Terry Field, our English correspondent experiencing a damp and chilly summer in Normandy, France, writes one of his most profound, and well-thought-out tomes on the forthcoming exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union.  - Glenn N. Holliman

A possible future for Britain after Brexit

 By Terry Field

  The engine is running with sputtering inefficiency, but it is, nonetheless, running. The British administrative machine is running through the tedium of Article 50, and the Great Repeal Act is starting to be put in place.

For the logic of this little article to be exercised, it must be accepted that there will and can be no ‘soft’ brexit. That is to say, that after the body of European law, and the Accession Act in particular, is repealed and the body of law incorporated into British Law, the United Kingdom will have left the European Union.

Article 50 is NOT the act of leaving; it is the act of administrative control, change and regularization of the accepted political reality.

The United Kingdom, when it joined the European Union, followed the powerful argument that 80% of the economic activity of the European Union was internally traded, whereas the percentage for the United Kingdom was the reverse – 80% was externally traded, only 20% internal.

The idea was to stabilize Britain by joining a (relatively) vast market of stable internal activity, thus offering Britain everything its post-war experience denied it. 

Now Britain will find itself outside the Customs Union, the Single Market, the political structures of the EU and the other legal and commercial cementation mechanisms.

What does this mean for Britain?

It is probable that Britain will rapidly forge trading patterns with other world powers – Japan, India, Pakistan, China, Australia, New Zeeland, perhaps Brazil, Canada and the United States, Singapore, Vietnam and other second and third-order states.

This process may take some years; perhaps over a decade.

Whilst this proceeds, the United Kingdom will experience progressively greater exposure to free market and free trade forces. That is the motive force behind much of the brexit-supporting Tory Party acting as they did in the referendum.

The Social Management Dimension

Britain has adopted a massive raft of the European Unions social protection mechanisms, ranging from labour-law protection, environmental protection, competition law, food standards, drug standards, safety and physical protection law, all driven with a parallel political and cultural integration program. And freedom.,

Since 1975 Britain has become radically integrated into Europe, with the international trade protections of a closed-trade block that allows for relatively stable tax-take and revenue management and expenditure controls.

The totality of these structures act to flatten income inequality, and reduce the potential for individual ‘libertarianism’. This latter is a jarring change for a country whose only period of massive wealth under Empire came from precisely this philosophy of personal liberty.

SO what happens as Britain faces the open seas after brexit?

In English law, the corporation is a person. With rights and obligations. As Britain rips so many of its European roots up, and looks to plant them in the trade soils of every country across the globe, it returns immediately to the reality of an unprotected, very-high throughput economy.

At the level of the talented trading individual and mercantile corporation, the potential for a new version of the East India Company is always there. 

I imagine this ‘buccaneering’ genius, unmatched anywhere else in the world save for Singapore, Holland, maybe parts of South Africa under Apartheid, will from time to time produce great success, great wealth, immense personal ego. 

The British state, however, is a large entity composed of competing interests many of which have built their consciousness over a – now - entire political lifetime of European philosophy and structure. Socialism, European–style, is baked into expectations; indeed, many people voted brexit as revolt against the effects of ‘globalisation’ on their life-chances.

BUT out of Europe, in the world, those competitive pressures will be enormously magnified. If the UK Inland Revenue finds tax collecting from individuals and corporations hard now, then the new world of totally global activity will make profit for corporations and individuals vastly more ‘manageable’ by the owners and managers.

Add to this the present overarching political intervention undertaken across the EU – whereby the working population is composed of at least 25% to 30%  who work but cannot survive without internal transfers from the prosperous to these needy via ‘tax credits’ (Germany at the van here, as ever) and it is very easy to see that there will no longer be any possibility for the British state to make such continuous massive transfers. 

Why?

