What should Labour do next?

I’m just starting to sober up after a week of Christmas boozing and drowning my sorrows after last Thursday’s catastrophe. In this brief moment of clarity I wanted to get some notes down on what the fuck Labour does next. We have many options, none of them certain to work, so let's review them.

Win back the white working-class?

White working class people in small towns aren’t voting Labour anymore. This isn’t a problem caused by Jeremy Corbyn or unique to the UK, however the election shows that it’s particularly acute right here, right now. 

The Labour Party was founded as the political representatives of the working class and whatever we were doing in the last election was not representing the views of the working class. There's no way we can win the support of the working class to form a government to tackle the problems of housing, social care, education, etc. whilst also telling working class people that they're stupid and racist. That's neither accurate nor a good strategy.

The obvious solution is to go full Blue Labour, i.e. find a Labour leader who is pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, happy to do speeches in front of the St George’s Cross and willing to indulge people in their casual suspicion of foreigners and benefits claimants in order to win back the support of the voters that the Tories just won, which allowed them to demolish Labour's red wall.

I guess in this scenario people like me, i.e. metropolitan, university educated, under 40, craft beer drinking (I’m literally writing this in the Brixton Craft Beer Co while drinking a pint of Earl Grey IPA), vegan burger eating, podcast listening, liberal socialists are just supposed to go fuck ourselves. Or we’re supposed to vote for a Labour leader who says “people are right to be concerned about how much Polish they hear on the bus” because the candidate for the other side has even more contempt for us. I call this the Joe Biden strategy: vote for this awful person because he might win and he’s less awful than the right wing candidate.

Of course there are those who think that Labour is remiss for not representing the views of the white, Northern man drinking Ruddles Best in a Wetherspoons, who thinks most Muslims aren’t properly British, immigrants are taking our jobs and not working them (to be fair that guy was from East London like me), that London is a fallen city because they made the mistake of being tolerant and that the measure of a strong leader is the number of countries they're willing to reduce to nuclear ash in a fit of pique. (If this sounds overly reductive, I just described myself as vegan despite loving meat because it fits my personal stereotype).

To the charge of Labour not representing lazy Northern stereotypes: you’re probably right, but the issue with politicians who pander to popular prejudices in order to educate people is that for some reason they never get around to educating people out of their prejudices but are really keen on the pandering. All this means I'm not keen on the above.

Being very pro-EU?

An alternative view is that Labour should be more anti-Brexit and pro-EU. Jeremy Corbyn was at best lukewarm warm to the EU and it cost him votes. 16.1 million votes is more than enough to form a government so being the party of the people opposed to Boris Johnson’s plan to literally drive a forklift through our economy is not a bad strategy, as everyone likes the guy at a party who said “I told you so” after a badly planned, drunken chinese lantern launch results in a car being set on fire. (I know this from personal experience.)

Seriously, there is a lot to be said for being socially liberal, open (whatever that means, but I think you know, wink wink), pro-business in a sort of “unfettered capitalism is bad but surely not everyone who wants to start a company is awful” sort of way. Also the alliance of people who hate Brexit + people who hate the Tories is a strong one.

On the other hand there are easier ways to hand the right-wing papers the perfect chance to paint the Labour Party as the enemies of ordinary, decent, salt-of-the-Earth people. Having John McDonnell urinate on The Cenotaph for one. This position would go down well with the #FBPE crowd, (an excellent bunch of people who think that everyone not gagging to make Lord Andrew Adonis leader of the Labour Party is vaguely suspect) but I'm not sure who else it wins over. Many Remainers voted for Boris and his very hard Brexit.

There are not enough people living in the right places for Labour to win an election under First Past the Post as a Remain Party. Most Remainers are clustered in cities where Labour is already strong and not in the towns Labour needs to win. Also, most people who endorse the idea of going back to 1997 usually talk about being realistic in their offering, meeting voters where they are and doing what it takes to win. Reconciling this with opposing the result of a referendum frankly doesn’t make sense. So making Labour a Remain party is not going to work.

Some horrible combination of the above

Doing full Blue Labour or being a strongly Remain party are both good ideals, what we’re likely to get is the crappiest execution of them. Just like Corbyn is the crap execution of every Owen Jones column ever written, what we’re likely to get next will be the crap version of whatever we want. In our heads, a speech that acknowledges people’s concerns about immigration whilst also accepting the crucial role that immigrants play in our society may sound like a transcendent Jed Bartlet monologue, but it will actually sound like a politician giving a vague politician answer that pleases no-one whilst said politician simultaneously trips up over their own shoes.

