Paul Harley

USA media dishes brutal truth about Brexit Britain “Every decision taken by Tory (and @LibDems) governments was a political decision—it did not need to happen that way. Austerity was never the hard logic of dutiful caretakers; it was a political calculation to rescue rich friends and dump the burdensome price on those least able to endure the cost.” “There is mold in the walls and shit in the rivers, posh butter in the supermarkets has anti-theft tags stuck to it, the trains run on schedule about half the time, the average pub-poured pint of lager—the blood of the nation—is nearing the criminal price of 5 pounds ($6.34), and on May 22 a new general election was announced to the people of Great Britain by a prime minister who is richer than the king.  “Should the polls prove correct—short of a 2016-scale error—the annihilation will be justified. Wage growth is at its lowest level since the Napoleonic Wars. What the Financial Timescalls the “rental market” and what the rest of us call “How much of your money someone richer than you takes every month” is stratospherically inflated; rent is about half a person’s average salary in London. Chain stores on British high streets close permanently at a rate of 14 per day, leaving most shopping areas a procession of corrugated shutters, uncollected rubbish, and the sleeping bags of the homeless. “The precious marvel that is the National Health Service is cracking at the seams; at the current rate, waiting lists will not be cleared for another 685 years. The union for junior doctors, the BMA, has organised 10 strikes and walkouts in the past year for a pay deal that would only bring wages up to the current level of inflation. The city of Birmingham was the first to tip over into bankruptcy; more will follow. “In 2022, at least 3% of all families in Britain—around two million people—could not afford to eat. Like a revenant from Dickens, Victorian diseases like scurvy, rickets, and scabies are back to blight children. “Life expectancy has dropped to the lowest level since 2010—tellingly, the year the Conservatives took power, at the height of the recession.” “These are the bitter fruits of austerity: an experiment in sado-monetarist economics and financial barbarism. Not much unites those five PMs other than the constant ritual tribute in blood to their coiffed icon, Margaret Thatcher. Yet Thatcher, back in the 1980s, did not lie about how brutal the first shock of neoliberalism was going to be. She coldly promised torture before riches. “Its sequel, however, was pitched by its architect George Osborne, chancellor under David Cameron, as a bit of belt-tightening resembling that most prized memory in the national canon: the Blitz Spirit. Come on, chaps, buck up and give it some welly. The shattering of society into thinner fragments was supposed to be a hardy adventure.  “Midway through this downhill plummet, Britain bumbled backward out of the EU. The wreckage of this four-year disaster can now best be seen as an attempt to escape the harsh bite of austerity. “Brexit was a retreat from hunger into myth: an embrace of antique fables about British pluck and derring-do, a belief that even without an empire and an industrial base this archipelago might reclaim past glory. Faced with profound turmoil, much of the nation turned to a half-remembered falsehood about their grandfather’s generation, marching along with Churchill. This election is the reckoning Brexit postponed. newrepublic.com/article/1829…