Category: Labour party

Brian Clough, my dentist and me

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Ol’ Big ‘Ead

When I started getting obsessed with football in the late ’70s there were two great sides in England: Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. I was too young to appreciate the simple fact that unlike Liverpool, Forest were not supposed to be up there with the very best. I just grew up watching them win two back-to-back European Cups as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Their manager, Brian Clough, was very opinionated and often acerbic in tone whenever I saw him on the TV. I was probably a little scared of him.

Many years later the magnitude of what Clough, and his faithful assistant Peter Taylor, had achieved suddenly dawned upon me: they had taken a small provincial club to the top of Europe – a truly astonishing achievement that one doesn’t have to be a football fan to appreciate.

But how was it done? That Clough was a disciplinarian is well known, but it was when I remembered that I had seen him affectionately kissing his own players a penny dropped. Clough was a ‘benevolent’ dictator, an alchemist capable of turning average players into world-beaters, or ‘Pig iron into Rolls Royces’ (as one of his biographers put it), and the love was a two-way street. The secret was that Clough’s man-management was based upon an intuitive understanding of human nature and motivation, underpinned by the fact that he was a self-proclaimed Labour Party socialist. This was combined with a genuine awareness of his own limitations (his reliance upon Peter Taylor was not something he denied) and the limitations of his players, including a psychological appreciation of their motivations and personal proclivities. From here he forged a team. Rather than making players fit into a preconceived abstract plan, the players were ‘the plan’ – an honest assessment of their varying abilities made it possible to mould them into a winning force. However, this wasn’t Clough’s first time, and like most people blessed with a touch of genius, his strongest attribute – man management – had blown up in his face with his ignominious failure at Leeds United when he was sacked after only 44 days…

 Dr Bill

Thirty years ago my dad returned from a visit to the new local dentist assuring us that he was a ‘madcap’. Apparently, he had been ‘singing and shouting’ whilst examining my dad’s teeth. From that moment on it was almost a pleasure to visit the dentist. Over the years Dr Bill invited patients to ‘bring their own music’, or they would have to listen to his – with him singing over the top of it! Even when I lived in northern England for many years, I did not change my dentist. As soon as one walked into the waiting room, one could hear Dr Bill’s dulcet tones competing with the noise from the intermittent drilling punctuated by ‘Open gob’, ‘Shut gob’ and ‘Have you flossed?’ The atmosphere was more akin to that of a comedy show than a dentist’s waiting room. People ordinarily apprehensive of dentists would sit with smiles upon their faces almost champing at the bit to get in to the dentist’s chair! Dr Bill oversaw my sixth-form years, university and beyond, and we always seemed to pick up the thread of the previous conversation. He would ask me about politics and I would reciprocate with questions about dentistry (secretly hoping for some amusing anecdotes), I was always sad when he told me to ‘bugger off’ and vacate the chair for the next patient. ‘I’ve got loads of you lot to get through’, he once exclaimed in a tone not too dissimilar from John Cleese’s centurion supervising the mass crucifixions in Life of Brian.

One time I turned up for an appointment wearing my heavy metal-studded denims. In the waiting room with me was an elderly gentleman who went in first. When it was my turn, Dr Bill spoke in an excited hushed whisper. ‘You know that old boy who was just in before you? Well, he wanted to know what a punk rocker was doing here! Don’t worry, I put him straight and told him that you were not a punk – you’re METAL!’ And he did know the difference too – having been at university with Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson!

Me

But it only dawned upon me recently just how influential Dr Bill had been in my life. He was the only professional I knew who could clown around yet remain deadly serious. I came to realise that Dr Bill had subconsciously legitimised my own ‘clowning around’ teaching style when I taught in further education. We both combined amusing ourselves with putting the patient/student at ease and giving the best service we possibly could. For me, comedy was the only serious approach to education worth taking. I daresay the same was the case for Dr Bill. I once asked him if dentistry ever bored him. ‘Nah, I was born to drill!’ was his response.

However, I never fooled around in his company so he probably had no idea what I was really like. I was just the serious politico who predicted the economic crisis at every appointment in the five years leading up to 2008. It didn’t go unnoticed. ‘You said something like this would happen. You were right!’ It was difficult to verbally agree because he was scraping my teeth at the time. It then occurred to me that both of us may have been a little bit like Brian Clough: honest, outspoken, with a general disdain for the professional hierarchies; yet with a genuine passion for our careers (football, dentistry, teaching) and all those involved (players, fans, patients and students).