If there was a smooth operator in the Labour Party who had the pop culture cool of Tony Blair, whilst also having the dogged principles of Clement Attlee, the intellectual clout of Gordon Brown and the media savvy of Harold Wilson they would have come to the fore by now. Wanting Keir Starmer to be that person doesn’t make it true. The Labour Party isn’t well organised enough to suppress a brilliant leader if they existed. Please remember that whatever you want from a Labour leader in your imagination you’ll get the Tesco Value version of that vision, and like Tesco’s value toilet paper, it will fall apart under use. I speak from literal and metaphorical experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love the Labour Party to get good at politics again. I just want to inform those who think that the solution to Labour’s current woes is to make a full throated defence of Britain’s EU membership, whilst also fighting and winning a culture war in Britain’s Small towns that this won’t work and the amount of glue they’ve sniffing is doing some bad to their brains.

What should Labour do next?

Whoever we choose as the next Labour leader will get monstered anyway. We could find the blandest, most inoffensive, loveable children’s TV presenter and the right-wing media will convince everyone that they’re a dangerous Marxist who wants to nationalise your Gran, whilst also being a feminist culture warrior who wants to make your dad your mum, replace the Queen with Sandi Toksvig and spend their entire time in government apologising for the British Empire. The Labour Party could make Alan Sugar leader and some people would still think he’s dangerously left-wing.

If anyone wants to be Labour leader given everything I have said, then fair play to them. I don’t want to do it. If someone really thinks they can thread the needle of working-class Labour heartland, metropolitan liberals and swing voters whilst also taking on the right-wing media establishment then they’re welcome to have a crack at it.

What we shouldn’t go for is someone who really appeals to one part of the coalition and believe the rest should just fall in line because they should. We tried that and it didn’t go so well. Just because the metropolitan liberals have had a crack winning power by doing things that they like and being rude about people who think differently, doesn’t mean it’s now time for someone else to piss off a different part of the Labour coalition by ignoring them.

It’s not simple enough just do Blue Labour, or just be pro-EU, or just being a sensible centrist, or just be a socialist. Labour needs to appeal simultaneously to lots of different people in lots of different places to win power and it’s time we started reckoning with the complexities of that. So, as I have said before ,let’s hear some ideas of how we get out of his hole. That’s what Labour should do now.

Labour Party picture taken by Andrew Skudder and used under creative commons.

5 examples of political satire books

Some great works of political satire have been written over the years. So many that it is hard to know which ones to read first. To help you in your reading I have included 5 examples of political satire books that everyone should read. 

Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)

The farmyard fable is a tradition of English literature, which George Orwell employed for his satire of the Stalinism, Animal Farm. The book uses satire to tell the story of the Russian Revolution through the lens of a farm where the animals have risen up against the humans and taken over. The revolution then falls to tyranny as a Pig named Napoleon’s lust for power destroys all the principals of equality it was built on.

 Such was the impact of this novel that in the USSR it was illegal to name a pig Napoleon and phrases coined in the novel, such as “we are all equal but some of us are more equal than others” have become shorthand for when a revolution aimed to bringing freedom descends into tyranny.

 Orwell was a lifelong socialist, but he wanted to warn the British left of the dangers of authoritarian socialism. In Animal Farm he uses satire effectively to take the complexities of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism, to paint a stark picture of how revolutions can go wrong.

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

Joseph Heller’s novel takes aim at the pointless waste of life that is war and the bureaucracy of military-industrial complex. The novel follows Yossarian, a World War 2 bomber pilot stationed on an island called Pianosa. It dramatizes several events where Yossarian is caught between bureaucratic processes in a Catch 22. When we first meet Yossarian, he is in the hospital for jaundice, but the doctors are refusing to treat him until the jaundice fully sets in, but they won’t release him because he has jaundice. Yossarian is stuck as his life is ruled over by processes beyond his control.

Heller uses humour to expose what is wrong with war, religion and bureaucracy in America. He exaggerates the convoluted, contradictory and self-defeating aspects of the American military to make a point about the futility of war and how it ultimately adds up to the waste of human life. This is one of those novels when you have to laugh so that you don’t cry.

I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert (2007)

Stephen Colbert is a master at sending up conservatives via his comedy personality as a right-wing pundit. His show, the Colbert Report, was a mainstay of Comedy Central between 2005 and 2014, and in 2007 he put the character’s take on what was wrong with America (mainly liberals) into book form. Covering topics such as the homosexual agenda, race and immigration, Colbert satirises the hysterical tone of right-wing American politics. 

