A Silver Lining in Britain's European Parliament Elections

Those polls from a couple weeks back showing the Conservative Party placing fifth in elections for the European Parliament proved to be accurate. According to Stephen Castle in "Nigel Farage’s Populist Brexit Party Wins Big in European Parliament Elections":

With many of the votes counted, the Brexit Party was ahead with 31.5 percent of the vote. The Liberal Democrats were second with 20.5 percent, followed by Labour with 14.1 percent and the Greens with 12.1 percent. The Conservatives pushed into fifth position with 9.1 percent of the votes.

The Conservative Party’s dire performance will increase pressure on those campaigning to succeed Mrs. May to take a hard-line approach to Brexit that could result in the country leaving the European Union without any agreement.

At first glance the results do appear to favor a crash-out. On the other hand, if the Tories end up selecting a Leave ultra, then the opposition in parliament could coalesce to torpedo the government, triggering new elections. May's particular zombie genius was to fudge, dither and burn the clock; it's going to be hard, I would imagine, for whomever ends up as the new prime minister to replicate that.

New elections, as Nigel Farage boasts, would not likely lead to a Brexit Party as a member of a governing coalition. Look at the vote totals. Evening assuming the 9.1% Tory vote is all Leave, that means the Brexiters are at a little less than 41%. Add the Remain vote together (the assumption here is that Labour can be categorized entirely as anti-Brexit) and you get almost 47%. Not a majority, but significantly larger than Leave. There is a possibility that Labour could form a new government.

Brexit Post-Mortem

The reason the neoliberal status quo has been around for as long as it has -- 40 years and counting, ten years longer than the social democratic consensus following World War Two -- is that it has proven agile at quickly adapting to threats.

Two recent examples. First, the Arab Spring, which, after stunning victories in Tunisia and Egypt, was completely rolled back thanks in large part to the export of jihad by the U.S. client states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Next, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was easily co-opted by Obama's 2012 presidential campaign, with a hefty assist from New York City's Finest.

What is happening in the case of Brexit is more of the same. The neoliberal status quo lost the vote last Thursday but has been winning ever since. The first significant casualty might have been Podemos in Spain's parliamentary elections on Sunday. Going into the vote, many predicted that Podemos would replace the Socialists as the number two party behind the ruling conservatives. It didn't happen. While Podemos didn't lose ground, neither did it gain any. The Popular Party actually picked up seats. The reason for Podemos' lackluster showing is being explained as voter risk-aversion following the currency and equity markets turmoil on Friday following the Brexit vote.

The markets have calmed since. Brexit will not be another Lehman Brothers. The narrative that is cohering to the point that it is close to being chiseled in stone is that the successful Leave campaigners, leaders like UKIP's Nigel Farage and Tories Boris Johnson (BoJo) and Michael Gove, have not a clue what Britain is to do now that its people have actually voted to separate from the European Union. This confusion is crystallized in a much-cited column written by BoJo for The Telegraph, "I cannot stress too much that Britain is part of Europe – and always will be," where he basically dismisses the reasons for a Leave vote by both the right and the left: Immigration will continue and so too will free trade. Britain will negotiate for itself a Norwegian membership in the common market.

Cameron must have been mindful of this dearth of leadership atop the Leave campaign. His 90-day exit is looking like the smart move at this point. Given another week like the last one, the Leave Tories will be so discredited they will not be able to govern. Cameron's Remainers will keep control of the Conservative Party, better able to join Labour's parliamentary putschists -- assuming they are somehow able to rid themselves of the troublesome Jeremy Corbyn as party leader (which I don't think they will be able to do) -- to finagle avoidance of Article 50, whether through a re-vote or artful negotiation.

The problem in all of this are those hard-shell anti-neoliberal voters, both left and right, who have grown deaf to the mellifluous hymns sung in praise of unfettered markets. Bigger is not better. And I would argue that a solid majority of voters in countries throughout the West have come to believe this, which is a real problem for the governing elite. This majority can be tamped down here and there by means of fear and focusing on division within its ranks, but it will not go away.

