A
Brexit betrayal is coming – but who will get the blame?
Aditya Chakrabortty
Leave
voters wanted the status quo to be ripped up, and Theresa May simply
cannot fulfil this promise
Tuesday 13 December
2016 05.59 GMT
Hold off the jibes
and sighs over how much poorer Brexit Britain will be. Forget about
the mendacity and slipperiness of Boris ’n’ Nigel. In the six
months since the referendum these have been the clever arguments to
make, the ones that fill the sophisticated newspapers and BBC
discussions. But none answer the far simpler and much harder
question: then what? What happens when 17 million people get the
feeling they’ve been cheated?
That will be the
most profound question in British politics, not just in 2017 but for
many years to come. As the broken promises of Brexit pile up one on
top of the other, so that they are visible from Sunderland, from
Great Yarmouth, from Newport, what will the leave voters do then?
The pledges I mean
aren’t the ones about how £350m will flood each week into the NHS,
or those others that came out waving a Pinnochio-sized proboscis. I’m
thinking of the promises that went far deeper. The vow to “take
back control”. To stop being the human punchline to someone else’s
macroeconomic joke. To – as our north of England editor Helen Pidd
wrote last week – no longer live on crumbs, while others in London
enjoy entire loaves.
The Brexiteers were
explicitly offering voters a once-in-a-lifetime shot at changing the
status quo. And before embarking on what has otherwise been a
stiff-backed, fixed-grin, try-hard few months at No 10, Theresa May
got it, promising “people voted for change. And a change is going
to come.”
The forecasts are
in, and they indicate Britain will suffer its first lost decade since
Karl Marx was alive
Except change, in
our new prime minister’s dictionary, just means more of the same.
Admittedly, it is only six months into Year Zero and Britain is yet
to start disentangling itself from Europe. But whatever is promised –
hard or soft, red white or blue – it’s clear that the terms of
Brexit will be dictated by Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel and the other
27 members of the EU, rather than by our dream team of May, Boris
Johnson and David Davis. We can also see much else of what the next
few years will bring. The economic plan for the rest of this decade
has been laid out by Philip Hammond, and it equals austerity-lite –
but for even longer. The forecasts for wages and living standards are
in, and they indicate Britain will suffer its first lost decade since
Karl Marx was alive.
More to the point,
it’s not clear what May’s initial promises of a fresh start were
worth. She steeled herself to call off the expensive disaster of
Hinkley C – then meekly waved it through. She vowed to install
workers on company boards – then the idea didn’t even make it on
to a green paper. She promised to stick up for “just about
managing” families, then allowed her chancellor instead to carry on
slashing taxes for multinationals.
And then there’s
foreign ownership of Britain’s infrastructure. Remember how May
promised to scrutinise any proposed takeovers of such strategic
assets as water, energy and transport? Well, last week, while the
rightwing commentators were diligently huffing and puffing over Gina
Miller at the supreme court, another kind of sovereignty was being
covered on the City pages. The National Grid announced it would sell
a majority of its gas pipelines to a consortium of largely overseas
investors, including China and Qatar, and led by an Australian
investment bank, Macquarie.
You may never have
heard of Macquarie, but my guess is you’ve probably been one of its
customers. The bank is known as the “millionaires’ factory” or
the “vampire kangaroo” – and it owns a lot of the most prosaic
parts of British life. You’ve been Macquaried if you’ve left your
car in a National Car Park, or flown out of Glasgow, Southampton or
Aberdeen or if you’re among its 14 million customers in Thames
Water. And as of next spring, it will lead an international group
with a 61% share in our biggest gas distribution network: that’s
82,000 miles of pipe, serving 11m homes and businesses across eastern
England, the north-west and the West Midlands.
I have come across
Macquarie before, through its handling of Thames Water, which some
analysts cite as being among the greatest debacles in all of
Britain’s history of privatisation. Just as with National Grid, it
led a consortium to buy Thames. Two academics at the Open University
examined the accounts between 2007 and 2012 and found that in four
out of those five years, Macquarie and its fellow investors took out
more money from the company than it made in post-tax profits. They
crippled the firm with billions in debt, while Thames customers paid
ever more in water bills and got among the worst service offered by
any water company.
When I put these
findings to Thames, its response was the email equivalent of a shrug:
“Some years dividends exceed the years’ profits, sometimes they
are less.” This was even while the company successfully managed to
offload much of the cost and the risk for the Thames Tideway tunnel
on to ordinary households.
The National Grid
gas pipelines aren’t the only things Macquarie is set to get its
hands on. Even while May was at her party conference at Birmingham
talking about a country working for all, journalists were being
briefed that the state-owned green investment bank would soon be
flogged off to … you guessed it, Macquarie.
One of the canards
about the referendum is that the decisive swing came from
working-class voters furious at high immigration, and that therefore
the primary issue that needs to be resolved in the next few years is
who gets to stay in Britain and how. Whenever I hear that, I think of
the voters I spoke to in south Wales just before the vote. True, all
the leavers volunteered immigration as their main justification. But
the longer we talked, in this area that remains almost exclusively
white, the more it became clear that they were angry at something
else – not the invisible refugees, nor far-off Brussels. One,
Gareth Meek, told me: “I’m angry at the British government. They
sold the country out. There’s nothing we own any more.” A
multitude of frustrations, pushed through a binary vote.
What happens when
Meek and his fellow voters realise that their vote for change –
however loosely defined – means more of the same? When that call to
take back control ends up with them playing the same old captive
market, there to be ripped off by multinational capital. Who will
take the blame then?
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