Colbert’s right-wing pundit character was a parody of American conservatives before they became a self-parody. Recently, Fox and Friend’s host Pete Hegseth denied the existence of germs saying: “I can’t see them, therefore they’re not real.”

The right in America have become some kind of scary, crazy joke, led by a reality TV version of Mussolini. The crazy pronouncements of Colbert now look tame and moderate next to a right that has openly embraced conspiracy theories and fake news. It’s terrifying that the world has become madder than the mad world of Stephen Colbert.

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935)

The idea of a US demagogue is powerful and scary. America has always thought of itself as a freedom loving nation, immune from the lure of authoritarianism. Yet there is a streak in American culture that is fanatical in its worship of flag, military and Americana. Could support for a dictator lurk beneath the surface that prides itself in its liberty?

That’s the idea behind Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here. The novel follows the rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip an authoritarian who becomes President of the United States by appealing to patriotism and a return to traditional values. To say that this book is relevant in the age of Donald Trump is an understatement.

The novel was mainly aimed at satirising Louisiana governor Huey Long, who was preparing a run for president before he was assassinated in 1935. Although it’s satire of the weaknesses of American democracy are still relevant today.

The character of Buzz has a few crucial differences to Trump, he has a street protest movement similar to Hitler and the SS, which Trump doesn’t have. However, other parallels exist, such as the main character being a journalist, a profession that Trump hates. I hope that Lewis’s fiction is not America’s future.

 Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes (2012)

Would we recognise Hitler for what he is if he walked amongst us? That’s the premise of German satirical novel Look Who’s Back. Hitler wakes up in modern Berlin, unaware of anything that has happened since 1945. As he continues to spout his Nazi views, he is mistaken for a method actor or comedy character, eventually finding success on YouTube and re-entering politics.

The novel pokes fun at contemporary alt-right extremists who are able to find an audience for their hateful views via social media. It also satirises our inability to see the true awfulness of extreme right politics and our mistake in assuming what we are seeing is an attempt at humour. Hiding behind a Family Guy-esque shock humour is a known tactic of the far-right. It’s sad to say that if Hitler was alive today, most people probably would dismiss him as a social media provocateur and not see the threat he poses to the world.

Conclusion

The list above covers a wide range of novels from different countries and periods in history. They all have something to say about today as well as the time they were written in. Even the old books have contemporary relevance as we can learn from the past to avoid repeating their mistakes. 

Satire is an effective way of communicating complex political ideas in an accessible and impactful way. What I have included above are a few examples of books that I think are excellent. Let me know which political satire novels you enjoy in the comments below.

Top 5 best satirical pieces of 2017

A good piece of political satire can quickly illuminate a truth or make a point that can take thousands of words of straight up reporting. Satire is also capable of bringing information outside the current context to a story or it can use humour to take an important story to a wider audience. I enjoy political satire, and 2017 has been a great year for satirists with lots of events ripe for satirisation, so I have chosen five of my favourite examples from this year.

5. London is lost claims alt-right snowflake doing literally everything ISIS want from him

No list of the best political satire of the year would be complete without something from NewsThump.com and this article is one of their best. Like all good satire it is both funny and makes an important point. The article mocks British alt-right YouTube personality and general purveyor of hatred Paul Joseph Watson, while making the important point that by blaming all Muslims for every terrorist attack he is creating just the culture of fear and hatred that extremists use to recruit more terrorists.

It is the goal ISIS and their ilk to convince Muslims that they cannot live in the West and practice their religion without being the subject of suspicion and hostility. Whereas most British people can generally see the difference between a few extremists and a peaceful majority, it is self-important alt-right hate mongers with a vision of apocalyptic culture war who are feeding a climate of suspicion of all Muslims that allows ISIS to flourish. This piece gets bonus points for finding a model who looks as punchable as Watson for their cover photo.

4. It’s not our fault they don’t take black kids at Eton says Oxford

Like NewsThump.com above, no list of British satire would be complete without the Daily Mash. Oxford and Cambridge Universities came under criticism this year for classism in admissions. It was revealed that twenty-one Oxbridge colleges didn’t accept a single student of colour from the UK. This article makes the point that it is not just Britain's top universities that are riddled with classism, but the entire education system and our entire society.

