The Observer
In my view 09.01.22 53William
Keegan
@williamkeeganA
part from his bad
luck in being struck
twice by the need to
go into isolation from
Covid, the leader of
the opposition, Sir
Keir Starmer has a huge, indeed his-
toric, weight on his shoulders. To
put it bluntly: this government is
so appalling that if, as it hopes, it is
re-elected either this year or next,
many of us will be seriously tempted
to emigrate.
The sleaze that fi nally overturned
one of the safest Tory seats in the
land, namely North Shropshire ,
brought to mind a line in Imperium ,
a novel by my old friend Robert
Harris : Cicero (for it is the fi ctional
he) describes a dodgy politician as
“giving corruption a bad name”.
The reaction to the Johnson gov-
ernment in the polls, and in volu-
minous acres of the hitherto supine
Tory press, may be heartening to
Starmer, but only up to a point.
What we are witnessing – and,
goodness, it has taken time – is
the eternal wisdom of that great
observation attributed to Abraham
Lincoln: “You can fool all of the peo-
ple some of the time and some of
the people all the time, but you can-
not fool all the people all the time.”
It is reassuring to those of us who
are unrepentant Remainers that the
wider public appears to be waking
up to the economically and socially
damaging impact of Brexit. This
development, along with the chaotic
sleaze of Johnson’s government, is
giving rise to open rebellion within
the Tory ranks, and speculation
about who will succeed him.
The problem is that the candi-
dates are all of the same mould: in
horseracing terms, they are sired by
Brexit, and their dam is Austerity.
The point about Brexit, as empha-
sised in Lord Frost’s resignation let-
ter from his post as chief negotiator ,
is that it was a neoliberal coup to
make this country “a lightly regu-
lated, low-tax, entrepreneurial econ-
omy, at the cutting edge of modern
science and economic change”.
No matter that Frost, before
the referendum, was on record as
acknowledging that we were bet-
ter off within the EU; no matter that
all that stuff about being at the “cut-
ting edge” is so much cant; the main
point is that in attempting, in Lord
Lawson’s notorious words , “to fi n-
ish the Thatcher revolution” with
Brexit, the Brexiters were opposingthe social-democratic, intervention-
ist nature of the EU in favour of giv-
ing free rein to “market forces” and
English nationalism. But they were
abandoning a market that really
mattered: the single market, an
enlightened intergovernmental cre-
ation championed by Thatcher.
What Starmer needs to do is
stop trying to pacify “red wall” for-
mer Labour voters and get across to
them that Brexit was essentially a
war against them, and against the
socially compassionate nature of the
founding principles of the EU, prin-
ciples that have been made a mock-
ery of by the long squeeze on the
NHS and social services generally.
In his magnum opus The Betrayal
of Liberal Economics, Prof Amos
Witztum laments the way that,
because “collectivism” or state pro-
vision is associated with the politi-
cal tyranny of communist regimes,
there has been, since the collapse of
the USSR, “another form of unno-
ticed oppression: the tyranny of
markets”. He suggests: “Instead of
subjugating all public provision to
the scrutiny of markets, we should
subjugate markets to the scrutiny of
socially constructed criteria.”
Now, I have noticed that there
have been many references recently
to the debt we owe to Clement Attlee,
Labour prime minister from 1945 to
51, by whose benefi cent administra-
tion the NHS was founded. Starmer
for one, has been singing his praises.Attlee, like Franklin Roosevelt
before him in the US, sought the
right balance between private and
public provision. The ideological
Brexiters do not. One of the reasons
Frost adduces for his resignation is
that Johnson is “going in the wrong
direction” by planning to raise taxes
and increase public provision, even
though this is the forced conse-
quence of the costs of dealing with
Covid. Chancellor Sunak has made
it plain he wants to cut taxes before
the next election. Johnson is actually
unpopular among many of his col-
leagues for being a “big spender”.
The thrust of the policies of such
potential successors to Johnson as
Sunak, or the one and only Liz Truss,
would be the Brexit doctrine of
low taxes and concomitant auster-
ity. What they do not appear to take
into account is that by knocking 4%
off GDP with Brexit (the OBR’s esti-
mate ), they have damaged prospec-
tive tax revenues so badly that the ir
tax-cutting plans ha ve horrifying
implications for public services. Or
perhaps that does not worry them.
Attlee must be turning in his
grave. I am sure Starmer and his
advisers are aware of the impli-
cations of all this. They should be
championing the EU, and not be
embarrassed by their association
with the Remain campaign. Let us
hope they can bring home the elec-
toral bacon. I really do not wish to
have to emigrate.Neoliberal
Brexiters are
no friends
to their ‘red
wall’ voters