Every fibre of my being says we should stay in BUT Greece BUT Cyprus BUT TTIP BUT Ukraine BUT inequality BUT the Rise of the Far Right BUT Palestine.
Corbyn and Varoufakis are right to say "stay in and reform from the inside". It makes perfect sense morally. However it makes no sense politically simply because there is no process by which it can be reformed to the fundamental degree that is required. No £3 memberships available for this revolution from below sadly. £300 billion might get you a seat at the table. Or Trident of course.
I have no idea what I will do. I wont abstain. I will probably do what I always do and vote with my heart not head. Largely because the boom bust cycle and political see-saw that goes with it will end up coming back round to a left of Social Democrat position before too long and then we can start to claw back a national sense of civility rather than perpetual scapegoating.
I would lay money that a Labour government would have saved the Greeks and Cypriots from this degree of humiliation and, to use Varoufakis' memorable phrase, from decades of financial water boarding. There would also have been enough firewalls in TTIP proposals to protect the Labour Party's traditional red lines. Brown may have been a lot of things (and a good Labour leader was not one of them) but, being basically a Sunday School Socialist, he was not unaware of the need to be paying down the moral national debt of history, where you can, as well as the one on the balance sheet.
Sadly I think the "outs" will win for all the wrong reasons and there will be an EU Premier League established of maybe eight states trickling spare change down to nations where people take wheel barrows of money to the bread shop. GB returns to the prefects room off the back of a snap vote before Scotland can make their get-away. By which point the Pound will be on a par with the Euro and close to par with the US Dollar.
I am constantly reminded of all the people who thought staying at home six years ago on election day was a positive moral decision or else voted Lib Dem / Green / Nationalist so that they could be seen to be virtuously "protesting" the Labour government's role in the Iraq War. Well you've got plenty to protest about now. No one can tell me any of this would be happening even if Labour had only scraped a workable tie in 2010. Yes there would still be plenty of Blairites fattening their consultancies and we would never have had Corbyn but do you really think it would be a tenth as bad as this? Robin Cook will be spinning in his grave if what he sacrificed in resigning his cabinet position and opening himself and his family up to endless attacks led to all this.
If I still gave money to bookmakers I would bet on Corbyn and John Mcdonnell engineering Livingstone into the hot seat in 2018 for a Bonking Boris v Red Ken rematch which will be fought to a bloody standstill. Clive Lewis or someone Clive Lewis shaped is meanwhile groomed to step in next to bring a more youthful leftist patriot Vision Thing thing in 2025.
A Corbynised Labour Party filling the Podemos spoiler role with the SNP at the next General Election is going to be ten years too late for those who will suffer the most - here and abroad.
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