Brexit Pie

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This is what power looks like.  Rupert Murdoch in front of a Parliamentary Select Committee, getting a pie in the face.  State versus capital, plus a seemingly triumphant gesture from the multitude, which must have felt good at the time. 

I’m not sure who I’d back in a fight. Rupert Murdoch is the most high-profile face of
transnational capital, with accompanying ideologically-driven media dominance that vast
amounts of money can buy - destroying jobs, erasing ideas, and providing consumption
goodies which we can all enjoy, if you’ve got a credit card. But I have one thing in common
with this tyrannical behemoth of new world global wealth: he can’t stand the British elites.
And they’re in the picture too. I’d like to think that Select Committees are part of the
Cromwellian heritage of parliament, as the power that holds ‘that damn King’ in check; but
the only revolution we ever had was ‘silent’ and we didn’t quite manage a land reform. The
State here is as feudal as it is public - and, as I’m sure Marx would agree - capital is a great
weapon if your problem is feudalism.

And there was no better example of the feudal chumocracy that Rupert and I hate than the
Coalition government which put him up in front of that Select Committee. They went to
school together; they went to university together; they all looked and sounded the same.
They had no sense of the responsibility, duty and honour of public office. They were the
‘butler class’ - the elite-designated whipping boys for global capital who were to get some

experience running a country before going for a proper job. But not to forget that the
government also includes the opposition, and the public schoolboy dominance of the Left is
no less marked- whether in government or the press. The Staggers versus The Spectator is a
showdown of positions taken in undergraduate tutorials that constitute a woefully
inadequate crucible in which to forge the grit and determination needed to take power on.
There are no more Nye Bevans.

And that pie will have felt good. Loads of retweets, and that guy got really famous - for a
few moments. But a fragmented spectacle of ‘acts of resistance’ is as symptomatic of the
social-media driven age of narcissism as the bulging bank accounts of digital empire
billionaires, all of whom are as lacking in duty and honour as our schoolboy governors, as is
evidenced by their apparent inability to think things through.

How did the pie shift the power landscape? Louise Mensch - university chum of Cameron,
cousin to the Queen - who was parachuted in to a safe seat on the back of a trend set by
Tony Blair - got to look Concerned. I’d been looking concerned for a while before that at the
paltry quality of the questioning. Security at the House of Commons needed to be beefed
up. But, most significantly, Rupert will have felt ashamed. Ashamed in front of the public
school crowd. Like Captain Ahab did when he felt humiliated in front of that whale. And we
know how he reacted.

At that moment, the disintegration of the dignity, honour and authority of the British
political establishment was assured. There would soon enough be a crisis, and transnational
capital is renowned for not letting them go to waste. And Cameron’s hubris absolutely
guaranteed that it wouldn’t be long in coming. It is cockiness and an over-confident ‘charm’
which gets the likes of him through - he certainly didn’t bother doing the reading for those
tutorials, and it shows. A referendum is a populist’s dream, and anyone with an actual
interest in how political systems work would know that. But Cameron liked the buzz - he’d
got hooked after the Scottish one. Sailing close to the wind, winning through in the end and
making the Queen purr.

And transnational capital bided its time. It gave away The Sun free in Wales. It made
pantomime villains of European politicians and bureaucrats in such a memorable way that
Sun readers were more familiar with the Junkers and Tusks than the average Europhile, and
BoJo would save us all. And the BBC, in its ever more naïve idea of ‘balance,’ reported that
the massive fall in the pound on 24 th June 2016 wasn’t all bad; Rupert Murdoch’s shares
went up. It forgot to mention that they were in dollars, and that the FTSE always goes up
when currency drops, to a chorus of head-desks from panicking bankers everywhere.

The victory here wasn’t to win the vote, that was just the mechanism. The victory is that
public institutions are in disarray, and there’s nothing elites can do to stop it. And the
‘ordinary people’ whose only role now seems to be to be interpolated into political
discourse on every side, including this one, are now caught in the original double bind
between capitalism and feudalism - and the pie thrower isn’t going to help you out either -
he’s from Windsor.

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And Labour. Oh dear. You thought this was going to bring down all those bourgeois
institutions, didn’t you? And then we can renationalise the railways. And you liked it when
he got the pie, and you liked it when all of those leave voters in deindustrialised areas stuck
the boot in. That’s why you’ve supported every mechanism that ups the ante - triggering
article 50, even anti-immigration legislation. You think you’re going to build a new
hegemony of Ordinary People - even though 40% of them voted to remain, and most of
working class, deindustrialised, militant labour Liverpool. Of course, no-one there has
bought The Sun since Hillsborough. And transnational capital is perched, vulture like, with
historically unprecedented levels of financial power, now with added automation, to watch
the cocky political elites, who have forgotten their duty, squabble and tantrum.

I have no idea who to back in this fight. But I know who’s going to win.