It’s over two years since I posted on this blog. This has been partly, but not exclusively, because of health problems, a serious mountain bike accident last year and a diagnosis of prostate cancer and surgery this year. Actually this has given me quite a lot of time to read and write but this would also have needed a frame of mind I just didn’t have. Anyway, all is pretty good at the moment and it looks as if I have a life expectancy now of between 5 and 15 years, probably as good as most 70 year olds! So I hope to get this blog going again. If nothing else it will serve as a diary and notebook of sorts for me. At best it may make a contribution to the development of ideas and debate.
The two big events this year that have served to both deepen my depression but also to kick me out of my complacency are Brexit, the referendum held June 23rd 2016 where ‘the British people’ (actually 51.9% of those who voted from a turnout of 72.2%, so about 37% of the elegible electorate) voted to leave the EU and on Tuesday 8th Novemebr 2016 when the US electorate voted for Donald Trump for the next President. In both cases the widely held assumption of who the winners would be, the remainers for the Brexit vote and Hilary Clinton for the Presidency, were confounded. Immediately links were being made between the two startling results. Trump, before he won, said his victory would be Brexit plus plus plus. There does seem to be some underlying similarities – the hidden masses disaffected from politics and excluded by the forces of global developments of economies, the perception of being ignored by a wealthy business and political class and its administration, the extension of the precariat into previously privileged middle classes, and so on.
These results are also heralded as the end of the liberal (in the wider sense of the term) project but whether it is also a threat to the neoliberal project remains to be seen. There is much in Trumps rhetoric that suggests that his presidency will try to roll back some of the effects of magnetisation and globalisation but this may offer his voters false hope if his proposed cabinet is anything to go by.
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Brexit vote explained: poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities JRF Matthew Goodwin and Oliver Heath, 31st August 2016.