Brexit is a necessary crisis – it reveals Britain’s true place in the world: David Edgerton
Since the 1970s things have changed radically. Today there is no such thing as British national capitalism. London is a place where world capitalism does business – no longer one where British capitalism does the world’s business.
Who backs Brexit? Agriculture is against it; industry is against it; services
are against it. None of them, needless to say, support a no-deal Brexit. Yet
the Conservative party, which favoured European union for economic reasons over
many decades, has become not only Eurosceptic – it is set on a course regarded
by every reputable capitalist state and the great majority of capitalist
enterprises as deeply foolish. If any prime minister
in the past had shown such a determined ignorance of the dynamics of global
capitalism, the massed ranks of British capital would have stepped in to force
a change of direction. Yet today, while the CBI and the Financial Times call
for the softest possible Brexit, the Tory
party is no longer listening.
Why not? One answer is
that the Tories now represent the interests of a small section of capitalists
who actually fund the party. An extreme version of this argument was floated by
the prime minister’s sister, Rachel, and the former chancellor Philip Hammond –
both of whom suggested that hard Brexit is being driven by a corrupt
relationship between the prime minister and his hedge-fund donors, who have shorted the pound and the whole
economy. This is very unlikely to be correct, but it may point to a more
disconcerting truth. The fact is that the
capitalists who do support Brexit tend to be very loosely tied to the British
economy. This is true of hedge funds, of course – but also true for
manufacturers such as Sir James Dyson, who no longer produces in the UK. The
owners of several Brexiter newspapers are foreign, or tax resident abroad – as
is the pro-Brexit billionaire Sir James Ratcliffe of Ineos.
But the real story is
something much bigger. What is interesting is not so much the connections
between capital and the Tory party but their increasing disconnection. Today
much of the capital in Britain is not British and not linked to the
Conservative party – where for most of the 20th century things looked very
different. Once, great capitalists with national, imperial and global interests
sat in the Commons and the Lords as Liberals or Conservatives. Between the
wars, the Conservatives emerged as the one party of capital, led by great
British manufacturers such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. The
Commons and the Lords were soon fuller than ever of Tory businessmen, from the
owner of Meccano toys to that of Lyons Corner Houses.
After the second world
war, such captains of industry avoided the Commons, but the Conservative party
was without question the party of capital and property, one which stood against
the party of organised labour. Furthermore, the Tories represented an
increasingly national capitalism, protected by import controls, and closely
tied to an interventionist and technocratic state that wanted to increase
exports of British designed and made goods. A company like Imperial Chemical
Industries (ICI) saw itself, and indeed was, a national champion. British
industry, public and private, was a national enterprise....read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/09/brexit-crisis-global-capitalism-britain-place-world#comment-134115104
