The Left Case for Brexit. Richard Tuck
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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.
IV
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get funding from the EU, will offer money of its own, but that does not mean it would not do so if that funding were withdrawn.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.
Notes
6 Richard Tuck, ‘The Left Case for Brexit’, Dissent, 6 June 2016. 7 European Trade Union Confederation, Trade Unions and Free Movement of Workers in the European Union (April 2010), p. 5, https://www.etuc.org/sites/default/files/TURKISH_8_1.pdf.
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