Britain’s political centre has, by contrast, returned to rude good health. One mild-mannered gentleman will hand over power to another such gentleman in early July. The kingdom’s cleansing constitutional system will then deliver five years of national political renewal from the centre-Left.
Whether or not the politicians, professors, commentators, think tanks, tweeters and good citizens of the British Left realise it, their reflexive europhilia has become absurd. A profound realignment is going to reopen frozen pietistic debate over Brexit.
“Hard-core Remainers are going to be very peeved about what is actually happening in their beautiful Europe,” said Yanis Varoufakis, enfant terrible of the Athens Spring in 2015 and now campaigning on a radical ticket in Greece.
“Europe is in a structural process of economic desertification and cannot even afford its farm policy any more. It is a black hole and the distance between the EU’s propaganda and reality has never been so large,” he said.
Professor Costas Lapavitsas, an economist at London University School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and author of The Left Case Against The EU, says British progressives have never understood that the EU is a Right-leaning corporatist construct, which has hardwired anti-Keynesian policies into the legal Acquis.
Nor do they understand that the European Court is a “veritable machine for the relentless application of neoliberal ideology”. But a Right-wing landslide in the elections is hard to ignore.
“Europe is entering a very dark place. There is an authoritarian drift everywhere and democratic institutions are becoming empty shells,” said prof Lapavitsas.
“A second lost decade is already shaping up to be even worse than the last one, and fiscal austerity has hardly begun. You are seeing the deindustrialisation of Northern France. The German car industry is being blown out of the water,” he said.
Britain is neither in a better nor worse economic shape but it has a superior political immune system. The country is starting to look like a reassuring liberal oasis, while Europe looks ever more like a menagerie of reformed fascists, proto-fascists, and actual fascists. Woe betide the woke.
“Britain could become an example for Europe if Keir Starmer gets it right,” said prof Lapavitsas. One might argue that a successful Labour Brexit poses a greater threat to the EU’s ideological project than a Tory Brexit could ever do.
