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This is hardcore. Prime Minister Theresa May has said that not only will Britain leave the European Union, it will leave the single market, which gives Britain privileged, tariff-free access to its biggest trading partner. Staying in the single market “would, to all intents and purposes, mean not leaving the EU at all.” This means that May has put border controls and withdrawal from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ahead of trade. The withdrawal from the ECJ is particularly important, since being bound by its decisions means being bound by the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The range of the ECJ’s remit extends from trading and market regulations to home affairs, civil liberties, justice, immigration, and asylum. In recent years, it was the ECJ which ruled against deportations of foreign criminals with a child, and denying prisoners the vote. The British state will now be at liberty to revisit these and other issues. Race figures prominently in this. The ability to keep out immigrants, to bolster authoritarian state apparatuses, to lock up, deport, exclude, extradite, and extraordinarily render, comes before the interests of the City of London and the CBI. Britain’s colonial past is never entirely in the past — though, “Britain” may be in the past very soon, since Scotland’s secession has now been made much more likely.

Thatcher’s Legacy But this also means that, to achieve these goals, May is really going to pursue the ultra-Atlanticist fantasy that UKIP has been pleading for all these years: instead of a European-oriented British capitalism, a “global” state linked to Washington and Europe through bilateral free trade deals, and trying to foster former colonies as export markets. This suits a wing of cowboy capitalists, spivs, and petty-bourgeois traders, anxious to be relieved of the constraints of the EU’s ordoliberal “social model.” Instead of the single market, therefore, Britain will seek a separate free-trade deal with Europe, allowing it to trade more freely globally. And in the event that it can’t get good terms, Chancellor Philip Hammond promises to use massive tax reductions for corporations to lure investors, prompting German scowls. Donald Trump, using his position already to create leverage for the Brexit right, has promised that Britain can have a “quick” free trade deal with the United States once Brexit is complete. This is probably more of “the old Trump bullshit,” since it would take at least a few years to get such a deal in place, but it has been welcomed by May as a conversation-changer. It is possible that May’s current position is posturing, an attempt to drive a hard bargain. Asked less than six months ago, I would have wagered that May has no interest in leaving the single market. But this may have been to give her too much credit as a strategist, and the squeals of business and the business press suggest that they’re taking her plans very seriously. The Financial Times laments that May is giving up on “one of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest legacies.” Former Liberal leader Nick Clegg echoes this sentiment: “Theresa May has finally turned her back on Margaret Thatcher’s greatest economic achievement, the world’s largest borderless single market.”

Short-term Capitalism There are various reasons why this is bad capitalism. In the first instance, as Oxford academic Ngaire Woods pointed out prior to the Brexit vote, if you aren’t part of the single market, then you can’t offer access to that market as a perk of trading with you. You will get worse terms in any trade deal you strike, because you have a smaller market, and the larger economies you’re trading with will dictate the rules. When Trump talks about a “fair” trade deal, this artist-of-the-deal can be assumed to know what leverage he will have. The government has attempted to talk up post-Brexit trade deals, claiming a total of £16 billion in trade deals made since the vote: a figure that turned out to be concocted from deals unveiled in previous years. Investors, who were interested in Britain in part because its access to European markets, have been reconsidering their investments. Those who have invested have been subject to extraordinary serenading and special offers on the part of the government. The Telegraph, which can always be relied on to deliver the “good news” about Brexit, can at best offer the decidedly unenthusiastic opinion of someone at the Fitch ratings agency claiming that Brexit will not be “the bogeyman that causes everything to fall over” and “ultimately companies will cope.” British capitalism is already in a bad way. With low domestic demand caused by wage contraction and spending cuts, the Bank of England and the chancellor’s office has for some time talked of an “export-led recovery.” This was part of an austerian answer to Britain’s economic malaise: suppress wages and cut corporate taxes to stimulate investment, reduce debt, and export goods. This proved unavailing. It was hoped that the plummeting value of the pound, post-Brexit, would finally stimulate more exports. The large British trade deficit begged to differ with such sunny prospects. Labor productivity remains very low. It was never Britain’s strong point and, while it has recovered to levels last seen prior to the credit crunch, it remains well behind that of other powerful economies and will not return to its long-term trend before 2020. Hammond, appointed after the Brexit vote, claims that he is prepared to raise public investment in order to raise productivity. In this respect, he has stolen a trick from shadow chancellor John McDonnell. But what was notable in his autumn statement was how little he actually broke with the policy of his predecessor. While he abandoned the failed attempt to run a budget surplus, in order to invest about 1 percent of GDP in infrastructure investments by 2020, the figures are extremely modest. It also comes with a continued commitment to public-sector austerity, contributing to the “humanitarian crisis” in the National Health Service. So what we are looking at is an attempt to engineer something far more radical. It is an epochal shift in a whole ensemble of relations: not just Britain’s relations with the United States and the European Union, but also the internal distribution of power in its capitalist class, in favor of its most short-termist elements. The political power of the middle-class right is altering the character of the national power bloc on both sides of the Atlantic, and forcing a recomposition of the state apparatuses in a more authoritarian, death-dealing direction. It should be said, meanwhile, that there are already signs that business will be forgiving if May can indeed negotiate a bilateral, tariff-free trade deal. The reactions to her speech, while worried, are far from completely hostile. British business has always been short-termist in its approach, and might find May’s Brexit preferable to a more redistributive, “social” capitalism of the sort that the opposition led by Jeremy Corbyn might try to implement.