I would guess that over the next few years the major parties in the capitalist core will continue to splinter.

It's Axiomatic: The Coming Dissolution of the European Union

Safe bets are not easy to come by in politics. The future remains open. Even though there appears to be broad agreement among citizens throughout the West that we live in a dystopian age and that things need to change pronto if we are to avoid a cataclysm, the power of money is so dominant that entrenched interests continue to set the agenda long past their sell date.

One such safe bet though is that the refugee crisis presently convulsing Europe will destroy the European Union.

The refugee crisis is blow back from the nihilistic campaign of the West, along with its autocratic monarchical allies of the Gulf Cooperation Council, to rid Syria of its Baathist leadership. Turkey has control of the spigot, both of foreign mercenary jihadists entering Syria to wage war, and war-torn refugees fleeing the region to the safe, social-democratic European north.

As long as there is war in Syria and Iraq, and the U.S. and its allies continue to play the double game of bad jihadist terrorists (ISIS) vs. good jihadist terrorists (Ahrar al-Sham), instead of sitting down and negotiating peace with Assad, Iran, Russia and Iraq, the outpouring of Europe-bound refugees will continue.

And as long as the refugees pour into Europe, voters in France, Britain, Germany, Hungary, and all other EU-member nations will increasingly opt for politicians of an ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-EU stripe. Marine Le Pen is surging in France for instance. For those on the left who would never vote for a hard-right politician, there is a renascence of the radical left, which, while not axiomatically anti-EU, is more a threat to the neoliberal status quo because of its anti-imperalism.

Under these conditions, the date to look at is the spring of 2017; that is when the French presidential election takes place. Marine Le Pen has promised to take France out of the EU. Cameron, who promised a referendum on EU membership if elected, as he was this past spring, confidently talked about moving that vote up to next year as opposed to waiting until 2017, the date originally promised for the referendum. He might be re-thinking that now.

The European power brokers see what is happening. Their plan to deal with it is to basically capitulate to Turkey; pay it billions of euros to warehouse the refugees and block them from entering Europe. Another demand of Turkey is membership in the European Union, something Germany's Angela Merkel has long opposed. My sense is that Merkel, the Queen of Europe, might not grant de jure recognition of Turkey's membership in the EU but rather de facto membership in the form of visa-free travel in Europe for Turkish citizens.

In either case, the European Union will not survive. Politicians like Marine Le Pen and UKIP's Nigel Farage will see their popularity soar.

The only thing that might switch up this outcome is if peace were quickly settled. But with weapons arriving in even great numbers once Russia began bombing jihadists, war and more refugees are all that we can be sure of. And we haven't even mentioned Afghanistan and Yemen.

Two Good Signs: The Rise of the Scottish National Party and the Diminution of Police Exceptionalism in the U.S.

Two rays of sunshine greet today's reader of the Gray Lady: Noam Scheiber's frontpage "Police Struggle With Loss of Privileged Position" and Katrin Bennhold must-read "Nicola Sturgeon, Not Running in British Election, May Yet Prevail."

Scheiber's story is a useful recap of police missteps over the last year. No longer can police automatically rely on "thin blue line" fear-mongering and racial hatred to guarantee a privileged status. Scheiber anchors his piece with a description of St. Louis's decade-plus effort to finally pass civilian review legislation:

Early this year, Megan E. Green, a St. Louis alderwoman, met with officials of a local police union to discuss a proposal for a civilian oversight board that would look into accusations of police misconduct. After Ms. Green refused to soften her support for the proposal, the union backed an aggressive mailing campaign against her. 

But Ms. Green won her primary with over 70 percent of the vote, and the Board of Aldermen approved the oversight board by a large margin. “All that stuff backfired,” Ms. Green said. “The more they attacked me for it, the more people seemed to rally around me.” 

During the urban crime epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s and the sharp decline in crime that began in the 1990s, the unions representing police officers in many cities enjoyed a nearly unassailable political position. Their opposition could cripple political candidates and kill police-reform proposals in gestation.

