Richard Tuck - The Left Case for Brexit

But equally obviously such a model would do little to hold back Scottish nationalism: if Denmark can be in the EU but Norway outside it, why cannot Scotland, and Ireland, be inside the EU and England outside it? So even if the vote in the referendum were to be in favour of exit, at least in England, the most likely and attractive post-referendum settlement would not stop the steady advance of Scotland towards independence, and with it the slow death of the Labour Party. There may now simply be no undoing the mistakes which the party made under Kinnock and Blair. But if the Labour Party cares at all about the future of its role in a united kingdom, the worst thing it can do is oppose Brexit: Brexit offers the only prospect, however slight it may be, of preserving the United Kingdom and rebuilding a British Labour Party.

One of the odd things about British leftists’ support of the EU is that when they are invited to support a very similar institution with a different set of members, they resolutely refuse to do so. Many people on the Left now oppose both the TPP and the TTIP. They do so partly for economic reasons. But much of the opposition to these trade agreements is based on their political implications, and in particular the regulatory structures which they put in place and impose on individual states. These treaties are not old-fashioned trade agreements to lower tariffs. Instead, they attempt to construct coordinated regulatory structures in a wide variety of areas, ranging from workers’ rights to industrial policy and environmental regulations. Such provisions clearly intrude on areas of national life that in the past were presumed to be the preserve of national governments. Furthermore, the treaties create mechanisms for so-called Investor–State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) which amount to the creation of supranational courts, ruling in accordance with loose principles and free from appellate scrutiny.

Liberal defenders of global capitalism led by President Obama like to stress the fact that the treaties enshrine workers’ rights and gender equality, and they imply that the other provisions are necessary to enforce these rights and to prevent states from restricting free trade through such means as the manipulation of labour laws and health and safety regulations. But the fundamental fact is that supranational intervention on behalf of left-wing causes is bundled together with intervention on behalf of modern global capitalism, and it is not difficult to see which type of intervention will have – and is intended to have – the most lasting impact.

Everything I have just said is commonplace in discussions on the Left across Europe. But many British leftists do not see that these points also apply to the European Union. The EU anticipated both this kind of bundling of left-wing with right-wing promises and the assumption that modern free trade requires a supranational structure with powers to intervene in the internal life of the member states. Because there are so many ways in which regulatory hurdles can be erected to restrict trade, it is argued, regulation has to be managed at a supra­national level. And like the partnerships, in practice the EU subordinates its concern with workers’ rights to its concern to maintain the freedom of companies to shop around within the EU for the weakest regimes of labour protection. To see that, one need only look at European Court of Justice judgments concerning transnational labour disputes within the EU, which the European Trade Union Confederation has described as confirming ‘a hierarchy of norms … with market freedoms highest in the hierarchy, and collective bargaining and action in second place’. 7

It is the Right that ought to applaud this kind of structure, and the Left that ought to be hostile – this is the paradox at the heart of the current British argument about EU membership. Free trade is never the unalloyed good to everyone which is promised: everything depends on the political power of the various groups concerned, something the Left has usually understood, and which the renascent US Left has rediscovered. Anxiety about the TTIP in Britain and the rest of Europe is well judged; but there is no point in resisting the TTIP, or even employing European political institutions to prevent the EU signing up to it, if we remain within the EU. Everything that is objectionable to the Left about these trade partnerships, with the single exception of the fact that the United States is involved, should be objectionable to the Left when it comes to the EU. This was what the original opponents of the Common Market in the Labour Party understood in 1975, and time has merely proven them correct.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Left’s natural position should still be one of opposition to the EU. Why is this message proving so hard to get across? One reason is the fact that many centres of the Left, such as universities, have done very well financially out of the EU. Overall, Britain contributes more to the EU budget than it receives back, but it has proven easier for many academic institutions to negotiate grants from the EU than from the UK government. But this is scarcely a good argument: first, those institutions should not be protected from democratic politics, particularly as far and away the bulk of their funding still comes from the UK taxpayer; and second, no one knows how negotiations would go in the absence of EU largesse. No government, aware that universities can at the moment get funding from the EU, will offer money of its own, but that does not mean it would not do so if that funding were withdrawn.

The most powerful reason, I think, is cultural and political hostility to the supporters of Brexit, and in particular to their stance on immigration, and a fear of what happens in general if they win. But this fear is self-reinforcing. The Left is frightened because it has chosen to abandon the field to its enemies, rather than because of any necessary cleavage between Left and Right on the EU. One can put this point in a more vivid way by asking, why is there no British Bernie Sanders? Sanders has shown that the alienated working-class vote can still be won by left-wing policies, particularly on global trade, and need not be abandoned to the radical Right. But the British Left cannot make that move, despite a degree of windy rhetoric. And the reason it cannot is that its power to propose genuinely left-wing policies has been severely circumscribed by the EU.

The way for the Left to address the immigration debate is to understand that immigration is to many people only the most vivid and proximate sign of a more general loss of political power. Nothing will answer those people’s concerns unless they can be told that decisions about immigration policy are going to be in the hands of the British electorate, like all decisions of major importance. The debate can then begin over what kind of immigration policy the Left should support, and whether (like the present system) it should in effect give priority to white Europeans over the older classes of immigrants in Britain, predominantly South Asian, who wish to unite families and move easily between Britain and South Asia. The Left should also appreciate that the traditional heart of modern left-wing politics, a planned welfare state, is rendered virtually impossible if Britain stays in the EU, since no one will have any idea of the population numbers in the UK even in the near future. This is an illustration of the way the free movement of people in the EU, as well as of goods and capital, almost necessarily entrenches markets rather than collective planning.

Many of my English friends on the Left reply to these arguments with despair: nothing can now be done to change the situation, the forces of globalisation are too strong, the political culture of Britain is too conservative. Membership of the EU offers shelter, despite its patent lack of democracy and its basic sympathy with capitalism. But this is to rationalise defeat. There have been times in living memory when the Left in Britain could assert itself successfully, but those were times when it understood the nature of Britain’s political structures and could use them. The lack of political possibilities perceived by so many people today is the result of quite specific decisions, above all to enter the EU, and I see no reason why reversing that decision would not open up real possibilities for the Left in Britain again.