Politics

Brexit and the causes and possible consequences of Brexit have been on my mind. Brexit has been on everyone’s mind. There is a great divide between those who want Brexit at any cost and those who want Britain to remain in the EU.

One thing that interests and worries me is how much of a danger this divide represents to the stability of the social order.

It is not an idle question.

Nigel Farage, one of the architects of the desire to leave the European Union, has talked about blood on the streets if Brexit is not delivered to the British people.

He has an axe to grind, of course, but there is a question of what would or will happen if Brexit goes ahead and the economy tanks as badly as some say it will, or if Brexit is reversed.

There is something else. I wonder what those Brexit promoters in the upper reaches of the Conservative Party think? I am talking about those who have read history and who have a grasp of economics.

What on Earth as they thinking?

The Peasants’ Revolt

That brings me to a book – The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 edited by RB (Barrie) Dobson.

It is edited by him (rather than written by him) because the bulk of it is court records, Council records, trial records, ecclesiastical records, and the commentaries of contemporary commentators.

Most were written in Latin or Norman French and have been translated by Professor Dobson.

The Peasants’ Revolt is not unique. There were revolts going on in continental Europe throughout all this period. But England was a case apart.

English society rode the changes in economics, the changes in society, and sailed on. That is, it sailed on with just one major rip in the continuum, and that was the Peasants’ Revolt on 1381.

The reasons usually given for the rebellion are the poll taxes that were imposed. A poll tax is a straight tax. It does not relate to ownership of a property or a business. It is a tax upon mere existence.

Another reason given for the rebellion was a complaint about the high life that the church and the court hangers-on were living at the peasants’ expense.

What brought the situation to a head was that the population had been reduced – maybe by as much as 40% – by the Black Death that reached Britain in the 1350s.

With gaps in the towns and the countryside, prices rose and a new kind of tenant appeared – men who had the money to step in to take up tenancies from the rural landlords.

They did so as contractual tenants, a simple exchange of occupation of the land in the return for rent paid as money.

Villeins and Fedualism

Those rental contracts were completely different to the system of rights and obligations of villeins – those who held land from the Lord of the Manor under the feudal system. Those villeins, or peasants, were bound to the land and one step up from slaves.

That status put them at odds with the new breed of contractual tenants. That difference risked a wholesale breach in the social fabric in the countryside.

But the taxes also exposed another threat to stability, namely that rising prices meant things were going well for some, and that the poll tax hit them at a time of rising expectations.

Add to that another factor, the failure by the authorities to protect the population. Britain was at war with France in what is known as The Hundred Years’ War. The war was a war with gaps – a series of conflicts that lasted from 1337 to 1453.

On the English side was the House of Plantagenet, rulers of the Kingdom of England. They claimed the right to rule the Kingdom of France and were opposed by the French House of Valois.

The conflict is not so surprising. The English kings were originally Norman, and held lands in France. In some ways it was a family quarrel.

The peasants’ complaint was that French and Castilian ships came up the Thames regularly and carried out brutal tip-and-run raids, and seemingly without fear of reprisal.

And then came the poll tax, a tax imposed by the King to finance his wars. Not everyone was liable to pay (beggars, for example, were exempt), but with rising prices after the Black Death, people who had been outside the taxation net in earlier times were now caught in it.

So those were the complaints – rich people and the clergy living high on the hog, and failing to protect the populace. And just when things were getting better economically – along comes the poll tax to send them sliding to the bottom again.

When Adam Delved And Eve Span

During the Peasant’s Revolt, the priest John Ball asked, rhetorically, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” He meant, of course, ‘Who made you the boss?’

But of course, anyone who wants to grab the crown is free to do it if they can.

A Marxist would say that in the 1380s the clergy was the mouthpiece for the propaganda of the ‘proper’ order. Which is why the clergy and the local dignitaries were a prime target of the mobs that sprang up, simultaneously in different parts of England.

The revolt was bloody, with many killed by the mobs and many executed by the authorities. The duplicity of the King and Lords in promising an amnesty and then hanging the leaders of the revolt can be looked at two ways. On the one hand one could argue that one can use any ploy to outwit rebels and bring them to justice. On the other hand, one could argue that these rebels are the people of England and deserve fair treatment. Which way should a king behave?