It was with these thoughts crystallising in my mind that I entered his practice for the last time exactly 30 years after having first entered it – Dr Bill is hanging up his drill and taking early retirement. As I lay on the chair, my eyes were stinging with tears, hoping he wouldn’t noticed. I started to sketch this article in my head.

‘Are you done with teaching then?’ he asked through his green face mask. ‘Yes,’ I replied, aware of the fact that next to his relatively smooth and successful career-path mine had been a comparative failure. ‘Far too stressful,’ I squeezed out from my enforced open mouth. ‘You backing Corbyn?’ he whispered, bringing his masked face slightly closer to mine. ‘Yes.’ ‘Good lad,’ he said.

It was then I attempted to articulate my Brian Clough ‘theory’ – that we or he was worthy of such a comparison. Brian Clough believed in relaxing players in the same way Dr Bill believed in relaxing patients, in the same way I believed in trying to put students at their ease. A famous example was when Clough took his Nottingham Forest team on holiday as part of his preparation for the European Cup Final. For Clough, if you relaxed people you got the best out of them – inducing stress and fear were counter-productive.

We were also bowing out in Clough’s style. My teaching career had ended, and although I didn’t miss it, I considered myself to be good at it. I had an original style which served me well before I outstayed my welcome in much the same way as Clough outstayed his. He had fallen out with Peter Taylor and they were not on speaking terms when Taylor died in 1990. (Some argue that this situation exacerbated Clough’s already existing drink problem. His career petered out as Forest were relegated back to the second division. Within a few years he was also dead.)

Turns out Dr Bill’s career was ending on a similar note. ‘Brian Clough? That’s interesting darling,’ he said as I explained my theory. I let go and told him what I had wanted to say all these years: how he had been a massive influence on me and I had only just realised. ‘They don’t like it,’ he said, as he jabbed his finger skyward: ’The hierarchy.’ I told him that things would never be the same now he was retiring – his patients would be distraught.

He pulled his face mask down and planted a tender kiss upon my forehead.

‘Thank you darling,’ he said.

Corbyn: a conservative response to the neoliberal crisis?

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‘This is hardly revolutionary,’ said John McDonnell, as he summarised what a Corbyn administration might look like at a recent Momentum rally. Student debt reduction, social housing, rent controls, dignity at work (with anti-trade-union legislation repealed) and ending the privatisation of the NHS. If this stuff is deemed to be radical, the question is: just how far have we fallen?

Even by the turn of the ’90s, student debt (as we currently understand it) did not exist. The main battle with Thatcher at the time was over the size of the student grant, and the fact that certain welfare benefits were starting to be restricted. Sure, council housing was being sold off and not replaced (as rent controls were abolished), yet even as trade unions were clamped down on, all manner of battles were fought on the industrial field. As for the NHS, the Tories boasted that the ‘NHS is safe with us’ and that record funding was being ploughed in to it. In other words, the Thatcher administration was merely laying the foundations for a revolution that was to be continued and embedded by every subsequent government. But if Thatcherism was a conservative (radical) attempt to resolve the crisis of the 70s (the end of the so called post-war consensus), might not Corbyn be seen as radical (conservative) attempt to reconstitute society by retrieving many of the things lost, yet that still live in the minds of many?

There are two main reactions to the crisis in neoliberalism outside of what can be called the political mainstream: Corbynism and ‘kipperism’ (the broad appeal of UKIP). In order for Corbyn to be electorally successful, the rising tide of ‘kipperism’ amongst the working class in Labour’s traditional heartlands must be stemmed. This must involve a realistic assessment as to the nature of the elephant-in-the-room: immigration and perception of non-integrated communities. A blasé liberal internationalism whilst shouting ‘refugees welcome here’ with the implicit implication that any objections are merely ‘racist’ will not suffice. Indeed, it was this type of contemptuous attitude which fuelled the Brexit vote. From our own perspective, we must show empathy and understanding towards attitudes we intuitively withdraw from. The concerns echoed in the Brexit vote were longstanding and deep rooted in social despair and alienation. So if part of Corbyn’s plan to end austerity shores up the labour market, this in itself may undermine certain employment practices associated with the ‘mass migration’ from the EU and other places. In other words, deal with the problem from the demand rather than supply side, putting the responsibility for good employment conditions onto employers and away from migrants. Hopefully this will undermine the traction the ‘kipper narrative’ has amongst many vulnerable elements in our society.