Because the payers will do what they can to ‘disappear’ from tax sight, and the society will reject subsidy for work, and move to a more direct, Darwinian approach, the most powerful voices arguing that:

1 Future vitality depends upon open competition

2 Stateist intervention impoverishes and should be abandoned.

3 It is not moral to subsidise uneconomic activity, and low paid work is the very definition of ‘uneconomic’

4 Personal freedom can lead to success or failure; that is how life is and must be.

In other worlds, the retreat from the 200 plus years of liberal European thought will be in full flood.

I would argue strongly that Britain – in totality, not by reference to all its constituents - cannot succeed in a hard brexit, as a total society, if it attempts to maintain the very expensive, socially-reconstructive, redistributive, work-limiting EU controls.

Liberal, social interventionist, redistributive, universally socially ‘inclusive’ Britain will not last ten years of full-scale global open competition, hard-brexit having provided this environment.

I do not believe anyone in Britain has the slightest idea of what it will mean for the British to compete in open markets with the Indians, the Chinese, the South Americans, the USA. 

The reality of competition is vastly more developed, intrusive and economically violent that in 1973.

Then India was a socialist protected space, China made dim sum and not much else, and the imperial structures, falling apart it is true, still existed.

ALL gone, now vast capital and dirt cheap highly skilled labour across the globe faces down the British comprehensive state - school product.

Game set and match for quite a long time then, one who know the country from within might say. 

Our education standards are some years behind all those countries, save for the United States. 

Protected within European internal trade, cushioned by socialist relativist interventionism, this deficiency is not starkly experienced. 

BUT after brexit, the state will neither chose to, nor be able to protect the weak, the incompetent, the natural failures. 

There will be legions of them….

Success will bring wealth and power, inadequacy will produce poverty and exclusion in a way not experienced in Britain in living memory.

Should Britain try to maintain European social protections, the cost and economic distortions will stop the required changes that will be needed to make brexit any sort of success at all.

Capital is always lightly leavened in Britain, and ‘labour’ is packed, thus the country has low productivity and very low value-added.

This condition goes back for very many decades, reinforced by the social stratification that still requires the capital-free ‘peasantry’ to act and live with humility.

This lack of ambition amongst the British working classes is something the new brexit-empowered local mercantile capitalists will exploit ruthlessly.

Not for nothing did the historian AJP Taylor suggest Britain and Russia had very much in common, including the former’s almost feudal social separation between the educated, powerful rich, and the mass of the ‘rest’.

Despite some ‘modernisation, this condition has persisted.

It persists also in France, but that country hides behind Germany and is sheltered from competition by the EU structure and that pesky ‘internally–trading’ continental economy.

Only Britain faces the raw revolution of 21^st century open direct competition with whatever the world throws at it.

Thus social divisions in Britain are likely to increase, the social protection systems, the universal healthcare system, the housing and planning structures, as well as the access to universally good food and medicine. All will atrophy. 

Right, Terry writes from his country house in Normandy, France

The nature of Britain

At its core, Britain is a set of fractured social groups, which do not greatly interchange.

The essentially ‘local’ rich county Tory, the ‘internationally aware’ very different City banker, broker, financier, commercial adventurer. 

Then there is the small industrial technically-educated group, and the much larger, uneducated and marginal ‘post-industrial-and-commercial’ prolatariat, getting by with ‘a little bit of this a little bit of that’.

These groups neither like each other, understand each other, connect with each other, empathise with each other, nor share experiences together.

They live profoundly different lives.

On top of this there are the immigrant groups, some clever and enterprising, some stupid and passive. This variety adds instability and uncertainty in a new way. 

SO

How will these groups co-exist as Britain strips out the social togetherness that Europe progressively introduced, and which never was a part of the British social experience.

Certainly Britain was a monoculture, and when the economy roared into a new shape from 1750 to 1914 the different social constituent parts acted well together – there was ‘enough to go around’ where all new their place, and all could benefit. 

Now it is profoundly NOT a monoculture, and has been well described as a series of ghettos, with little interchange. Thus the class, income and asset differences are overlaid by racial, religious, supra-cultural, non-common assumptive world differences.

