Richard Tuck - The Left Case for Brexit

Indeed, one does not have to imagine this: one only has to think back (if one is old enough, as I am) to the days before Britain joined the Common Market, when Scottish nationalism was largely a joke, and its supporters’ principal activity was moving the Welcome to Scotland sign from one side of Berwick-upon-Tweed to the other. Even after Britain’s accession, as long as the Common Market appeared to be merely a somewhat loose trading arrangement it played no part in Scottish nationalism – indeed, the SNP had violently opposed the accession. But once the Common Market began to take its current shape, the power of European integration to advance its cause began to dawn on the SNP, and as soon as it switched to an enthusiastically pro-European position in the 1980s its electoral fortunes began to improve.

There is little to set against the power of this logic. The ties of sentiment between Scotland and England can be maintained if both countries are united with one another via the EU as easily as in a United Kingdom; witness the ways in which strong ties continued between England and Ireland despite their separation since 1921, as long as freedom of movement and a high degree of economic integration were guaranteed. Enemies of Scottish nationalism often deny that an independent Scotland would be part of the EU, but no one is convinced: given the character and ambitions of the EU, is it at all plausible that an independent Scotland would be left outside while England stayed within? It would surely become a second Ireland, welcomed as an independent nation at Brussels, whatever the Spaniards (in particular) might say or do.

These obvious thoughts do not need to have been in the forefront of the minds of the almost half of the Scottish electorate who voted for independence in the referendum, though they have certainly been in the forefront of the minds of the SNP leaders; it is enough that the EU is simply now part of the necessary background to any discussion about the separation of the two countries, and as its clear logic works its way to a conclusion it is hard to see the old United Kingdom surviving. Even if it does, in some precarious fashion, the plausibility of Scottish independence in this context will remain, and will continue to attract large numbers of voters to the SNP and away from Labour.

The Labour Party should have remembered that more than the other parties it was a creature of the United Kingdom; it only came into being towards the end of the UK’s most powerful century, and from the start it was heavily represented in all four nations. It even organised in Ireland prior to 1913, when (in an ominous precedent for the current Labour Party) it withdrew in the face of Irish Home Rule, creating in its place a separate but affiliated Irish Labour Party which has continued as a party in the Republic until the present day. From this perspective, the carelessness with which Blair approached the twin questions of Scottish devolution and European integration was suicidal for his party.

It remains one of the great oddities of modern British history that the powerful voices within the Labour Party in the Wilson and Callaghan years opposing membership of the Common Market were so easily silenced after the party’s defeat in 1983 (when its manifesto had included a pledge to withdraw from the EEC), and that the Conservatives and Labour so swiftly swapped places on this issue: in many ways the objective interests of the two parties remained what they had been in the 1970s, and the instinctive suspicion of European integration felt by many people in the Labour Party corresponded to the structural position of the party in British electoral politics. This is leaving to one side, of course, the well-founded character of the suspicion that European integration would prove disastrous for the cause of trad­itional socialism, as European history over the last two decades has so amply demonstrated. Both democracy and socialism require a state, and the EU looks increasingly as if it will offer its residents something far short of a democratic state at the supranational level, but powerful enough to destroy the old democracies at a national level, in the process handing capitalism a freedom it has always desired.

Is there any rowing back from this disaster? All that the current leaders of the Labour Party offer is an act of will: a resolution that there must be a Labour government once again in the UK. But none of them are providing any plausible analysis of how such a thing can be achieved. At the moment it looks as if Cameron may succeed in setting the capstone on his historic defeat of the Labour Party by engineering a victory in a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the EU, supported in doing so by the very Labour politicians whose future the EU is destroying. Such a framework will continue to facilitate Scottish independence and prevent a United Kingdom Labour Party from effectively rebuilding in Scotland. But suppose that the vote in the referendum goes in favour of leaving the EU; what then? The SNP has moved quickly to declare that it will not be bound by such a result if Scotland votes to stay in the EU, and Nicola Sturgeon has attempted to argue that each constituent nation would have to be in favour of leaving before the UK as a whole could leave. This illustrates the extreme importance of this issue for the future of Scottish nationalism, and the judgment of the SNP leaders themselves that continued British membership of the EU offers the best route to independence. But what would actually happen depends on the nature of a post-referendum settlement with the EU, and no one has any idea what that might look like; indeed, the pro-EU camp will make it their prime objective to keep any possible post-Brexit settlement completely unclear, as the pro-Unionists did in the Scottish referendum.

It should be said that the most likely arrangements following Brexit bode only a little better for the future of the United Kingdom than does continued membership of the EU. It is extremely unlikely that Brexit would leave the UK standing in the same relationship to the EU as (say) Canada does; that is, as a wholly foreign country. But if that were to be the case, and Scotland were subsequently to leave the UK and join the EU, there would be a completely unprecedented situation, since for the first time in post-medieval history there would be real barriers to trade and the movement of population within the islands of Ireland and Britain. Even after Irish independence, as I said, there was continued integration of the two populations and to all intents and purposes of the two economies, with Ireland recognising in 1973 that if the UK were to join the Common Market it would have to follow suit. Already there are some voices being raised in Ireland suggesting that a Brexit might entail an Irish exit as well, and a break with the EU of this radical kind would certainly cause major problems for both Ireland and an independent Scotland – so great, indeed, that it would probably deter Scottish voters from supporting independence.

But this is extremely unlikely as a post-Brexit scenario. Much more likely is that Britain would enjoy something like the relationship with the EU which Norway has; this is indeed the option often cited by opponents of British membership. The relevance of this to Scottish nationalism is that Norway has two kinds of relationship to the EU; one is its membership of the European Economic Area, along with Iceland (and Lichtenstein), but the other is its continued membership, also along with Iceland, of the Nordic Passport Union. The Nordic Passport Union guarantees free movement of people and an integrated labour market among the Scandinavian countries (which is why both Iceland and Norway have to belong to Schengen – just as the Irish, with in effect a passport union with the UK, cannot belong to Schengen as long as the UK stays outside). This would indeed be the obvious model for an England outside the EU but still integrated with the other two insular countries inside it.