Last September in New York City, the EU’s Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini said something quite telling in a speech on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, where the great and the good of business and politics rub shoulders. Individuals such as Canadian prime ministerJustin Trudeau and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, billionaire Mike Bloomberg and IMF managing director Christine Lagarde graced it with their presence.
“The rest of world is now looking at Europe for leadership. And we can do it,” Mogherini said.
There’s no doubt that the loss of Britain to the EU has been felt. Britain is a big diplomatic hitter. It is a nuclear armed nation and has deep connections all over the world, especially with it being only one of two EU countries with permanent membership of the UN Security Council. In terms of real international clout, only France and Germany come close.
Recently, the EU has signed trade agreements with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America’s Mercosur bloc (which includes Brazil and Argentina). Meanwhile, Liam Fox has been travelling all over the world and signed …. nothing at all. Fox is a dangerous man for Britain. He is all about ripping down public protection in favour of ‘free markets’.
In the meantime, in Brussels, the leaders of the EU27 are now expected to come to some sort of agreement that sufficient progress has been made in the Brexit talks for negotiations to move to the next stage of the trading relationship.
If you think getting to this stage was difficult – now the hard work really starts, especially now that the Cabinet is to decide what sort of trade deal it wants, let alone what the EU27 has in mind.
At the heart of this domestic debate is whether we want to follow the plans of hardline Brexiteers or the plans of moderate Brexiteers. The truth is that it makes little difference what you, I or they want. As I have said all along from before the EU referendum took place, the hardliners, supported by the insatiable appetite of American corporate billionaires – want far more than the simple sentimental yearnings to regain national sovereignty, which they sold to an unsuspecting public.
This ideological project, one that has been in the planning stage for years wants to take neoliberal capitalism to the final stage. It wants to completely abandon the social and economic model that has underpinned most western economies for the last seven decades.
What they really want is a Britain that eventually emulates what will look like the worst of America. These extreme capitalists want a low regulation, small state economy, where privatisation, and the so-called free market, completely takes over. There have been many warnings about this in the last decade, but little in the way of real resistance.
So if you thought Brexit was about arresting inequality or immigration, or about wages, jobs, democracy or sovereignty – you are wrong.
As the people of Britain continue just to accept whatever happens without much complaint (like state surveillance, destruction of privacy, loss of workers rights, civil liberties, et all) the next stage of their destiny is depressingly playing out to a plan. After bailing out the banks for their egregious crimes a decade ago, it became apparent that there was little in the way to stop extreme neoliberal capitalism from marching on.
With renewed vigour, camouflaging their ambitions in a web of lies, deceit, disinformation and propaganda to both confuse and avoid alienating voters, the race was on to force and then win the EU referendum Brexit vote.
The tactics used to achieve that are now slowly emerging. A shadowy global operation involving big data, foreign billionaires – the owners of social media and transnational corporations along with the diverse forces of the Leave campaign, politicians and what the MSM now acknowledge – the Deep State – influenced the result of the EU referendum to the extent that stage one was declared – ‘mission accomplished’. Democracy in Britain has been usurped by technology, the transnational whores to money and what many will come to accept as traitors from within our own corridors of power.
Moderate Brexiteers then went on the warpath. They understand what might happen next and are well aware of the political and economic repercussions. Vulture capitalists are being set up to destroy civil society in a deregulation fest. Ironically, Corbyn could end up being our last hope as a final line of defence.
Even the right-wing Telegraph admits that the “outcome of the Brexit referendum would be reversed if it was held tomorrow.
The moderates are seeking a sort of compromise that would see the UK align with EU rules and regulations to maintain a trading base. But that’s not the actual plan currently in play. By delivering confusion, an air of incompetence and the veil of secrecy – it is only at each stage, when a real decision has to be made, that they are having to admit to the consequences of their ideological course. Nevertheless, they are still on course. And still no resistance. Anger maybe, resistance, no.
The Guardian exclusive entitled – “David Davis’s Brexit department tops government secrecy table” is telling. “Theresa May’s key Brexit department has failed to respond to more than six out of 10 freedom of information requests over the past year, giving it the worst annual record for secrecy in Whitehall.” This is another big clue.
In the past Davis has voted against the ‘Snoopers Charter,’ and the Data Retention Bill. He voted against secret courts and withholding information in civil court cases. He voted for the Equality Act, the alternative vote, animal welfare and the like. And yet, Davis has overnight become the secrecy tsar of the biggest post-war political and economic event our our time.
The Institute for Government (IFG) shared an analysis exclusively with the Guardian. It painted a “broader picture of government opacity” – particularly related to Britain’s departure from the EU. The Department for International Trade – also involved with Brexit planning – was worst for timeliness. David Davis is now fully in bed with Liam Fox. Davis, granted just 18% of FoI cases in full – the lowest of any department ever and has been accused of showing “disregard for the principle of making decisions based on evidence.” Fox’s department is just as bad.