In 21st century Britain your lot in life is decided by your class and racial background. Why? Because we are very unequal society and the advantages your parents can give you matter more than your talent or hard work. Even institutions created to be social levellers, like grammar schools, have been colonized by middle class parents with sharp elbows. The classism in the admissions policy of Oxford and Cambridge is just a very visible example of this. The scandal goes beyond Oxbridge and Eton, and effects the entire country.

3. I’m a Google  manufacturing robot and I believe humans are biologically unfit to have jobs in tech

We cross the pond now to look at a depressing news story that was too ripe for satire. A grumpy Google employee (now ex-employee) decided that because he was a conservative, he was actually the most discriminated against person in the world, and to prove this, he wrote a memo claiming that women can’t work in tech because their brains don’t work that way.

This article, written from the point of a view of a robot manufacturing products for Google, artfully parodies some of said grumpy Google employee’s own arguments through exaggeration. For example, the robot’s claim that humans and machines “inherently differ” takes aim at the tired trope that women’s brains aren’t set up right for jobs in the tech industry. This article also make the point that robots are much better suited for the world of work than humans, so maybe we should think about all jobs they’ll be doing in the future before we all wake up to a world where there is no work and no one can earn any money.

2. The Malt-right/Is genocide the new counter-culture?

A truly brilliant piece of satire should be easily confused with what it is mocking, yet at the same time be a clear parody of it. This satirical piece of podcasting was so subtly done that I have to admit that at first I was taken in. Joel, Marsin, Iain and Craig run their podcast Kraken where they take a funny and irreverent look at anything from politics to Punisher comics. They often have guests and in this episode they invited on Alliot, who is a fictional far right activist whose analogies about racial purity always come back to single malt whiskey.

Alliot’s impression of a softly spoken, reasonable sounding, deeply racist alt-right nut job is note perfect. Depressingly believable moments include when he accuses Theresa May of being on the left (because she doesn’t support his vision of a racially segregated society and wants people to mix like blended whiskies) or when he claims that he disliked how a group of vagabonds stole from a cohesive, harmonious society of beautiful formed beings in in Guardian of the Galaxy Volume 2 (siding with the villains over the heroes).

As a character Alliot is just crazy enough and just real enough that I could believe that really are alt-right activists who believe that single malt whisky is the basis for a perfect society. This satire is so on the nose that I was actually left fuming that one of my favourite podcasts had given a platform to such an awful person.

1. Deep In Macron Country

The best piece of satire I read all year was written by a serious political journalist, not a professional satirist, and it is a perfect humorous parody of a lot of articles I have read. Like the Malt-right above, I was at first taken in that this was a serious piece of on-the-scene reporting from a town in France that had voted overwhelmingly for Emmanuel Macron. As the piece progresses, the French stereotypes subtly become more obvious until the basis in satire becomes evident.

What makes this piece so brilliant is that there are two interesting points being made here. The first is making fun of all the metropolitan journalists who dashed to forgotten post-industrial towns to grab a few quick insights in the wake of the Brexit vote or Trump’s election. The article parodies journalists were keen to seek out an archetypical member of the left-behind to grab a few quick quotes from about what madness had driven them to ruin the country for everyone.

As well as this, the article shows how Macron was able to easily defeat the far right candidate Marine Le Pen for president, by contrasting the French presidential election with the American one. Points such as how other right wing French politicians threw their “weight behind a centrist in the final round” instead of “pander[ing] to her more in order to prop up their own base”. This shows a country less politically fraught than America, where a conventional politician was able to defeat populists. Like all good satire, this article is witty and has a real insight.

These are my favourite pieces of satire from this year. What are yours? Let me know in the comments below.

Inside the Church of Momentum

I am very worried about the state of the Labour Party. Only a few years ago we were a friendly broad church that tolerated differences of opinion. Sure, there were disagreements between Blairites and Brownites or between supporters of Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, but generally we all got along. That changed when Jeremy Corbyn announced he was standing for Labour leader and thousands of hard left activists flooded into the Labour Party. The hostility of these Johnny-come-latelys to proper party members is palpable. They should remember they are guests at this party and not be so rude to the hosts.

You cannot even point out how fundamentally misguided these people are without being labelled a “neoliberal”, “Red Tory” or simply “scum”. In order to complete their takeover of the party and crush all dissenting opinion, this gaggle of former SWP members have banded together to form a clandestine party-within-a-party called Momentum.

Anyone with sensible, centre-left opinions views Monument as a dangerous cult. The fact that Momentum is responsible for all the party’s current woes is frequently discussed at Progress meetings. Many proper party members are worried about how this rabble of Trotskyists are dragging that party away from the values of Chuka Umunna and Yvette Cooper.