But amid a rash of high-profile encounters involving allegations of police overreach in New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., the political context in which the police unions have enjoyed a privileged position is rapidly changing. And the unions are struggling to adapt. 

“There was a time in this country when elected officials — legislators, chief executives — were willing to contextualize what police do,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “And that time is mostly gone.”

***

St. Louis offers a particularly vivid example of the inability of police unions to update their tactics amid widespread frustration with policing. The St. Louis Board of Aldermen first passed a measure creating a civilian oversight board back in 2006. Mayor Francis G. Slay, a Democrat, vetoed the bill at the time, citing its “inflammatory antipolice” language and questioning whether it would survive a legal challenge given that the State of Missouri still formally controlled the local Police Department. 

But, in December, after months of outrage following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in nearby Ferguson, Mr. Slay agreed to support a bill similar to the one he vetoed a decade ago. A spokeswoman for the mayor said that local control of the Police Department now made the bill legally defensible. 

The St. Louis Fraternal Order of Police, one of two prominent local unions, was not persuaded. Although the alderman involved in drafting the legislation met with union officials around the same time and asked them for input, the union offered suggestions in writing only on April 13, two days before the board was set to vote on the bill, and far too late to incorporate any of its changes.

“When we met with them in December, I was honestly interested in their thoughts,” said Alderman Terry Kennedy, who sponsored the legislation. “I would have tried to incorporate as much as I could have.” But, Mr. Kennedy said, the union’s objections proved to be a “constantly moving target.” 

Jeff Roorda, a spokesman for the union, said that once it became clear that the Board of Aldermen was determined to give the oversight board investigative authority, rather than simply review powers, the union felt it was better to save its reservations for a future legal challenge.

Civilian police review boards, even those with subpoena powers, are no panacea. Members are usually appointed by politicians, and politicians are loath to mess with the police. Once misconduct or lawbreaking is exposed, the civilian review board must then rely on police department officials and/or prosecutors to enforce penalties. Civilian review boards in one form or another exist in cities throughout the country, in New York City, for instance, and they have not proven able to check the fundamental excesses -- the racism, lethal force, and gangster-like impunity -- of the police status quo. They are better than nothing. That's about it.

Nonetheless, the fact that city legislatures are beginning to get some traction on long-stalled civilian review laws is a positive sign.

But a truly positive sign is the rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP) out of the ashes of last September's independence referendum defeat. The SNP is positioned to win 45 seats in British parliamentary elections tomorrow, basically scouring Labour leadership out of Scotland, and giving party leader Nicola Sturgeon a great deal of say in any coalition government Ed Miliband expects to form.

Take note of the adulatory opening to Katrin Bennhold's story:

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — Nicola Sturgeon was late getting to her burgundy helicopter. It had taken her 45 minutes to traverse the 50 yards between the medieval church and the high street — and not just because of her perilous-looking designer heels.
Ms. Sturgeon, the leader of Scotland’s semiautonomous government, was campaigning for her Scottish National Party before the general election on Thursday, and the reception, by the standards of British politics, was rapturous. 

Teenagers screamed. Supporters wearing “I’m with Nicola” badges shouted her name. A half-dozen schoolgirls who skipped class for the occasion lined up to take selfies. A grandfather wanted her autograph on his new party membership card. (“My whole family has joined, three generations,” he said proudly.) 

Then, a man with a distinctly English accent approached. “I’m a fan from London,” he told her. “I wish I could vote for you.”

The affluent university town of St. Andrews, where Prince William and Kate Middleton studied, has never elected a parliamentary candidate from the left-leaning, separatist Scottish National Party in a general election. But it appears likely to do so this week, along with most of Scotland.

Ms. Sturgeon, a 44-year-old feminist from Ayrshire, a working-class county in southwest Scotland, wants to lock the Conservatives out of power, rid Britain of its nuclear weapons and end austerity measures. She has attracted the spotlight in the election campaign — and she is not even running for Parliament herself. 

Judging by opinion polls, she is all but certain to emerge as a national political force, commanding the third-largest bloc of seats in Parliament and ending the Labour Party’s long dominance in Scotland. 