Going into the rally, someone proffered that Corbyn could not win a general election because of Labour’s 1983 defeat on a similar left platform. However, this was a different time and Labour were seen (rightly or wrongly) as offering a return to the bad old days of the 70s, and Thatcher’s universal acid had not finished its revolutionary renewal. But now we have now come full circle. The neoliberal experiment has long since run aground and we are living with the consequences. This is one thing that ‘Corbynistas’ and ‘kippers’ (even if many elements of Ukip don’t) agree on. But simply returning to the old ways will not suffice. Momentum talks of a ‘new kind of politics’, which must mean, for example, that a nationalised railway service does not repeat the kind of mistakes which made the case for its privatisation unassailable in the Thatcher period.

The vision of an outward looking, inclusive multi-cultural society is in danger of being lost. It is Corbyn’s job to continue and renew this one aspect of the neoliberal worldview (intended or otherwise) that we actually like and value. The consequences of a socio-cultural victory of ‘kipperism’ are too dire to contemplate.

Repentance: the mistakes we made

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The aftermath 

From the moment we opened our eyes on the dawn of 24 June, our minds were thrown. It has taken from then till now to reach a place of equanimity. A reckoning is in order – what happened, and was our reaction wise or just?

What happened in the outside world we have sketched already and we see no reason nor has anything materialised to change our minds about our analysis of it. In short, an irresponsible, unserious, unscrupulous and stupid section of the ruling elite has taken power, or is in the process of taking power, based on a campaign of lies designed to whip up the fears and emotions of the poor and bewildered. The result has been just as predicted by those denigrated during the campaign as “experts” – so not Project Fear at all, but Project Reality. The brains were for Remain. But the brains lost. Project Hate is taking the reins of government and the lid that had been kept on racism and social divisions in recent decades has been lifted off, with explosive and ugly consequences. Can there possibly be a bright side to any of this?

The best that we can be
There might well be, but to get there we need to look a bit more closely at our reaction to the news – to what happened internally. As we said, our minds were thrown. We were angry, and depressed, and sought people to blame. Having picked a scapegoat, the one we believed to be most immediately and obviously responsible, we picked up hot coals of anger and thew them – burning our own hands in the process. That this is understandable and (we hope) forgiveable should be derivable from our honest and we believe factual assessment of what had happened. But never mind the justifications – was it right? Was it just? Was it wise?

At times like this, full of anger, of sorrow, of confusion about the best way forward, we turn for guidance to those who are more highly evolved than we are. Thich Nhat Hanh is a Zen master. That means he is a master of his mind and his emotions and is therefore more capable than we are of making wise decisions in the heat of the moment. When he first came to America from Vietnam during the war there, his country too was in crisis. And, it should be needless to say, a much more severe crisis than we are facing. Thich’s country was being destroyed, his friends, family, loved ones and fellow countrymen slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands. When the gentle monk stood up in a meeting to speak for peace, an audience member interrupted and asked what a kook like him was doing over here in his country, giving lectures. If things were so bad, why didn’t he go back home where he belonged and put his attention there? Thich remained completely calm and gently explained that his country was on fire. Given that the cause of the fire was over here in America, he’d come over to see if he couldn’t help put it out. Later, after the talk, Thich was found by his friends standing outside, trembling and shaking all over and breathing deeply. He explained to those who asked him what was wrong that anger had arisen in him as that man had spoke. Then why not express that anger, he was asked. Surely the fool who had asked the question deserved it – surely Thich was justified in expressing it. Maybe so, said Thich, but I am not here for myself. I am here to represent my fellow countrymen who are suffering so badly. I must show people here in America the best that we can be.

I can never relate that story without choking up. And the lesson from it is clear. We failed to be the best that we can be. Following the path of peace and wisdom is a hard one that takes many years of training to yield success. We do not beat ourselves up for our failure, but we do bow in gratitude for the lesson – it is humbling to the ego to know how far one yet has to go. It inspires us to begin anew and try again.

Eknath Easwaran, a spiritual teacher from a different tradition and inspired by Gandhi, says that anger is not a problem as long as you have trained your mind to be slow. If your mind is slow, you can see and watch gently as anger arises, take steps to calm yourself, not feed your anger with thoughts, and drive the energy of anger instead into wise and compassionate action and kind speech. If your mind is fast, there is no hope for any of that. You will have no chance of taking hold of and transforming your anger – your anger will tear off and drag you in its wake. You won’t use it, it will use you.

