Brexit — why Right is not the new Left

In his 1928 musical play, The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht regales us with the following critique of the dehumanising properties of capitalism. ‘’A man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time he’ll give him sixpence. But the second time it’ll only be a threepenny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he’ll have him cold-bloodedly handed over to the police.’’

How many of us reading those words could honestly claim immunity from the kind of desensitisation Brecht describes? Unless you are living on an island in the middle of nowhere, it is almost impossible not to be found guilty of it on a regular basis. How else could we cope with the ubiquity of suffering and despair we encounter as we go about our daily lives — the army of homeless people begging for change, the human casualties we see all around us (or perhaps refuse to see) of a brutal system underpinned not by justice or fairness or solidarity but by social Darwinism?

In the wake of the 2008 economic crash and the resulting imposition of austerity — an ideologically-driven project to transfer wealth from the poor and working class to the wealthy and business class in order to maintain the rate of profit — the callous and cruel disregard for the most vulnerable in society spiked to the point where it became de riguer to…