The EU Referendum (Part 4)

The UK was set to be officially leaving the EU today. It’s a strange feeling that’s hard to put into words. It’s been delayed, of course.

How the UK got to this situation in the first place is a moot point. Its roots can be traced back to the end of World War II, yet were channelled by the tabloid press in earnest during the last thirty years, who successfully ushered in the notion that somehow the European Community has been an invading, hostile force, in which the UK has constantly seen its sovereignty undermined – rather than the reality, which is that the UK helped shape EU laws as a large member-state, rather than have laws imposed on it. This quite deliberate campaign has been relentless in its stream of anti-EU propaganda, propagated by tabloid owners based in tax havens. The image propagated by the tabloids of plucky 'us', the underdog dictated to by 'them', is something that writer Fintan O’Toole picked up on with this article, which locates Brexit as a result of the English psych about World War II. It can’t be a coincidence that many of the British films that have been in the cinemas in the last few years have been about WWII, from Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill to Dunkirk to, well, this. While cinema in other European countries has addressed head-on all kinds of contemporary, a good deal of British films have retreated to nostalgia about Britain’s finest hour, standing alone against an invading Europe.

Something was continually repeated during the referendum was the mantra “taking back control of money, borders and laws” – despite the fact that the UK never really lost control of all three. The UK never entered in the Eurozone, and thus uses its own sovereign currency; while a member of the EU, the UK has had a theoretically permanent opt-out from using the Euro. The vast majority of laws have always been made in Westminster, as the Government’s own white paper confirmed. The UK may have not been able to make its own individual trade laws, but as part of the EU it has had sufficient clout when spearheading trade deals together with the other member states to take on the USA and China. Meanwhile, the UK’s exemption from the Schengen zone has meant that even UK citizens have to show their passport when returning from other EU member states. The only UK border that can be said to be ‘open’ in any meaningful sense is the one with the Republic of Ireland – a situation that the UK agreed to, and which involves a complicated confluence of factors, including the Common Travel Area agreement between the two countries; the Good Friday Agreement; and the fact that both countries have been in the EU up until now, thus guaranteeing the same standards for everything from goods to livestock rules. The inconvenient problem of the border was circumnavigated by the leading Brexiters by simply ignoring it. Instead, the pro-leave leaflet that I received through the post at the time of the referendum obsessed over Turkey (along with a number of other Eastern European countries) joining the EU, despite the fact that discussions over Turkey joining the EU have effectively come to an end: 

Not only did the tabloids manage to exploit the unfounded fear of Turkey joining the EU, but the leaflet above also heavily implied that the EU's borders would shortly be facing war-torn Iraq and Syria, instilling the idea that it would be easy for jihadists from those countries to walk into EU territory.

At the same time as this, what has become more and more obvious during the political chaos that has engulfed Britain in the last two years is that many of the right-wing thinktanks, institutes and pressure groups that have emerged from the shadows into the public eye, such as the European Research Group (ERG) and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), have used the spectre of no-deal Brexit, or 'Hard Brexit' in which the UK severs all ties, precisely for reasons of self-interest. Sometime in the 2000s, Conservative MP’s Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father, Lord William Rees-Mogg, wrote a book called The Sovereign Individual, which detailed how one can exploit economic chaos and civil unrest for personal benefit by shorting the pound (or dollar, or yen, or whatever the local currency is). That’s precisely what many people did in the resulting economic downturn that happened, on both sides of the Atlantic (as captured in the film The Big Short).

Groups such as the ERG remain shadowy, murky entities. They have been frequently accused of breaking parliamentary rules in their use of public funds in promoting a partisan view of politics rather than objective research. The ERG in particular has openly plotted to oust Theresa May in the last few months.

As it turns out, they are just one of many groups which all advocate similar plans. All believe strongly in strengthening ties between UK and the US while distancing the UK from the rest of Europe – an ethos that was central to The Atlantic Bridge, a group that was set up in 1997 by current UK secretary for independent trade, Liam Fox, who has close links to the Trump administration.

The rise of these groups, and with it the popularity of politicians such as Rees-Mogg, has alarming implications for the National Health Service (NHS). They advocate free market economic views, including a rolling back on workplace regulations, food labelling laws, and environmental protections, with Rees-Mogg commenting on the latter: "If it’s good enough for India, it’s good enough for here". This systematic culling of most state intervention would include a deregulated economy in which tax havens would thrive. These groups advocate getting rid of 'red tape' and 'bureaucracy'.

