Alter-globalization slogans during the protests in Le Havre against the 37th G8 summit in Deauville, France.Wikicommons/Guillaume Paumier. Some rights reserved.Across the world the political centre ground is disappearing, and the new enemy of the people is globalism. Watching the rise of the nationalist right is particularly frustrating if, like me, you took part in protests in the late 1990s and early 2000s against globalisation. These protests for a few years united the radical left with the less radical NGO world. All were in agreement that there was something rotten about free market overdrive globalisation, that it was creating more losers than winners. Millions of people turned out across the world to say ‘No’.
But the centre left parties – the Democrats, Labour, and their equivalents across Europe – were not among them. There were multiple reasons why they gave in to the siren call of globalisation: many of them were or would one day be handsomely paid by global corporations benefiting from their policies. Most of them were taken in too by the tinpot version of economics – neo-liberal and poorly evidenced – that had taken hold in academia, with the help of rich donors. Politicians also have a tendency to think not much beyond the next election, and the effects of free trade agreements often took longer than that, though not very long, to hit home. But there was another reason why the centre left parties couldn’t get on board with the anti-globalisation movement. From the ‘non-political’ NGOs to the radical left, they were offered no alternative ways of organising economies.
Fifteen years later everything the anti-globalisations campaigners said has turned out to be true, and the UK provides a prime example of the fall-out. The manufacturing jobs and farming jobs are not adequately replaced by service jobs. Around a million people in the UK work in call-centres; few of them love it or take pride in it. Millions more are precariously or insufficiently paid or employed. Vast areas of the UK outside of London have non-functioning economies, with no hope in sight. It seems nobody had ever asked: what if South Wales, or Flint, Michigan, has no comparative advantage on the world stage? Now even the EU funding for impoverished areas is on the way out. Meanwhile the government has no economic strategy except to further inflate the housing market and cut taxes for the rich to ‘compete in the global market’.
