Why the Left is Betraying Us Over Brexit, and How It Leads to the Hypocrisy of Protesting Against Donald Trump But Not Theresa May

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Why the Left is Betraying Us Over Brexit, and How It Leads to the Hypocrisy of Protesting Against Donald Trump But Not Theresa May

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OK, I admit it: I’m thoroughly fed up with the Left in Britain, which largely supported the campaign to leave the EU, and is now facilitating Theresa May’s efforts to destroy our economy by following through on the outcome of the ludicrous referendum last June that saw the Leave campaign win by a small majority.

The referendum was not legally binding; its outcome was advisory, meaning that it should have been taken as the starting point for further discussion, not as an end in itself. In addition, a decision about something as seismically important as leaving the EU shouldn’t have been allowed to be dependent on a simple majority vote. Generally, a referendum on a topic this important would have required a majority to consist of over 50% of all those eligible to vote, or over two-thirds of those who voted, whereas in June’s referendum 27.9% of those eligible to vote (13m people) didn’t bother to vote, and the decision to leave was taken by 37.4% of eligible voters (17.4m people), with 34.7% (16.1m people) voting to stay in the EU.

What has particularly annoyed me today — and the reason I made the poster at the top of this article — is that the Stop the War Coalition today held a protest against Donald Trump’s recently imposed immigration ban and his proposed state visit to the UK — a worthwhile cause, certainly, but one that, noticeably, didn’t involve protesting against Theresa May, even though there is no reason to suppose that she is any less racist and Islamophobic than Donald Trump.

Stop the War, however, is not going to organise a march to criticise Theresa May, because she is in charge of leading us out of the EU, and Stop the War, and most of those who are politically on the left in the UK, support our departure from the EU — even, it seems, if doing so will, as seems probable, be the biggest act of economic suicide in our lifetimes, and even though it can only strengthen anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK, because that was the major driver of people’s discontent last June.

Yes, there was a strong backlash against austerity, and against the Westminster elites who have lost touch with the electorate, but racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia were prominent throughout the campaign, and will only be strengthened if Brexit actually goes ahead, with, I believe, the probability that an isolated Britain would then, like Trump’s America, only become more racist, obsessed with repatriating foreigners, and obsessed with keeping out those regarded as undesirable, through just the sort of ban that Donald Trump has implemented.

So you see my problem, I hope: those protesting today were doing so on behalf of an organisation and movement that is actually helping to facilitate what they’re protesting against.

Trump is a nightmare, of course, and his immigration ban is despicable — as I described it last week, in my article, Trump’s Dystopian America: The Unforgivable First Ten Days, it is a “ban on citizens from seven countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen (at least 134 million people) from entering the US — for an initial period of 90 days, with Syrian refugees banned indefinitely. The ban was so scattershot and chaotic that, incredibly, it also included permanent US residents who were abroad when it took effect, and even dual nationals, born in any of the proscribed countries.”

However, Theresa May is no angel when it comes to immigration, as I explained in July in my article, As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration. As a hardline Home Secretary for six long years, she was responsible for the vans telling immigrants to go home that she sent around the streets of London, and she became obsessed with sending alleged terrorist suspect Abu Qatada back to Jordan (see here and here), even though that required the UK to turn its back on its international treaty obligations requiring countries that are part of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that are signatories to the UN Convention Against Torture, not to send foreign nationals back to their home countries if they face the risk of torture.

Such is her obsession that it underpins her drive to rid the UK of its human rights obligations altogether, a disgraceful aim that I highlighted in my 2015 article, What Does It Say About the Tories That They Want to Scrap Human Rights Legislation?

These are not her only crimes. In October 2012, she bragged to the Conservative Party Conference about her delight in extraditing a number of Muslims, who were alleged terrorist suspects, to the US for prosecution, including Talha Ahsan, a poet with Asberger’s (who was later sent home by a US judge), while the week after she refused to approve the extradition of another man with Asperger’s, Gary McKinnon, who was white.

She has also been an enthusiast for stripping the citizenship of dual national British citizens she regards as terrorists, without any due process requirements, and, in some cases, then letting the US know where they were so they could be killed by drone strikes.

She was also resistant to Europe’s effort to rehouse refugees during the huge refugee crisis that began in 2015, and she also refused to grant visas to the foreign spouses of UK nationals if the latter do not earn £18,600 a year, which, it should be noted, is more than the national median income for the UK, and roughly the same as the median income in London. She also has a track record of being obsessed with snooping and surveillance, and, after the EU referendum, failed to reassure EU nationals living in the UK that they would be able to stay in the country.

Last week, after Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, imposed an outrageous three-line whip on his MPs in an effort to compel them all to vote with the Tories to support the triggering of Article 50, which starts the two-year process of leaving the EU, just 47 of his MPs rebelled, joining 67 others (primarily from the SNP). The reason for the whip was, I presume, because of elements of Corbyn’s own antipathy towards the EU, but also because the party didn’t want to send a message to its Leave voters that it might disagree with them.

Unfortunately, those who support remaining in Europe have been shamefully dismissed by Corbyn’s actions, just as the Remainers in the Conservative Party have been silenced by Theresa May and her Brexit ministers.

This is disgraceful and unacceptable. 75% of MPs supported remaining in the EU before the referendum, but in last week’s vote the 16.1m of us who voted Remain (48.1% of those who voted) were represented by just 18.6% of MPs.

As a left-wing Remainer, I feel more isolated than I ever have in the UK, and I really hope I don’t have to spend the next two years, before Brexit becomes a reality (unless we stop it, as I believe we can and must!), pointing out the betrayal by the Left as, presumably, more and more creative ways are invented to engage in political protest without actually attacking the root of the UK’s current problems — the racist Theresa May and her racist Brexiteers, who are intent on destroying the UK for their own deluded ideological reasons, and who only pay lip service to a multicultural Britain, and will, if they can, implement their own version of Donald Trump’s ban as soon as they think they can get away with it.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).