Britain’s Opportunity To Declare Itself

Now when I think of Brexit, it sounds like we have been here before and the situation is ripe for exploitation. I see Jeremy Corbyn waiting in the wings like Lenin arresting the Provisional Government in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. I see Nigel Farage claiming the crown to the Right and calling for a mass uprising to deliver on the promise of Brexit.

I am no nearer to understanding why those grandees of the Conservative Party are pushing to bring about Brexit.

It might be a good time to remind myself of the sometimes fractious relationship between France and NATO, and in particular, France and the USA.

In 1966, President Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command structure.

He cited the overbearing, overarching dominance of the USA – which no one could deny because the USA was and is the dominant partner in terms of muscle power and its contribution to the upkeep of NATO.

France banned the stationing of weapons, including nuclear weapons, on its territory.

NATO’s political headquarters and SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe) moved from France to Belgium.

It was not until 2009 that Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated the return of France to the integrated military command and the Defence Planning Committee, the latter being disbanded the following year.

France remains the only NATO member outside the Nuclear Planning Group and unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, will not commit its nuclear-armed submarines to the alliance.

That is not to say that France has remained outside NATO’s missions, but it shows how France could decide unilaterally against which countries it was going to take action.

It’s a good time to remember that Donald Trump has railed against the cost that the USA bears in NATO, and how he has said that the USA has been taken for a ride and that the European countries must to pay more or risk losing NATO.

The English Revolution 1640 by Christopher Hill is available to read online, and that is how I read most of it before I bought the book secondhand. It’s a slim book and an easy read.

What It Argues

The English Revolution 1640 argues that the monarchy, the landed gentry, the church, the merchants, the peasantry, the urban masses, the army all had their positions to protect. But their allegiances were shifting in a changing world.

Merchant capitalists were making money overseas and as pirates on the high seas. Those who bought land following the destruction of the churches under Henry VIII wanted rack rents (rents that represented the full open market annual value of a holding) from their tenants.

They weren’t interested in the feudal relationships that had kept the feudal landlords living like lords. The new breed of landlord didn’t want tenants with their feudal copyhold entitlement to remain on the land. They wanted money.

The term rack rent originated in England in the early 1500s, and meant an extortionate rent, a rent raised to the highest possible limit, a rent greater than any tenant can be expected to pay. It derived from the now obsolete meaning of ‘rack’ – to extort or obtain by rapacity above a fair level.

The towns wanted workers, and tenants wanted to feel safe. They didn’t feel safe from being evicted from their land because they feared being unable to pay rack rents. So they were moving away to the towns to work.

The towns were bound by guilds that prevented the opening up of competition. Acts of Parliament prohibited those less well off from entering guilds.

But things were changing, the makeup of Parliament was changing. And the entrepreneurs knew how to circumvent the King’s parliament by establishing businesses outside the towns, free of the restrictions.

Prices rose, and the feudal order collapsed because it was too expensive to maintain.

Meanwhile, attitudes were changing because the Church was no longer the only route for disseminating truth and propaganda.

Civil War

The result was civil war, the establishment of a republic, and eventually a change in the relationship of parliament to the monarchy. When Charles II was crowned, he understood he did parliament’s bidding and not the other way around.

What didn’t happen? The mass of the population were not able to take power. They tried but they failed.

Economic changes and the march of history rarely favour those trying to stop change.

I think the look in the face of Charles II in this c.1678 terracotta bust attributed to John Bushnell says it all. He was brought back on condition that he knew his place and kept out of politics. (The bust is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.)

Quotes From The English Revolution 1640.

The English Revolution of 1640-60 was a great social movement like the French Revolution of 1789. The state power protecting an old order that was essentially feudal was violently overthrown, power passed into the hands of a new class, and so the freer development of capitalism was made possible. The Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and conservative landlords.

Parliament beat the King because it could appeal to the enthusiastic support of the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside, to the yeomen and progressive gentry, and to wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about.

Ever since then orthodox historians have done their utmost to stress the “continuity” of English history, to minimise the revolutionary breaks, to pretend that the “interregnum” (the word itself shows what they are trying to do) was an unfortunate accident, that in 1660 we returned to the old Constitution normally developing, that 1688 merely corrected the aberrations of a deranged King.

