Richard Tuck - The Left Case for Brexit

The early members of the Labour Party in England (who were more Marxist than their successors cared to admit) understood this, and believed that a properly organised working class, using representation in the House of Commons as its vehicle, could institute radical economic and social change. And compared with the life of the working class in the nineteenth century, working-class life after the growth of Labour vindicated their confidence. Indeed, the greatest achievement of the Labour Party, the creation of the National Health Service, would have been impossible in a country with strong constitutional constraints on the legislature, since it required the large-scale expropriation of private property in the shape of the old endowed hospitals. That is a major reason why so few countries have adopted the NHS model: in most of them it would have been illegal, just as similar proposals would be illegal in the EU today.

In the 1980s, however, demoralised Labour politicians began to seek the shelter of Continental-style constitutional structures. The most important and obvious of these structures is the EU, which functions for the internal politics of its member states exactly like the bourgeois constitutions of the mid-nineteenth century, though the Blair government introduced various other checks on the House of Commons such as a newly energised and apparently more independent ‘Supreme Court’, and an independent central bank.

The loss of faith in the advancement of left-wing politics through the ballot box may partly be explained by the success of Thatcher, though I would be more inclined to say that it was the other way round, and that Thatcher was victorious over a Labour Party many of whose most important figures had already lost confidence in trad­itional electoral politics and whose hearts were not really in the struggle against her. The defection of leading members of the party to the new Social Democrats in 1981, largely on the issue of Europe, symbolises this. It is a mistake to think that Thatcher’s victory in 1979 was necessarily the beginning of the long period of Tory government which it turned out to be: the Labour Party split with astonishing rapidity, only two years after Thatcher’s first election, and before the landslide of her second election in 1983. Labour politicians had already succumbed to the temptation to use an external order to put in place left-wing policies before Thatcher began to roll back the achievements of the Left (and in the case of Roy Jenkins, there was also the allure of personal power within the external order). This was precisely the temptation which Jacques Delors dangled in front of the TUC in his famous speech in 1988, and which brought the rest of the Labour Party round to the same position on the EU which the Social Democrats had espoused.

But like all temptations of this kind, it was not what it seemed. The same structures which Delors promised to use in the interests of the working class turned out by the time of the financial crash in 2007–8 to have been used instead to push through a neoliberal economic and social agenda. This would not have surprised Marx: as he understood, this is really the default position of such structures, since their whole point is and always has been to repress what Continental politicians call with disdain ‘populism’ – that is, democracy. As a Marxist, and given his own bruising encounters with EU institutions, Varoufakis should perhaps see this better than anyone. But despite fiercely criticising the way the EU handled the Greek crisis, Varoufakis has remained loyal to the idea that left-wing politics can be pushed through using EU institutions, if only the parties of the Left across Europe can properly coordinate their activities.

History would suggest that this is a vain hope. Even if Europe’s Left parties do succeed in forging a common programme, the EU is not the kind of political entity whose approach to the world can be altered by popular politics. Popular politics is precisely what the EU was designed to obstruct. Like independent central banks and constitutional courts, its institutions are essentially technocratic. Technocracy is not (as some like to pretend) a neutral or rational system of government. Instead, it confers immense power on culturally select bodies whose prejudices will be those of the class their members are drawn from.

Varoufakis believes that the EU may change, and many in the British Labour Party agree. But the kind of shift in European politics that Varoufakis and others want to see is simply not possible within the present structures of the EU: it would require sweeping institutional change of a kind nowhere on the agenda. Without that, like the Labour Party in Britain, the Left in Europe is reliant purely on an article of faith – a conviction that the Left must prevail, even in the face of all the constraints imposed on popular sovereignty by the EU.

The British governing class in the late twentieth century threw away the most valuable institution it had inherited, an institution whose preservation was the most obvious imperative for their predecessors: a House of Commons that was not constrained by a constitution. A vote to stay within the EU will render their casual trashing of it irrevocable, and end any hope of genuinely Left politics in the UK.

If these fundamental considerations were not enough to persuade the Left to vote to leave the EU, pragmatic politics should do so. The Labour Party since Blair has made a fundamental misjudgment about how to gain power, a misjudgment intimately related to its stance on the EU: this is its misunderstanding of Scottish politics.

It is now clear that the Labour Party, in the shape in which it has existed for upwards of a century, is dead. The loss of Scotland, as many commentators have observed, renders it virtually impossible that the Labour Party will rule again in a united kingdom; and since England has been a fundamentally Tory country since the seventeenth century, and shows no sign of becoming markedly less so, it is hard to see anything like the old Labour Party taking power in England alone. Something along these lines has been the obvious prize dangling in front of the Tory Party since Scottish nationalism became a serious political force, and David Cameron – whether through extraordinary luck or extraordinarily good judgment – has seized the prize without (so far) having to break up the United Kingdom in order to do so. In the aftermath of the debacle of the 2015 general election people both inside and outside the Labour Party have been quick to blame its failure on its rotten boroughs and sectarian politics in the West of Scotland, with long-festering resentments and disillusionments finally coming to the surface. But there is a much more fundamental reason why Labour sooner or later had to fail in Scotland.

Modern Scottish nationalism is essentially the working out within Britain of the logic of the EU. Scotland joined the Union in 1707 explicitly to enjoy an economic union with a large market and a global trading power, and there is no need for it to stay within the old union when a new one beckons; why have an intermediate level of politics in Westminster when everything can be much more easily decided directly between Edinburgh and Brussels? To see this, one need only consider whether Scottish nationalism could be a credible movement if the EU did not exist. The EU’s institutions guarantee Scotland virtually the same freedoms of trade and movement with England which the 1707 Union provided; the only missing element (as the equivocation of the referendum campaign demonstrated) is a common currency, but the EU offers some security to an independent Scotland even in this area, at least as compared with the risks of a wholly independent and wholly Scottish currency, the failure of which was a principal reason for the British Union.