> On Jul 9, 2016, at 8:13 AM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
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> On Jul 9, 2016, at 10:30 AM, Marv Gandall wrote:
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>> Despite a widely held view on the left that Brexit was at bottom an anti-austerity protest vote, it was essentially what the headline says it was.
>>
>> Brexit: a coup by one set of public schoolboys against another
>
> And wasn't that obviously the case all along? Evidently not to the dead brains, Corbynites and Blairites alike, of Labour, who all agreed to line up with one or another set of Tory types instead of enlisting in their farce by calling for ABSTENTION in their phony “advisory" referendum.
Some on the left seemed to conflate Brexit with Grexit. There was an insufficient appreciation that austerity has been imposed on British workers by British capitalists, not, as in Greece, by European capitalists in the framework of an oppressive currency union.
In fact, British austerity predates the European variant, going back to Thatcher, and subsequently serving as a model for EU and eurozone politicians and bureaucrats.
It’s clear the British workers who voted for Brexit weren’t protesting against their ruling class, but being misled by one wing of it.
That’s why the attempt by the SWP and others on the British left to turn the these workers’ vague discontent and nostalgia for the old dominant British Empire in a class conscious direction (“Lexit”) fell flat and did not acquire much of a following. They misread the character of the movement, and still do.