That is what happened to us when we learnt of the EU referendum result. Our minds raced off and anger and fear fed greedily on the thoughts. Social media made it worse – as social minds they are faster even than newspapers and TV and are therefore, unwisely used, poisons. Drunk on thought and poison and anger, we started wars with all around us. Thank God, the war of words has not yet escalated into a real war – though how easily that happens should now be obvious to all who are paying attention to the predictable and predicted rise in racist and xenophobic violence. We happily (or rathe unhappily) started wars of words with friends and family. In the country, others are starting literal wars of hatred with their neighbours. How desperately and urgently we need to slow and calm down and begin to make peace!

Drive all blames into one: the only revolution that will work
In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a system of slogans to help you with daily living known as lojong. One of the slogans forms the subhead to this section: drive all blames into one. What this means is that when things go wrong or aren’t to your liking, when disaster or dissatisfaction in whatever form strikes, whether in big ways as in wars or in small ways as in irritation with your neighbour, what you can do is to take all the blame for the situation onto yourself. This is not the normal way of proceeding, of course. Normally we start looking for someone to blame. To reverse that normal way of behaving is to begin the only revolution that will ever work. It doesn’t mean to turn yourself into a doormat for other people or to ignore or tolerate bad behaviour in others. It simply means to take full responsibility for every situation you find yourself in. If you look deeply, you will see that you personally always bear, or at the least share, responsibility for creating the situation you are in.

In the wake of the EU referendum result, we started to blame those most responsible. The Leave campaign. The people who voted for it against all the advice of the experts. The social situation that led the working class to so distrust the political class – the fact that they had been shat on from a great height and ignored or taken for granted by both sides of the political divide. And so on and so on. But we are to blame too. We failed to mount a successful enough campaign – in the first place against holding such a stupid and undemocratic referendum, in the second for the right result. We failed to get out there and connect with and educate the ignorant. We have failed to inspire confidence in the left project. We didn’t work hard enough to support those being shat on by the elites – the fact that they no longer trust them is our fault too. Our behaviour and conduct and thinking as socialists has inspired precisely how many people to follow our good example? Would zero be too cruel an answer?

This is our task now as our country slips into crisis. To drive all blames into one and act.

“Maybe…”
There is another Zen story that is relevant here. It goes something like this. A man comes into a great inheritance and is given a ton of money. You are so lucky! say his friends and family. Maybe, he says. With his windfall he goes out to buy himself a new car and drives it into a tree on the way home. At his hospital bed, his friends commiserate with him. You were so unlucky, they say. Maybe, he replies. While he is in hospital, a mudslide destroys his house. How unlucky, say some of his friends. How lucky you were not in the house at the time! say others. Maybe, he replies…

The point of course is that we cannot see all ends and must work well within the situation as it is, whatever it is. The vote for Brexit struck us as a complete disaster – and, of course, in so many ways it is. But might there be a bright side? Maybe.

For a start, Brexit may not even happen. The odds that it will and the political feeling that it must are against such a conclusion, but the possibility of EU fudge, a new deal, a general election, a feeling of Bregret when Brexiteers realise they’ve been sold a pup and cannot have the best of all worlds and that the costs of Brexit will be severe, means that a Breversal, as The Economist puts it, cannot be ruled out.

But more optimistically still, we have the situation in the Labour Party. The Blairites may have miscalculated here. They took Jeremy’s lukewarm endorsement of Remain and his supposed footdragging in the campaign as the excuse they’ve been desperate for ever since Jeremy was elected leader to launch a coup – flavoured, as might be expected, with shameful, even evil attempts to break Jeremy on a human level, a brew seasoned with lies and Machiavellian plotting and backstabbing. They have done everything in their power to unseat him – except, of course, to trigger a leadership challenge that they must surely lose. (The membership remains firmly behind Jeremy.)

Could, then, this crisis lead to a final reckoning in the Labour Party? Picture the scene – Jeremy wins a renewed mandate for his leadership. The movement that supported him gradually steps up to the challenge; MPs deselected, the PLP and shadow cabinet filled with Corbynistas. Come election time, a highly energised Corbynista Labour Party is able to connect to the least bigoted of the Leavers, thanks in part to Jeremy’s well known euroscepticism, winning back Labour’s core vote. The very fact of Jeremy’s survival and likely victory so discredit the mainstream narrative about his lame leadership that the aspirational middle class begin to see that there is little to fear in the Corbynomics plan to grow the economy. Following Corbyn’s victory, the very fact of Brexit gives the new Labour Party the freedom to pursue economic goals that would have been problematic under EU rules, and a moral power to renegotiate access to the single market with freedom of movement combined with protections for the sections of society that lose out most from such deals. In other words, from the jaws of Brexit defeat, we snatch a social democratic victory beyond present imagining.

