were the fruits of this topsy-turvy
policy of socialism for bankers and austerity for the many.
Going back to the people – everywhere!
The Guardian
editorial was right: It is time to ‘go back to the
people’. But Guardian readers who interpreted this as a simple call for
a second referendum were wrong. Our democracies are too damaged for a quick
fix. In Britain’s case, in particular, the demos cannot be put back into a
broken democracy simply via a second vote. Something more is needed.
In the run-up to the June
2016 referendum, I addressed several anti-Brexit meetings. The one that sticks in
my mind took place in Leeds, where I shared a platform with John McDonnell to
campaign for the DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) line of ‘In the EU.
Against this EU!’ Afterwards, a lovely old lady
approached me to tell me why she could not agree: ‘My dear boy’ she said
tenderly, ‘if I vote to remain, it won’t be you or Jeremy in 10 Downing Street
to fight to transform this EU. It will be Cameron, who will treat the result as
a vote of confidence in himself and a licence to hobnob with the Brussels
people who crushed you and your democracy.’
Every time I encounter
demands for a second referendum by people keen simply to annul the first, I
think of that lovely old lady. However much I wish Brexit had lost, telling her
to vote again, until she gets it right, is not something I would ever do. It
would confirm in her mind that a vote is allowed to count only when it does not
change anything. It will remind her of the power that she, her children, her
neighbours and her community have been denied ever since trade unions and local
authorities were neutered. So, if we are going to go ‘back to the people’ let’s
do it properly.
Bankers and neoliberals
never let a good crisis go to waste. Nor should we. The Brexit crisis is our opportunity
to rethink democracy in the UK and to do whatever it takes to ‘go back to the
people’. Similarly ,across the EU, in the United States, in Africa, in Asia. Of
course, this is easier said than done. ‘None of us are free’ if ‘one of us
is chained’, as the old rhythm-and-blues song proclaimed. The British
people will never be given full power to decide their future if the Germans,
the Greeks, the Brazilians or the Nigerians are denied it. Anti-Semitism will
never die if Islamophobia is not snuffed out too. As Edward Said once said, the
Palestinians will never be liberated if the Americans and the Israelis are not
emancipated also.
In the past twelve months,
in the midst of all the soul-searching and despair caused by the Nationalist
International’s triumphs, the idea of democracy proved its resilience. We saw
the idea of Citizens’ Assemblies gaining ground, especially after its
successful deployment in Ireland. We noticed that Aristotle’s definition of
democracy (as a system in which the poor, being in the majority, govern) is
making a comeback. We admired children across Europe who decided that it was
time to act like adults because the ‘adults in the room’ were behaving like
spoilt brats (see Jonathan Watts’ remarkable profile of Greta Thunberg on
p.000). We saw young women win office in Trump’s America, ready to confront
patriarchy, exploitation and climate change.
On a personal note, the
past year has been a rough diamond. In the May European elections, DiEM25, our
Democracy in Europe Movement, did something crazy: we ran in seven countries
simultaneously. We wanted to demonstrate that transnational progressive
politics is possible. I stood as a candidate in … Germany, while a German
comrade stood in Greece. For our manifesto, the Green New Deal for Europe,
we consulted thousands of Europeans over the course of three years. And our
list of candidates in each country, from Portugal to Denmark and from France to
Greece, was selected by an all-member vote, where the Germans also had a say on
the candidates in Greece and vice versa. In the end, we attracted one and a
half million votes but won no seats in Parliament. On election night, however,
the Greek Prime Minister called a snap general election for six weeks later and
MeRA25, our DiEM25 party in Greece, won nine seats.
Campaigning across Europe nearly broke me. But it also convinced me of the deep well of progressive energy waiting to be tapped in a Europe that to the naked eye looks beholden to the fake clash between an austerian establishment and the xenophobic ultra-right. Discovering some of the most progressive people I have ever known in the midst of conservative Bavaria, meeting poor brave pensioners putting up a fight against fracking in North Western Greece, supporting Sicilian comrades in their struggle to shield migrants from Salvini’s attacks – those were the precious moments that over the past twelve months helped me counter Bertrand Russell’s tendency to despair at ‘the unwillingness of the human race to acquiesce in its own survival’.