Whereas, in fact, the period 1640-60 saw the destruction of one kind of state and the introduction of a new political structure within which capitalism could freely develop. For tactical reasons, the ruling class in 1660 pretended that they were merely restoring the old forms of the Constitution. But they intended by that restoration to give sanctity and social stamp to a new social order. The important thing is that the social order was new and would not have been won without revolution.

A TV Series About The Period

I have now watched a series of BBC programmes with three episodes dedicated to Charles I. It emphasised, firstly, the fear that the Puritans in the Commons had that Charles’ wife, who was French and a Catholic, was turning the king back to Catholicism.

And it emphasised, secondly, that the King was circumventing Parliament by using the Royal Prerogative to tax without the authority of Parliament and to punish without trial. To the Puritans in the Commons, the King was an autocrat who had to be tamed.

The King was not a consensus politician. To him, Parliament was an obstacle he had to ride over to get his way. There was no attempt to bridge the gap and there were many ‘final straws’, but one that stung the most was the King’s attempt to foist a new prayer book in standard form on all subjects.

To the Scots; to the liberal-minded Londoners, and to the Puritans, the King’s prayer book was a Catholic mass by another name.

The Great Remonstrance was a list of complaints about the King’s behaviour, carefully worded so as not to impugn the King himself, for that would be treason. First the Commons voted to put the Great Remonstrance to the King. Then they voted to publicise the Great Remonstrance, with the result that the London was up in arms. Then it was presented as a Bill in Parliament with proposals to change the balance of power between king and Parliament.

Traditionally, the King could count on the Royalists and the bishops in the House of Lords to defeat contentious Bills.

And that’s where plague stepped in to lend a hand to the course of history. Among the Royalists were landowners who lived outside London. And they didn’t want to risk exposure to plague and did not come in the numbers needed. And the bishops were warned off by angry young Londoners. So the Bills passed and the power in the country shifted away from the Crown.

With the King in open opposition to the Puritans, the breakdown in communication ended in the civil war and the abolition of the monarchy.

On 22 Dec, Michael Carpenter @mikercarpenterSenior Director @PennBiden. Former DASD for Russia/Balkans/Eurasia @DeptofDefense, Foreign Policy Advisor @JoeBiden, and Director for Russia @NSC44 published a long thread on Twitter.

I have no way of knowing what axe he may have to grind in this world where everything is hostage to misinformation, but I want to record what he tweeted – and we shall see how things play out. Here is what he tweeted:

1 A military incursion into Ukraine. The most likely target is the canal that feeds fresh water from the Dnieper river to Crimea. Without this water, Crimea’s agricultural sector goes under. Also look for Russia to seek complete dominance over the Sea of Azov and Kerch Strait.

2 A military flare-up in Nagorno-Karabakh if Prime Minister Pashinyan does not cater to corrupt Russian interests in Armenia.

3 Pressure on President Lukashenka to allow Russia to build a military base in Belarus, especially if the US green-lights the construction of “Fort Trump” in Poland. If Minsk resists, the Kremlin will be prepared to execute an Anschluss operation.

4 Russia and Iran take control of eastern Syria as the US withdraws and Turkey engages in cross-border attacks on Kurdish fighters. Over time this guarantees that disenfranchised Sunni Arabs radicalize into ISIS 2.0.

5 A growing Russian military presence in Libya helps General Haftar consolidate control of the country, which becomes a Russian protectorate.

6 Moscow arms the Taliban with more sophisticated weapons as the US draws down its forces and the NATO ISAF mission is stretched to the breaking point. Moscow displaces the US as the chief power-broker in Afghanistan and the Taliban comes back to power.

7 Moscow supports Bosnian President Milorad Dodik’s efforts to separate Republika Srpska from the rest of Bosnia and Herzegovina, risking a renewed ethnic conflict in the Balkans.

8 The Russian-Saudi relationship blossoms as Moscow sends more weapons to Saudi Arabia and coordinates further oil supply cuts.

9 EU sanctions on Russia fall apart as one of the EU member states breaks consensus in return for an undisclosed energy deal with Russia. The most likely candidates: Hungary, Italy, Austria.

10 The Kremlin’s active measures campaign in the US goes into overdrive as Russia seeks to shape the 2020 presidential field. Dark money becomes the main tool of Kremlin influence as Russia concludes that financing organic disinformation is more effective than offshore ops.