I wanted to learn more about the hostile force that has invaded my political home. So I went down to a local Momentum meeting to see what these belligerent worshipers of Jeremy Corbyn were like. The experience was harrowing and confirmed all of my suspicions.

The email I received said the meeting would take place on Sunday at Leytonstone High Road Methodist Church. I went down on Sunday morning and the first thing I noticed was that Leytonstone High Road Methodist Church was the sort of Modernist, concrete box that that only a metropolitan, liberal who was completely out of touch with reality could like.

The meeting was well attended (it’s East London, Corbyn Central), but I was surprised to see so many students and young people out of bed early on a Sunday morning. I thought they would all be sleeping off craft beer induced hangovers and telling each other on SnapChat that Taylor Swift's new video was “problematic” before then heading down to Sodo Pizza Cafe for smashed avocado on toast.

It must have been passion for Corbyn that got so many young people up early. Momentum members behave in irrational ways, even for Millennials, who don’t vote and shouldn't be listened to. There were some older members, clearly Trotskyist infiltrators we kicked out of the party in the 1980s, still hell-bent on destroying Labour to prove some point about Communism being the future. They all had the Karl Marx beards and some had leather bound copies of Das Kapital with them.

I slipped in at the back, careful not to draw attention to myself. These people can smell a political activist with a firm understanding of what the electorate want a mile off and they don’t like it. I was ready for some unreconstructed old-school leftyness, but I was surprised that the meeting actually began with the singing of socialist anthems. I half expected Billy Bragg to appear with his guitar to lead everyone in in a chorus of the Red Flag. Instead, it was Jerusalem on an organ (I guess Mr Bragg was too busy at his mansion in Surrey).

Singing this song is clearly virtue-signalling of the highest order. A calling card marking out who is in the group designed to exclude people who aren't red flag waving nutters. They didn't sing Things Can Only Get Better because they secretly know that, under Corbyn, they can only get worse.

When the singing was over we moved on to the main subject of the meeting. I braced myself for a wave of hatred directed at Blairites and Red Tories, but the local chapter leader (I assume that’s what they are called) was a calm and soft-spoken young man who (credit where credit is due) had a real knack for talking to people on their level. At first I listened to him exalt the virtues of Corbyn or (JC as he called him) in his calm and reasonable voice. Then I remembered not to be taken in. Cult leaders don’t look like raving nutters at first. I needed to keep my wits about me during this meeting.

What was most striking about the meeting was that there is was no discussion of policy. At Progress meetings we all read from Policy Review and discuss what opportunities the gig economy presents for the future of work. At Momentum, everyone sits in silence and listens to the chapter leader. There is only one word for this: cult-like. What myself and my friends from the Liz Kendall For Leader campaign thought about Momentum was true.

Momentum members are not interested in listening to other people's views, only how great JC is and how he saved the party from awful Blairites. I heard about how JC died and came back to life - a reference to his poll ratings that have improved recently, but everyone knows this is only temporary, Corbyn has none of the sticking power of politician like Tristram Hunt

I was told how JC is both the son of the party and the party itself, a statement so contradictory and threateningly Orwellian that it could come from Chairman Mao himself. I heard about how JC suffered for our sins (clearly an attack on proper party members who supported Blair or read the fair and balanced debate in the mainstream media). The propaganda was dispensed in a reasonable way by a charming young man and these dulled fools lapped up every word of it, and to think that these closeted Communists have a go at religious people for being gullible.

Then came the most horrifying part. These delusional cultists practiced a ritual where they drank the blood of the Labour Party leader. Not literally. Symbolically using wine as a proxy, but I was still disturbed. The chapter leader poured the wine and invited the Corbnyistas to receive the blood of JC as a token of the suffering he endured (a clear reference to the PLP’s vote of non-confidence in Corbyn last summer).

I was worried what these lunatics might do to a non-believer. The walls of the meeting room were covered in pictures of a man going through some sort of wood and nails based torture, presumably to scare members into obedience. Things looked dark. I was about to be forced to symbolically drink the blood of a man who defied the Labour whip 617 times. This was unthinkable. I turned and ran screaming out of the meeting. I'm sorry to say that I shat myself a bit on the way.

Seeing inside the hard left cult of Momentum was the most disturbing experience of my life. These invaders have only one interest: driving out everyone who won’t take part in their righteous worship of JC. I was left believing that I was right about them all along and shouldn't have bothered to find out first hand.

