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The ‘Remain Alliance’ is a sad prospect

The likelihood of an anti-Brexit lash-up fighting a general election this autumn demonstrates much about British politics’ current malaise, writes DAVID B MORGAN

BRITAIN’S first-past-the-post system means that the increasingly broad range of parties clustered round the “centre” ground of British politics have little hope in achieving parliamentary representation without such an alliance.

It must seem an attractive route back to power for those architects of austerity the Liberal Democrats, and a welcome lifeline for those MPs who left the Tories and Labour and have since failed to establish a viable centrist party. But the Greens and Plaid Cymru?
What madness has seized these parties?

It is the madness of the Remain narrative that has gripped the country over the last few years — the idea that to remain in the EU is to strike a blow against the Tories and the Farage mob and that is all the politics you need. This idea, of course, infects the labour movement too, but it is the narrative of defeatism for all.

Whether your goal is Welsh Independence, a sustainable environment, to end austerity and build an economy of social justice or some combination of these components, the European Union has you boxed in and a Remain alliance is nothing but a high-speed ride into a brick wall.

The proving ground for the alliance idea was the recent Brecon & Radnor by-election, so it is worth reviewing some of the themes of that campaign to illustrate these points. Brecon being Brecon, much of the focus of the campaign was on the plight of Welsh hill farmers. Under the auspices of the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP), the amount of Welsh lamb sold in Wales has reached the inglorious level of 5 per cent.

The rest is for export within Britain, the EU and across the world. That adds up to a lot of carbon hoof-prints. At the same time, shoppers in Wales continue to find no difficulty in picking up a lamb chop from New Zealand.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s the CAP encouraged massive overproduction and intensification, the consequences of which were butter mountains, wine lakes and other surpluses, increased use of chemicals, particularly chemicals (particularly in horticulture), overgrazing, and erosion of habitat that continue as problems today. Friends of the Earth summarise the impact of CAP:

“In this time, it has not gone far enough to support or stimulate sustainable practices and has led to major problems. It has encouraged a model of agriculture that damages the environment — through contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss, soil erosion and water pollution — and promotes factory-style farming at the expense of jobs for farmers and workers in rural areas. Through increased import of cheap raw materials produced in socially and environmentally damaging ways, and cheap exports to the global south, the CAP’s impact is felt much further afield than within the EU alone.”

This is the agricultural arm of the neoliberal economic model supported by the EU and the brick wall of political reality that the Green Party would smash face-first into if it gained sufficient parliamentary representation to even begin to mount a serious challenge to such practices.

The Plaid Cymru case is equally curious. Like the SNP, Plaid is advocating an “independent Wales” within the EU. The reality is that the EU exists precisely to restrict national independence and sovereignty in policy-making in a huge range of areas.

The British and Welsh governments have already agreed to transfer full or partial decision-making powers in at least 70 policy areas from the EU to the National Assembly of Wales after Brexit. They include environmental protection, carbon storage, offshore energy, hydrocarbon licencing, renewable energy targets, flood risk, coastal erosion, waste management, water resources, forestry, rural land use, planning consent, local transport services, air travel, road safety, biodiversity, animal welfare, food standards and organic farming. And these are within the restricted bounds of the current devolution settlement.

A policy of progressive federalism in Britain has the potential for further powers to be placed in the hands of the Welsh electorate, including the levers of economic policy that would allow for the planned direction of the economy under public ownership.

But this option is denied while we continue to be wedded to the EU’s neoliberal policies. The arguments about state aid and the EU is ground we don’t need to retread here. The EU single market is incompatible with Labour’s manifesto. ​Those seeking power for the people of Wales — or any nation — will hit the same barrier of single-market madness if they deign to suggest that the people might like some power in the economic sphere.

Ultimately it is not likely to be either the Green Party of Plaid Cymru who would benefit from the Remain alliance. If it happens it is far more likely to simply resuscitate the Lib Dems (remember them?)

In coalition with the Tories — and bear in mind they have already ruled out working with Jeremy Corbyn — the Lib Dems presided over the biggest onslaught on the working class we have seen in this country since Thatcher and, arguably, the coalition government plumbed depths that even the iron lady failed to drag us to.

A vote for the Liberal Democrats, either directly or via a mistaken Remainiac vehicle of obfuscation, is a vote for universal credit, the bedroom tax, benefits sanctions, public-sector pay freeze, privatisation, cuts and the closure of vital services, billions of pounds to prop up bankers and the decimation of local education and the NHS.

We cannot tolerate another round of this. It is time to move away from the narrative of despair, the false choice between British nationalist neoliberalism and EU neoliberalism. The alliance we need is an anti-monopoly alliance that challenges neoliberal assumptions and poses the human alternative: socialism.

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