That this scenario is almost ludicrously optimistic from the point of view of the intellect and of political and social realities we would be the last to dispute. There barely seems to be time for it to be realised, let alone the will. But there is a final spiritual lesson to learn from this ongoing disaster – and it is perhaps the most important of them all. It is that pessimism of the intellect and objective realities can hold no power over a fully developed, undiscourageable, ever-renewed optimism of the will. So if our scenario is in the slightest bit appealing to you, don’t just sit there – and certainly don’t just criticise or sneer. Join the Labour Party – join Momentum, the movement that supports Jeremy. Do it today.

Regardless of the prospects for our utopian scenario, at the present time Jeremy remains the great hope for a progressive outcome for this crisis. He is also something of a model when it comes to political conduct. He may not have mastered his mind as Thich Nhat Hanh has, but he is a pretty remarkable operator nonetheless – committed to a politics of kindness, honesty, seriousness and straight-talking that even the right finds refreshing to behold. Jeremy doesn’t do personal. But he does do tireless political work for peace and socialism and compassionate action. Let Jeremy be our role model. Let’s get behind him now.

Delivering leaflets for Dave

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I couldn’t believe it. Was this what 30 years of (mostly) radical political activity came down to? Delivering leaflets on behalf of David Cameron! Oh sure, the leaflet said ‘Labour In’ and even had a nice picture of Jeremy Corbyn on the back with the most underwhelming message in support of continued EU membership that one could imagine. But I took heart from this. This wasn’t about how great the EU was. No this was about pragmatics, and the simple realisation that for a variety of reasons, leaving the EU would not only be bad for the economy but for the cultural direction of the UK.

Thus far, the whole campaign was characterised by the Conservative Party tearing itself apart – ‘Blue-on-Blue’ the media called it, but it was more ‘Blonde-on-Brown’. Yes, Boris Johnson had stabbed his friend David Cameron in the back when he announced his intention to campaign for a leave vote. Earlier this year, one could not have got a cigarette paper between them on this most vital of questions, now….

This act of treachery filled me with rage. ‘How could you do it Johnson, you over-ambitious asshole?’ Every time I saw Cameron’s face a wave of empathy rushed over me.

‘Don’t worry Dave, stay strong, you, me and Jeremy will halt the rise of the blonde assassin and his racist ‘spiv’ associate’.

How were these feelings possible?

I thought I hated David Cameron.

This was my self-justification for delivering pro-EU propaganda to local households on the London-Essex border. It made a change from the stuff I used to deliver. Here I was ready to defend the status quo at the drop of a hat. I was agitating for the establishment, yet I felt clean and unaffected. How nice to play the grown-up and confront these dangerous radicals, of both left and right, on their half-baked plans and their wistful fantasies.

Oh how I pitied them, despised them even.

However, my main concern as I walked up and down people’s front gardens, was what to say if someone challenged me. Should I argue at all, or come out with some witticism or clever putdown? Might that only provoke or alienate? Thirty years of actively studying politics and economics on a daily basis, seemed meaningless if this wisdom was not transferable to a pithy anecdote, or some clever phrase. The very idea of communicating in such a false way made me feel sick. I comforted myself that I really would have made a poor politician. After all, I still read books for Christ’s sake!

***

It was then when I saw her grey head walking up and down front gardens, zig-zagging towards me. She too was delivering leaflets and I knew instantly that she was working for Vote Leave. My bile rose up in my throat, I would have to say something – a golden nugget to get under her skin. What if she actually had some political understanding, and a longer discussion was required? This would require an entirely different approach. I rehearsed a thousand different arguments in the 20 or so seconds it took for us to virtually collide outside someone’s garden gate, and when this fateful moment occurred all I could manage was:

‘Vote lose-all-your-annual-leave’.

She looked at me momentarily, shook her head to free a pair of earphones which I had not noticed.

‘Sorry?’

‘I said you guys want us to lose our employment rights so Boris can inaugurate a form of neoliberalism which would make Maggie look like a socialist. You really think we can leave the single market without consequences? All of business and expert opinion is lined up against you.’

Ah, that felt good.

‘We can trade with other nations.’

‘Trade with other nations!! If it was that easy, nobody would want to be in the EU in the first place. Nobody likes the EU, including Cameron and Corbyn!’ I spluttered.

‘It’s all this migration,’ she returned. ‘We can’t control our own borders.’

‘No one can control their own borders, we all have equal access to each others’ borders, that’s the whole point!’