We are all cool with this, right?

I'm surprised with how relaxed everyone is about Brexit. 48% of the electorate voted remain, but you can’t tell that by reading the news. After a quick glance at the headlines and you would think that the winner of the referendum was people drawing in an additional box on the ballot paper saying "hardest Brexit possible" and then spitting on it. Why do we act like the whole country is united behind Brexit?

The only people standing up for the 48% are the Lib Dems, but if they get anywhere near actual power again I expect them to turn around and say: “We’ve looked at it and it turns out that what’s in everyone’s best interest is to drag the UK to the middle of Atlantic ocean”.

The public seems to be broadly united behind Brexit happening. Or more accurately: the public is united behind having no more elections or referendums. The public is sick of being asked its opinion and considering how hard I find it choose which craft beer I want in my local hipster pub, I too am dubious about the merits of having everyone make an important decision about the future of the country every year. The public don’t want any more referendums, expect perhaps, maybe, one more in Scotland, because that was fun last time and it ended well. Sort of.

The consensus is that we have to do Brexit, to stop Nigel Farage leading a pitchfork-wielding mob down to Westminster, but there are many different types of Brexit, so why are we getting hard Brexit?

The leave campaign was so woolly that it could mean anything to anyone. Paul Stephenson, is still saying that we should have £350 million a week for the NHS, although it's more likely that Boris Johnson will join a monastery and take a vow of poverty. The Brexit we are getting prioritises control on immigration and leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. The latter was hardly a feature of the campaign; it's just May’s personal desire to have a British Jack Bauer go to town on people she does not like, like a horrible cross between James Bond and Peter Sutcliffe.

The former priority is as widely supported as the Leave campaign’s offer of £350 million more for the NHS, which was dropped quicker than a Lib Dem MP’s majority and with no political consequences. So why can't we also drop the immigration pledge? It's not like the Tories think cutting immigration dramatically is possible.

I am surprised that the whole country seems to be relaxed that we are getting the most right wing Brexit possible. We voted to leave the EU, not to give the Daily Mail everything they wanted. I wouldn't be surprised if a referendum on reintroducing capital punishment and making it the law to sing the national anthem at the start of every school or working day is next.

I suppose we do have PM who is loved by the Daily Mail (apart from when she is trying to raise the national insurance payment of their columnists) and two thirds of the public want immigration to come down. The main division in the EU referendum was not between pro and anti-immigration camps, but between people who wanted immigration to come down but were not willing to be poorer to achieve this, vs people who either were willing to be poorer or thought that this would not be necessary.

The Tories have also given up pretending to be nice like David Cameron did (apparently that’s what the Tories think a nice human being is like) and now they really want to appeal to base selfishness by being pro-business and pro-hating people because of what they look like. There is also the issue that a significant number of remain voters were Tories and they don’t seem keen on turning against their government, even while it tramples all over our future prospects.

At first I was worried that giving two fingers up to the EU was likely to result in a bad deal for Britain. Now I am worried that there will be no deal and we will exit on WTO terms. The odds of us leaving with no deal are increasing and there is a complete lack of panic about this; in fact, some have argued that it would be okay.

I don't think that it will be okay to have a 15% tariff on food coming into Britain from the EU and a 36% tariff on dairy, raising cost of living and creating inflation. I certainly don't think that it will be okay if we have a hard border in Northern Ireland. This could literally lead to violence and the loss of lives. How many lives is it politically acceptable to lose to get a good deal from the EU? I am pretty sure some poor intern in Tory Party HQ has been given the job of working this out. It honestly frightens me when people are blasé about exiting on WTO terms as if that were not so bad.

This little talk has made me more nervous. I'm not sure why we are all so cool about the way Brexit is going. The 48% should be more angry about how their future is being mortgaged to placate the ire of Daily Mail-reading 70 year olds who won't be around to appreciate just how bad the long term implications of their dislike of immigration will be.

I'm worried by how little people are freaking out about hard Brexit or no Brexit deal (currently it's 50/50 between the two - I never thought I would root for hard Brexit on some level) and the lurch to the right. We're all cool with this, right? Because I'm not.

Brexit offers many opportunities for the Labour Party

It is certainly strange to be feeling disappointed that the Labour Party has a similar policy stance to the Tory Party when Jeremy Corbyn is leader. I voted for Corbyn precisely to avoid this feeling. If I wanted to be realistic about what the voters wanted, I would have supported Andy Burnham. I voted for a serial rebel, because I did not want to see Labour compromising. Now the preferred politicians of the Morning Star and the Daily Mail have little difference between them on the biggest issue of today. If Douglas Adams had submitted this as a novel, it would have been rejected as too surreal.