Evidence of corporations having unreasonable power in Britain arrived when, in an irony worthy of comedy series ‘Yes Minster,’ transnationals such as PepsiCo, Mars and Diageo were put at the heart of writing government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease almost as soon as the Conservative’s arrived in office in 2010. Civil Society was not represented. This is the basis of their plan. Seriously, it is.
Liam Fox (famous for being one of the biggest stars at the centre of the ‘expenses scandal’) has form. He founded a Think Tank called Atlantic Bridge under the patronage of Margaret Thatcher. It boasts a list of past directors, or “Advisory Council” members that included the likes of Michael Gove, George Osborne, Boris Johnson, Malcom Rifkind and Chris Grayling.
All are found clustered around the more extreme right hand of British politics, many of whom have direct influence in the internal political struggle for Britain’s outcome of international trade and Brexit negotiations. It’s UK executive director was Adam Werrity who caused Liam Fox’s forced resignation as Defence Secretary after his …. ‘conflict of interest’ scandal! After such as event, Fox would have been banished from political life in any normal democracy.
Atlantic Bridge was also made up from the far Right Tea Party and Republican party in the USA. This is a group that is profoundly opposed to taxpayer functions like the NHS, is pro-austerity, pro-nativism, protectionist, full of nationalists and don’t like foreigners, except when they are dropping bombs on them.
Atlantic Bridge was also in a partnership program with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a free-market organisation with extensive links to American State Legislators and corporate and industrial groups. These are the famed and very dangerous neocons who are looking for full confrontation with North Korea, Russia and China and caused the world order to disintegrate by attacking the Middle East. These same people are courting senior British Tory MP’s in advance of the rush to cash in on a less regulated UK Plc after Brexit.
Is it any wonder that a number of American billionaires, with transnational interests, heavily contributed to what we now know was a staged EU referendum, to achieve a Brexit result. The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr won the technology journalism award for her investigation on technology and democracy that broke the story into the mainstream, three weeks after TruePublica’s own article (Read: The Link Between Brexit And The US Election, MI6, Fake News And Dark Money), that demonstrated how this plan played out.
Under a hard Brexit, in which the UK gives up full access to the single market and the customs union – one that could quite possibly see no trade agreement with the EU at all, would land us in exactly the place that these hard-line Brexiteers want.
What they really see is that Britain can only be economically competitive by surrendering hard-won workers’ rights and protections that underpin civil society. They want to cut taxes which fund public services and leave domestic firms at the mercy of international forces, particularly American ones. They want to give us ‘freedom’ from everything – it’s called deregulation, but be careful, you don’t want their type freedom. That would break many of the ‘red-lines’ that the EU would not dare to cross – hence the no-deal plan.
Britain is now literally on the edge of a political and economic disaster that will shape its future.
George Monbiot explains what that disaster might look like;
“When corporations free themselves from trade unions, they curtail the freedoms of their workers. When the very rich free themselves from tax, other people suffer through failing public services. When financiers are free to design exotic financial instruments, the rest of us pay for the crises they cause. Above all, billionaires and the organisations they run demand freedom from something they call “red tape”. What they mean by red tape is public protection.”
Imagine a Britain, with no NHS (US senators have already said they hope the health service in Britain will be up for grabs in any future deal), ever decreasing job security, ever rising inequality, failing education, transport, policing and other public services. All of this is a new market to be exploited. This is where the EU/US trade deal called TTIP failed. But a post-Brexit trade deal with the US will be as Jean Blaylock from the Independent says, it’s “TTIP on steroids.”
An excellent example of this is when Bain Capital (US Venture Capital outfit) bought an 80% share in Britain’s national blood supplier in George Osborne’s privatisation drive, for £230 million in 2013. Just 3 years later, Bain sold it to a Chinese company called Creat for a total cash consideration of £820m. British donated blood is now being sold to the Chinese for profit and the taxpayer lost hundreds of millions along the way (not least a secure blood supply).
A longtime British official at the EEAS, the EU’s foreign service recently said “It’s hard to see the UK, as it is at the moment, wielding much influence in the world—which is a real shame.” He is right. Britain is about to become a serf to extreme capitalism.
Others think so too. Since Britain’s decision to leave the EU, many EU members are driving harder for greater integration. This drive took more than just a symbolic step last month, when 23 states signed what Mogherini called a “historic” defense pact. This is what she means by ‘world leadership’.
As far as the EU27 is concerned, discussions are firmly in place to forget Britain in the post-Brexit world and to unseat the US as the leader of the free-world, whilst one has Brexit and the other has Trump.
The Americans, along with the hard Brexiteers in Britain have engineered an economic disaster and view it as a business opportunity. The EU27 see this as geo-political game play and are throwing their all behind greater integration whilst the world watches what is about to happen to Britain. This is an opportunity that neither will miss. The Kings and Queens of this global chess game, for the first time, see Britain as nothing more than a pawn. Winner takes all.
By Graham Vanbergen
The original source of this article is TruePublica
The 21st Century