John Pilger - Why the British said no to Europe - TruePublica
John Pilger – Why the British said no to Europe
By John Pilger
– The majority vote by
Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy.
Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and
dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major
parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the
media.
This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by
the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the “remain” campaign and the
dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion
of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been
so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for
its life.
A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment
of both Britain’s ancient regime and the banking mafia in Europe,
threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the
wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.
Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism,
not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour
politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and
nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the
top. The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East – irst
Iraq, now Syria – are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the
United States, France, the European Union and Nato. Before that, there
was the wilful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the
theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.
The pith helmets may have long gone, but the blood has never dried. A
nineteenth century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on
their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centrepiece of modern
“globalisation”, with its perverse socialism for the rich and capitalism
for the poor: its freedom for capital and denial of freedom to labour;
its perfidious politicians and politicised civil servants.
All this has now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony
Blair and impoverishing and disempowering millions. On 23 June, the
British said no more.
The most effective propagandists of the “European ideal” have not
been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom
metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see
themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st
century zeitgeist, even “cool”. What they really are is a bourgeoisie
with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own
superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day
after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly
undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism
known as “neoliberalism”.
The aim of this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist
theocracy that ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided
and indebted, managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working
poor. In Britain today, 63 per cent of poor children grow up in families
where one member is working. For them, the trap has closed. More than
600,000 residents of Britain’s second city, Greater Manchester, are,
reports a study, “experiencing the effects of extreme poverty” and 1.6
million are slipping into penury.