John McDonnell has said that Brexit offers many opportunities. It's worth remembering that crashing your car into a brick wall offers you the opportunity to get a better one, but most people just head down to their local Ford dealership. Although the British public has spoken - and their chosen direction is into the brick wall. Driving safely is apparently what metropolitan liberals do, and in 2017 no-one wants to be seen publicly shopping in Waitrose or being nice to another human being. So with that in mind let's take McDonnell at face value.

Brexit offers us the opportunity to get the economy we want. Everything is up for grabs and Britain is clearly too dependent on financial services and desperately needs to diversify its economy, so that the new jobs created are not just at companies that find inventive ways for the very poor to do for money what rich millennials’ parents used to do for free. (This, by the way, is not sarcasm, it's an actual Silicon Valley business strategy.)

No-one is more excited than me about giving a bloody nose to the cunts who do coke in the toilet of the Liverpool Street Station Wetherspoons. However, after every financial crisis we end up ever more dependent on an unstable financial sector and then banks get less apologetic. If you think that the slow crushing of prosperity that Brexit will bring is going to be felt in the square mile then remember we have a Tory government who would sell Newcastle to Kim Jong-Un to test his nuclear weapons before they contemplate inconveniencing the City of London. We always end up worse off and they always end up richer.

Let's not forget that the Tories back up plan for Brexit (if acting like an impatient child for some reason doesn't land a brilliant deal from the EU27) is to turn Britain into a low tax, low regulation, neoliberal hell hole to lure in the money of the most greedy and unscrupulous people in Europe. In essence we will be like Monaco with rubbish weather. Or Switzerland with rubbish trains. Or Singapore with rubbish. What everyone who does not work in financial services, the sex industry, the coke supply industry, or north of Watford is supposed to do in these circumstance is unclear. Certainly do not think about being a nurse or a teacher or anything useful and (formerly) supplied by the government, as the Tories will be rushing to deliver as much austerity as possible so that they can offer dodgy back handlers to any company that threatens to relocate to mainland Europe.

Brexit also offers the opportunity for Britain to regain sovereignty of its laws, this will surely be of benefit to a future Labour government. Never mind that we have a Tory government right now that treats the Human Rights Act as an inconvenience that stops us driving nails through the fingers of people we do not like. Leaving the EU will offer any future Tory government the ability to do whatever they like with workers', environmental and human rights.

The Tories are salivating at the prospect of bringing back child labour (you need to start on that CV early in today's competitive job market), drilling for shale glass in the Lake District (can anything that doesn't make money for big business be truly beautiful) and throwing benefit claimants who don't look for work into the Thames (only a metropolitan liberal who lives in East London, cycles to work and drinks vegan beer would disagree with this). Unless we were looking at very long period of uninterrupted Labour rule, I would be very wary about leaving the comforting, regulated embrace of the EU.

While Brexit offers a great opportunity to regain the sovereignty of the UK, it also offers a great opportunity to destroy it. After Wales and Cornwall have become Mad Max-esque hellscapes following the withdrawal of EU assistance grants, we have the prospect of Scotland leaving the union and the creation of a hard border between Northern and the Republic of Ireland. Of course the proposed Tory solution to the latter is to treat Northern Ireland as if it is in the Republic, which will definitely go down well with the Protestants and Unionists there. We may be able to rip Britain away from the tyranny of the EU, but we are very likely to rip the country apart in the process.

Supporting Brexit also offers Labour the opportunity to reconnect with its base, because what voters up and down country really want is to hear a Labour leader talk awkwardly about immigration. It went well for Ed Miliband and I for one am looking forward to more conversations with Green Party members about why our leader’s so keen on controls on immigration, while trying to silence that nagging bit at the back of my brain telling me that this is not right. All the time we will be accused of betraying the two thirds of Labour voters who voted remain, and being accused of being Britain hating, Brexit traitors by UKIP regardless of how much we hug the flag and try to stop people coming here to contribute to our economy by doing jobs that British people turn their noises up at.

Finally Brexit offers the opportunity to make a strong statement about the Britain we want. It's a great opportunity to tell the world that we are a closed and xenophobic island with a hugely exaggerated sense of a self-importance, and who would not be want to sign trade deals with such a nation? Never mind that we have no experience of negotiating trade deals for the last 40 years, our closest ally thinks that the point of a deal is to come out massively better off than the other side and that many of the other countries we want to do deals with want Britain to relax our visa laws, something that the reasonable Brexit voters will certainly be opened minded to as they are so keen to put national interest ahead of their small minded prejudices.