‘But there are too many coming here, and we can’t cope.’

‘Can’t cope, do you not realise that migrants make a net contribution to the economy?’ Ever since Thatcher’s day, the idea has been to make the UK a low-wage flexible labour market. The whole thing has been set up for migration, the Brexit free-market Tories don’t even understand the logic of their own argument! How dare they blame the migrants for low wages – for shame!’

She stepped back a bit. It was working, she was an amateur, and she had not even mentioned wages.

Then she said it, her final rally…

‘Uncontrolled migration is a drain on public services, particularly the NHS. We need to take…’

‘NHS!!’ I shouted, slightly frightened by the level of my own volume. I stole a quick glance around the neighbourhood so as to ensure we were not causing a disturbance.

‘Let me tell you about the NHS!’ Last year my father almost lost the sight in his left eye. The doctor who saved his sight was from Greece. She was wonderfully attentive to my father’s needs to such an extent that he did not want to see any other doctor. It was as if she was a pagan Greek Goddess to our family. Even when we were at home eating dinner, the conversation would turn to Dr Frangoli. We would stop eating, and once I noticed a little tear dropping from my father’s left eye. He was so grateful, awestruck by this woman. ‘I don’t want any other doctor touching my eye,’ he said, ‘I trust only her.’ If that was not enough, most of the aftercare service was carried out by other migrants from the EU, as well as other countries. For days we sat in that hospital praising these people to high heaven. They appeared like angels to us. I even joked with them, saying, ‘Thanks for leaving your country and tending to our needs.’ How many Greeks have lost their eyesight whilst Dr Frangoli was helping my father? Eh? How many?! Migrants are not a drain on the NHS, they ARE the bloody NHS! Without them we would be screwed, how can you be so disrespectful?!’

I stopped and caught my breath. God I felt like crying!

I noticed my companion had shuffled back, she had clearly had enough.

‘I see,’ she said. And almost as an act of contrition, she whispered, ‘Well I guess your father will be voting for Remain then?’

‘Oh no, he’ll be voting for your lot.’

We stared at each other for a couple of seconds before she took her leave and recommenced delivering her leaflets. I stood there listening to my heart thumping. I was quite worn out, and just wanted to go home. I observed her mechanically zig-zagging up and down the remaining front gardens, but the swagger had left her gait.

I looked at the crumpled leaflet in my hand. It had become sodden with sweat. How had it come down to this? Without any enthusiasm whatsoever, I too continued with my leafleting.

‘Better get these delivered for Cameron,’ I reasoned.

‘Bastard.’

Brexit part II: the economy and the left

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We were planning to write a second part to our blog on Brexit, but we’ve never seen any point in reinventing the wheel, so here are links to two excellent wheelwrights who got there before us.

Firstly, we wanted to talk about the role of the left as unwitting footsoldiers for the right. People who live in their heads too much are often convinced that they’re being asked questions that they’re not. Ask why the bus hasn’t arrived, and they’ll launch into a polemic about privatisation. Ask whether Britain should remain a member of the EU, and they start dreaming about sovereignty and revolution. Here on earth, the question is a more straightforward one, but with potentially serious consequences, so conservative caution is called for. Vote Remain.

Secondly, we wanted to correct our perhaps too blasé analysis of the potential for economic damage on Brexit. As the post linked to points out, predicting the future is a tricky business, and it’s at least conceivable that Brexit will have no economic effect – perhaps even a positive one. But we are called upon in this referendum to judge the balance of probabilities – to choose between two elites who have done the work for us. Again, the conclusion looks pretty plain. Brexit will damage our economy – or, to put it in less abstract terms, will make us all poorer. Vote Remain.

A close reading of both these links might also, we would hope, put to rest the arguments of that smaller section of the far left who argue for a “plague on both their houses” as there’s “nothing to see here” for the toiling masses. Nothing could be further from the truth – unless you seriously think that living in a poorer country with fewer protections for workers at work, for human rights, and the environment, with neighbours engaged in ever more intense geopolitical conflict, is “nothing”. Remember, please, that you’re being asked a straightforward and serious question about present capitalist arrangements – you are not being asked about the dreams and hopes you have for the future (dreams and hopes that these bloggers share). Vote Remain.

The debate, for those following it, has sometimes been wearying, but interesting arguments have been aired on all sides. We rather wish this referendum weren’t happening at all, but given that it is, we have engaged with it, as all responsible citizens should. But at the end of the day, a decision is called for. We have made ours. It’s got to be for Remain.