The UK will be in a situation in which it will be at the mercy of other countries in trying to strike trade deals. Brexit, and especially a no-deal Brexit, is likely to lead to a situation in which there will be increasing financial pressure on the NHS, exacerbated by the falling value of the pound. As a UK In A Changing Europe report puts it, "There are likely to be further pressures on public-service funding more broadly from a hit to economic growth caused by Brexit. This will mean tough choices for the Government. It could decide to increase healthcare funding, but this will have to come from raising taxes, borrowing or diverting funds from other priorities".

These "tough choices" could lead to cuts to NHS spending and staff wages. Another right-wing pressure group, The Taxpayers Alliance, advocate an insurance-based health system involving increased charges for services. Those charges would fall on ordinary citizens. It could also lead to NHS Trusts being maligned and left to fail.

Indeed, the US could demand, as part of a free trade deal, a stake in an NHS already reeling from a fall of around 96% in recruitment of nurses from other EU countries. The result could be a situation in which American healthcare companies could make money off sick and vulnerable patients.

Such a deal could mean that the NHS could take on the form of American-style healthcare, where large sums are paid for surgery and caps on pharmaceutical prescription prices are dismantled. The result could be that many patients could be left in debt to the tune of thousands of pounds.

This opening up of the NHS to foreign competition could theoretically also lead to investment protection measures such as Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS), in which transnational corporations could claim compensation from the NHS if they believe that their investments have been harmed by the breaching of treaties.

This wasn’t the vision that some Brexiters had in mind. Instead, Vote Leave promised the public shorter waiting times and £350 million per week. This vision was summed up during the EU referendum campaign with videos such as 'Which NHS will you vote for?', which unambiguously depicts the NHS as better off post-Brexit:

Yet it was a member of Vote Leave, the MEP Daniel Hannan, who would go on to found the Institute for Free Trade (IFT), who are now advocating a new trade deal in conjunction with the Cato Institute – a libertarian right-wing organisation based in the US that advocates Ayn Rand-style politics, in which Government intervention is significantly rolled back. The IFT/Cato Institute advocate the removal of tariffs, and EU regulations – and the opening up the NHS to foreign competition. The Cato Institute has hosted lectures by the likes of Leave.EU founder Aaron Banks, who has made no secret of his desire to see the NHS fully privatised.

As the IFT/Cato Institute’s report puts it: “Health services are an area where both sides would benefit from openness to foreign competition…The United Kingdom should push as hard as possible for the United States to allow U.K. goods and services providers to have access to U.S. procurement markets, and open its procurement to U.S. companies, as well…the United States and United Kingdom – traditionally two of the world’s leading supporters of free trade – may be able to craft a free trade agreement that reshapes the model by pushing it in the direction of more trade liberalization and less governance”.

The IFT are not the only right-leaning think tank obsessed with dismantling the NHS. The IEA is another. Its news editor, Kate Andrews, a prominent lobbyist for private healthcare companies, opined in an article in The Spectator that “reform of the NHS is long overdue, and no amount of balloons or birthday cake can district from this obvious truth”; she also appeared on Newsnight to ram the message home. The IEA’s paper, 'Universal Healthcare Without The NHS', claims that "the evidence on the quasi-market reforms [of the NHS] is overwhelmingly positive, even if it could never be strong enough to convince the die-hard critics".

These right-wing groups advocate a hard Brexit because the resulting chaos – similar to what Naomi Klein describes in The Shock Doctrine – would provide a perfect opportunity for them to seize natural assets and short the pound. This is what The Sovereign Individual presciently predicted ten years ago, and which was borne out in the financial crash taking place at the time the book was published. As Andrew Simms has pointed out in Cancel The Apocalypse, "This kind of economic shock therapy has been employed for decades, ranging from Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998...it also seems to have been used in response to the massive financial market failure of 2007-8 in Europe and and the United States".

It’s for this reason that they have financial interests in seeing the NHS privatised. As a member of a pressure group called Keep Our NHS Public, it’s become obvious that the NHS is one of the big prizes that the Brexiters have their sight on.

As mentioned above, a parallel can be drawn with what happened in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which wealthy oligarchs became rich at the expense of both the ordinary public and public services. It’s not hyperbole to suggest that this is what could happen to the UK once we finally do leave the EU.