How do these new schistic elements rub against each other as buccaneering mercantile Britain forges a new future?

I predict one winner will be the Hindu Indian population; these people are internationally comfortable, educated, family based, resilient, used to tough exclusion and triumphing in difficult circumstances. For similar reasons the Chinese will also do well. Two groups of clever, motivated striving and serious-minded peoples. They will be the traders who connect the dots to Asia and new chances will be taken.

The City will do well, and be free to make itself anew; immense fortunes will be made, generally out of sight and out of tax liability as well.

Language and communications based technologies and softwares will succeed; Britain has a genius for communication and connection across cultures. 

Those clever indigenous who love those wider worlds will not suffer from world markets and they will be confident of real success – as their forebears also carved out new worlds.

Who will fail???

This is the central problem for the management of a modern state, but accentuated in the new condition of unconstrained competition a ‘hard’ brexit will impose on Britain. How can be accommodated the needs and survival of vast numbers of ‘citizens’ who can perform almost no useful economic function? The uneconomic nature of the uneducated, unintelligent, unmotivated and incapable will be thrown into bass relief when subsidy life is progressively withdrawn, and when no possible activity of pecuniary value and be undertaken by them.

To all intents and purposes these people will be dead to productive society. The increased barrier to activity represented by the inexpensive competitor workers across the globe, and the removal of function by computer managed economic subroutines will strip potential and survival potential from thee people.

Now within the EU, the social programs, reflecting the continuity of the ‘noblesse oblige’ of the 18^th Century enlightenment even into the 21^st century, and blunting the edge of the utter ruthlessness of the modern meritocracy these gentle failures can, in their many tens of millions, continue with some dignity – less by the day, but still some.

SO

Here is the real question of Brexit-

Can the liberal free market open-competition of the newly free British economy do a better job of looking after the interests of the poor that the European structures now do?

Tory types chafing at the bit for a free and open deep-sea economy says it can.

The anti-nationalists of the old European enlightenment currently steering Europe say nothing but misery and impoverishment can come of this liberality. 

My prejudices –

I was brought up to believe in the deep gains to be had from social integration, the suppression of extreme wealth, and the value of the individual despite their ‘economic value’, thus considering the poverty and early death of a gentle person simply because they had less means of accumulating wealth as an abomination – laughing and sneering, as it were, in the very face of God from whom all legitimacy is granted. 

Thus the very core Christian ethic, whereby it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle is what I believe, live and die by.

Brexit is in danger of destroying the combination of the Christian inheritance and the derivative Enlightenment in my country; of removing as emotional irrelevance the Methodist tradition, of replacing social responsibility with a combination of meritocracy and Randian total appropriation of wealth to the creator spirit in the economy.

The United States is going there now; China is already there, despite the absurd theatre-curtain of State Communism suggesting something other.

Islam teaches acceptance of the wealth of others, and is free of the social imperatives via Christianity and the French Revolution that drove European thought and present European action.

Brexit thrusts Britain away from all that. It drives it towards the raw competition of anew world of super-harsh amoral accumulation by winners.

That is not discussed in public.

Britain was here before, in the early 19th century, and only introduced social programs to fatten up the proletariat to be able to slaughter and be slaughtered by the Germans in the wars the country knew had to come in the future.

Britain has a very poor record on caring for its weakest and poorest. 

I argue here that the EU enhanced the social and psychological protections of the mass of the people of Britain, often in the face of the opposition of the local government and its values.

Thus the future for post-brexit Britain will be fast forward to the past. 

Into the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, but looking different with modern technology.

Vast unconstrained and remote wealth for some, fear and mental illness for very many. 

Irrelevance, physical and cultural isolation followed by relatively early death for many more than now. 

And the progressive end of the West. 

Europe will not readily withstand this new Island morality so close to its own shores. The social isolation of East Germany from the ruthless West could not survive.

I fear the EU and its high ideals is also doomed to be destroyed. For precisely the same reason. – by Terry Field