Boris Johnson, the BCC and the Brexit: Why Do We Expect Anyone to Be 'Neutral'?

Political neutrality is a strange thing. We're all supposed to be vaguely in favour of it; we want the agencies whose legions of desiccated accountants run much of our lives to be without any particular bias. But it's hard to say exactly what political neutrality is. Human beings don't tend to be very neutral, so there's no particular reason why any corporate bodies run by human beings should be any less partisan.

If you want something – anything – that's a kind of bias. Preferring to not be murdered in the middle of the night is, technically, a politically suspect stance. The only person who could be said to be absolutely neutral in all matters is a corpse. Dead bodies don't have any opinions on trade deals or government corruption. Demanding political neutrality from people is really just another way of telling them to be more like a cadaver.

Take, for instance, the recent revelations that the Queen is personally opposed to gay marriage. This has upset some people, and it's not hard to see why, but at the same time it should hardly be surprising. Yes, as a constitutional monarch the Queen is supposed to be neutral, but of course she's a (small-c, probably) conservative – she's the Queen . Putting your own face on stamps and money, wearing an ornate hat encrusted with gemstones stolen from former colonies: this is already pretty political; there's a base-level conservatism that saturates the institution of monarchy, regardless of what the woman herself actually says. It would be structurally impossible for our head of state to be, say, a revolutionary Bolshevik or an agrarian primitivist; any king or queen of England is required, without the need for any constitutional explication, to be a grandiose curtain-twitching Tory.

This is what's so incredibly stupid about the recent political spat surrounding John Longworth, the outgoing director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce. Most of this story is incredibly dull, which serves a purpose: these days, power likes to work by making itself as boring as humanly possible, in the hopes that everyone else will just ignore it. Longworth was suspended, and subsequently resigned, after giving a speech in which he claimed that Britain could have a "brighter future" outside the EU. In a press release from its (fantastically named) president Nora Senior, the BCC explained that it is "a non-partisan organisation, and as such, decided not to campaign for either side ahead of the European referendum", adding that "John's personal view on the referendum is likely to create confusion regarding the BCC's neutral stance going forward". This is, basically, bullshit.

As the pro-Brexit right has gleefully pointed out, BCC executives in Kent and Cornwall have publicly voiced their support for Britain's membership in the EU, with the latter writing that "leaving the EU is playing Russian roulette with the world's fifth largest economy", and that "it would be a great folly". Neither has been suspended. (To be fair, it should be noted that the BCC has clarified that its enforced neutrality only applies on a national level, which seems fairly arbitrary.)

But this misses the point. What is this magnificently neutral body that will sacrifice its leaders to remain above the sordid world of politics? The British Chambers of Commerce is, of course, an immense lobbying group trying to push the agendas of big businesses and the employer classes. It's also fairly successful – in 2010, for instance, it lobbied to impose onerous fees for any worker who wanted to sue their employer in an industrial tribunal, arguing that doing so could "increase employment". In 2012, it got its wish. That same year, it pushed for doubling the period of employment necessary for someone to claim compensation for unfair dismissal, and was again rewarded.

The BCC isn't just a dreary and bloodless pile of suits periodically issuing press releases, but an essential part of the apparatus constantly working to make life worse. Thanks to its efforts, bosses can now fire you for no good reason from a post you've held for two years, and mistreat you with impunity while you're there, so long as you can't cough up £1,200 for justice. The actual, physical, concrete result is deprivation and misery. If politics is just a group of overgrown infants whinnying at each other in Parliament, then yes, it's a neutral body. But if politics is the arena in which people try to actually make some changes to the world they're living in, then it's unapologetically on one side.

Next to this, it's hard to care whether or not John Longworth is allowed to speak his mind at a BCC conference.

Today, there's been a similar furore centring on Boris Johnson's City Hall: an email reportedly sent to deputy mayors and senior advisors warned them to "advocate the mayor's position or otherwise not openly to contradict it". This was an embarrassment for the Mayor, who'd previously complained about Longworth's suspension; he was forced to retract the directive, adding "let a hundred flowers bloom, folks". (Weird, isn't it, how only Tories are allowed to quote Mao Zedong without ridicule?)

This is a second form of neutrality: instead of nobody being allowed to say anything whatsoever, all the child-god's underlings are allowed to say whatever they want, in the hopes that they'll all balance each other out. But this neutrality is still as drawn and as deathly as any other.

And today The Bank of England is also facing questions over its neutrality after pro-"Brexit" Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg declared that the bank was being too partisan, an objection he didn't raise when it bailed out banks with tens of billions of politically neutral pounds following the financial crash.

After all, the terms of the debate on the EU are already set: it's a dispute over what's best for businesses, best for bosses and, as a corollary, worse for actual human life. Just like the monarchy, it already encodes a vast set of ideological assumptions. You can speak your mind, but only within certain limits; beyond them you're denied a common language in which to speak.

Until you die, that is, and then you'll be perfectly free.

@sam_kriss

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