Only a metropolitan liberal who grows ironic facial hair, attends music festivals in Eastern Europe and wants to buried wrapped in old copies of the Guardian (it's more environmentally friendly) would have reservations about tearing up 40 years of law and rewriting them in 30 seconds while primarily considering whether the Daily Mail will like the result.

With all the opportunities for radical change what is there to worry about? Anyone who says otherwise is just a Remoaner who hates Britain. I'm not worried. I'm not even going to wear my seatbelt when I voluntarily crash my car into this wall. To do otherwise is to talk down Britain.

Why you should not lend Ayn Rand your car

Recently I had to face the prospect of moving a large amount of house hold waste to the dump without access to a car or van of any sort. I do not have a driving licence so renting one was out of the question. The solution to this problem was evident; find an obliging friend who would happily drive my broken old furniture to the dump. This was easily done but a second problem quickly emerged, how best to pay my friend for his time and the use of his car. A simple cash payment between friends seemed crass, more akin to a business relationship than an honest friendship, so I was left with a dilemma.

What I actually wanted to acquire from my friend was use of his vehicle and his skills as a driver. Obtaining these for myself had been options in the past, but I deemed the cost of learning to drive and purchasing a car too high and thus declined. This afforded me more money to indulge in my other interests such as buying minimalistic furniture, however the keen investor is usually proved right and thus when some large items of furniture were broken beyond repair I needed to find some means of economic exchange to secure the removal of a broken wardrobe from my living room.

If hard currency was out of the question, what could I offer in exchange for my friend’s Sunday afternoon and his driving skills? Eventually I settled on the idea of a goods exchange. I would use some of my current wealth to purchase goods, which could be given to my friend in exchange for the use of his car and driving skills, which he had invested past wealth in. Both of us being fans of real ale I bought a selection from a local microbrewery for him to enjoy after he had driven home. I made it clear that I was not offering an incentive to violate drink-driving laws.

After our exchange of goods and labour was completed, the whole process made me think. How could I be sure my friend had received a fair price for his labour and the investment he had made in the car? The wardrobe was quite a problem for me and I might have valued the use of the car more highly than the payment I offered. In a competitive market place, where there are no restrictions of friendship then the use the car might have fetched a far higher price in terms of bottles of ale.

The whole situation reminded me of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged in which Midas Mulligan insists his friend charges him for the use of his car rather than simply borrowing it for free. Rand being a believer in the virtues of selfishness saw it as socialism to lend goods for free.

Perhaps this is an extreme interpretation of what she thought but the economics behind her ideas were simple. Someone invests time and money in learning to drive and buying a car. Those who choose otherwise should have to sacrifice some form of economic gain in order to get the benefit of what they have not invested time and money into.

I think Rand is missing a truth to this situation, which played out through my own experiences this weekend. On some level I was offering goods I purchased in exchange for the use of skills and equipment but there was another transaction taking place. My friend was sacrificing his Sunday afternoon to help me out of a situation, a choice which carried with it an opportunity cost. As part of this exchange he was building up good favour with myself which is in turn an investment which will yield fruit later, perhaps in the form of me fixing his computer or helping him clean up after a party. This relationship is not quantified by a direct exchange of goods and labour, but it is still taking place.

In short there is a human exchange taking place as well as an economic one. This human exchange can lead to an economic benefit in the future and the good relationships human exchanges foster can form the basis of strong long term economic alliances of the variety that really benefit communities and the wider economy. Not short term valuation aiming to get the maximum value for minimum input.

In Rand’s world we are all selfish machines, doing what is best for ourselves in the hope that this will somehow make human society richer as a whole. As the economic crash of the 2000s shows unbridled selfishness ultimately makes us all poorer. Human trust is an important commodity and good relations make as much sense economically as they do socially. I am very pleased that my friend gave up his Sunday afternoon to help me and I feel that it brought us closer together in a spirit of co-operation, a closeness that can help us overcome economic hardships.

Rand’s bleak view of humanity misses our real strengths; our willingness to sacrifice for each other that helps us collectively overcome great hurdles. What this all boils down to is that in the future, if I owned a car and Ayn Rand asked to borrow it, the price would not simply be economic and I doubt she could afford it.

Austin Allegro image created by Thomas Pics and used under creative commons.