Empty Promises, Empty Shelves

This week's Camino a Ítaca travels back to the 1970's and some of the parrallels we see happening today. Populist, right wing sociopaths are marching once great nations into the abyss of a #me-me, all for me world. Click over to the original piece published in el HOY or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The recent images coming out of the United Kingdom take me back to the fuzzy TV images of my 1970’s childhood. Cars stretching for miles all lined up to try and fill up their tanks with gas that just wasn’t there. Back then, the cause of the crisis was external. It took place when the OPEC member states, led by Saudi Arabia, proclaimed an oil embargo on countries that were perceived as supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Prices soared over 300% in North America but in the end, the embargo failed and ended up being self-defeating. Israeli forces did not withdraw, the countries that were targeted by the embargo refused to change their positions and perhaps the most longstanding consequences were that the crisis sparked increased oil exploration, alternative energy research and initiated a move towards energy conservation.

This conservation can be seen in the smaller cars that form the long queues in the U.K. They are certainly no longer the enormous land boats of my North American childhood, but what really marks the difference between these two crises is the root cause. While the 70s oil crisis was a multilateral affair involving many different actors from different continents, the crisis the U.K is currently facing is entirely self-inflicted. Try as they might to shift the blame elsewhere, there is no one to blame but themselves.

Brexit was not the result of foreign interference. While the Trump administration, knowing full well it would debilitate the U.K and weaken the EU, threw their support behind the slow-motion suicide, it can’t be said that they or any other foreign state forced the British to shoot themselves in the foot. They did it to themselves at the polls. The end result is that a once great nation, the 6^th biggest economy of the world and permanent member of the UN Security Council now finds itself with bare supermarkets shelves and shuttered up petrol stations.

Brexit was the direct result of a dangerous ideology. One that exploits the fear of the ‘other’, scapegoating immigrants and those who do not think like them as the cause of everyone’s problems. All the while diverting the attention away from their neoliberal aims of dismantling the social nets across the West and transferring public wealth into increasingly smaller yet richer hands. It’s a jingoistic right-wing populism that is eating away at the rotting traditional core of conservatism across the western world. One which may have lost its poster boy in power in the U.S, but that is still firmly represented in the U.K by someone who combs his hair with a balloon, and which has many representatives here in Spain in the House of Parliament.

This siren song that leads people to think that their problems are soley caused by someone else may lull one into a gentle sleep but it certainly won’t fix anything. The British can try and blame the EU for their misfortunes, the Catalans can accuse the rest of Spain of robbing them, Extremadura can allege that the fault lies in Madrid and xenophobes can claim that migrants are stealing nonexistent jobs but the result always turns out the same. The sooner we stop listening, the better.