Barely known in England before she took over her party last year, she has gained prominence in a series of televised debates in recent weeks. In one exchange, she challenged the head of the populist U.K. Independence Party, Nigel Farage, after he blamed immigrants for a housing crisis. 

Immigrants “make a net contribution to our country,” she told Mr. Farage. “So if we can maybe just put the boogeyman to one side, we can actually debate these issues for real and in substance,” she continued, to thunderous applause.

“It’s astonishing — —” a shocked Mr. Farage began. 

“You are, yes,” Ms. Sturgeon retorted, to more cheers. 

After she explained to a national audience why she wanted a higher minimum wage, more spending on health and child care and an end to steep budget cuts, people outside Scotland suddenly wanted to know if they could vote for her party. 

They cannot. Her party is fielding candidates only in Scotland. But with neither the Conservatives nor Labour expected to win a majority, Ms. Sturgeon could well determine the shape of the next British government — or whether one can be formed at all.

What is remarkable in Bennhold's story is the rocket-like rise of the SNP following its defeat at the polls for Scottish independence, after which Sturgeon took over party leadership from Alex Salmond:

So far, Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, has ruled out setting up a formal coalition, suggesting that he expects the Scottish Nationalists to support his agenda in any case. The two parties have similar economic platforms, though they differ sharply on some other issues, like nuclear disarmament and Scottish independence. 

But Ms. Sturgeon says that Labour cannot be trusted to make Britain a fairer country on its own. “We can bring an influence to bear on Ed Miliband and a Labour government to make them more progressive,” she said in an interview.

“There is as much of an appetite for political change in England as there is in Scotland,” she continued. “The fact that neither Labour nor the Tories are ahead in the polls reflects the fact that people think they haven’t got much of a choice.”

The right-leaning tabloid The Daily Mail has called her “the most dangerous woman in British politics.” Prime Minister David Cameron has described a possible coalition with her as “a match made in hell.” The Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, likened her to a scorpion and said that allowing her party into a coalition government would be like putting King Herod in charge of a baby farm.

One Conservative campaign poster shows Mr. Miliband peeking out of Ms. Sturgeon’s pocket. Another has her as his puppet master.

Ms. Sturgeon shrugs off the vitriol. “People only try and shoot at you if you’re worth shooting at,” she said. Noting that her party has been in government in Scotland since 2007 and won a majority there in 2011, she said, “If the S.N.P. wasn’t doing well, nobody would be bothering about us.”

In the meantime, each English insult seems to strengthen her in Scotland. 

“Every time David Cameron or Ed Miliband says something stupid, there is a surge in party membership,” said Heather McLean, 59, a former Labour voter from Dundee who joined the Scottish Nationalists during the independence referendum campaign last year. “And they do that quite a lot, you know, say something stupid.” 

The referendum galvanized voters on both sides of the independence debate, drawing nearly 85 percent of Scottish voters to the polls, the highest turnout in any British election in a century. Membership in the Scottish National Party has quadrupled. [!]

Even The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, which is backing the Conservatives elsewhere, has jumped on the nationalist bandwagon in Scotland. Its Scottish edition depicted Ms. Sturgeon as a light-saber-wielding Princess Leia from “Star Wars” and told readers it was “time to vote S.N.P.” 

Ms. Sturgeon was delighted. “If I cast my mind back a decade, the idea of any tabloid newspaper endorsing the S.N.P. would have seemed a bit fanciful,” she said. 

When she joined the party as a teenager, it was a fringe group with three seats in the national Parliament (Scotland would not have its own legislature for another decade). It took two decades and numerous defeats before she finally won election to the Scottish Parliament. When she took her seat, she refused to take an oath of allegiance to the queen, instead swearing loyalty “to the sovereignty of the people of Scotland.”

Oh, what a beautiful thing it is. I know adoration of politicians leads nowhere but to heartbreak, but maybe there is enough intelligence and courage left in the electorate that some sort of counter-hegemonic democratic shift can come about. One thing is for sure. The United States needs the equivalent of the Scottish National Party.