6 June 2016: The Left Case for Brexit

      On 6 June 2016 I published an article entitled ‘The Left Case for Brexit’ in the online edition of Dissent magazine,⁶ which attracted a great deal of attention on both sides of the Atlantic, including a recommendation by Charles Moore in The Spectator of 18 June. The article was based on some posts I had written during the previous month, including one which responded to an article by Yanis Varoufakis published on 5 April in The Guardian containing an extract from his new book, And the Weak Suffer What They Must, which was published the same week. Varoufakis ended his article by saying that, ‘Just like in the early 1930s, Britain and Greece cannot escape Europe by building a mental or legislative wall behind which to hide. Either we band together to democratise – or we suffer the consequences of a pan-European nightmare that no border can keep out.’ This is an edited version of the article, incorporating some more of those earlier posts.

On the question of whether Britain should leave the European Union, the British Left has been nearly uniform in supporting ‘Remain’. This option seems especially attractive since those on the Right advocating ‘Leave’ range from open racists concerned with the recent growth of immigration to romantic global free-marketeers. For entirely understandable cultural and political reasons, the Left has not wished to be associated with that crowd. But in supporting ‘Remain’, the Left is making a profound mistake, one capable of destroying its future, whether Britain is in or out of the EU.

      There are several flaws in the case made by Left advocates of Remain; here I want to consider three in particular. First is the idea, fostered especially by the dynamic Greek former finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, that Left politics today can only be advanced by concerted action within the EU. As I will argue, that is a fantasy, and by adhering to it the British Left is likely to undermine itself seriously – as the Greek Left may already be doing.

      Next is the claim that Brexit would hasten the break-up of the United Kingdom, and consequently (for long-standing reasons of electoral demography) spell doom for Labour as a party of government. I argue that the opposite is the case: Brexit may well be the only thing that could hold the UK together and offer Labour the opportunity to rebuild on a national basis.

      Last is the assumption, which seems to underlie much pro-Remain thinking on the Left, that the EU is fundamentally different from the multinational trade agreements – most recently the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the TPP – that are reshaping the global economic order. While many leftists have clear and well-thought-out arguments against such trade ‘partnerships’, they give their unconsidered support to the EU, though it suffers from all the same failings and more.

As a consequence of these mistakes, the British Left risks throwing away the one institution which it has, historic­ally, been able to use effectively – the democratic state – in favour of a constitutional order tailor-made for the interests of global capitalism and managerial politics. As the jurisprudence of the EU has developed, it has consistently undermined standard Left policies such as state aid to industries and nationalisation. Constitutional structures that are largely outside the reach of citizens have, in the modern world, tended almost invariably to block the kind of radical policies that the Left has traditionally believed in. The central fact about the EU, which the British governing class has never really got its head around, is that it creates a written constitution and ancillary juridical structures that are extremely hard to alter. Neither British politicians nor the British electorate are used to this, since Britain has never had such a thing, and they are treating the referendum as if it were a general election campaign, with short-term victories that could be reversed in a few years, rather than something with the long-term implications of the votes in 1788 on the American Constitution.

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      Yanis Varoufakis is one of the most significant left-wing politicians in Europe. As someone who witnessed one of its major crises from within, he speaks with authority about the character of the EU project. His accounts of the discussions in the councils of Europe about the euro crisis, featuring ignorant and preening finance ministers bent almost exclusively on the exercise of power, are a graphic illustration of what actually happens within the EU.

      Varoufakis is also important because despite his first-hand experience of the limits of the EU, he believes it can be reformed. More than that, he hopes that a pan-European Left will be revived through the institutions of the EU, and that hope is repeatedly echoed by pro-EU figures within the British Labour Party. But it would be a profound mistake for the British Left to follow Varoufakis’s loyalty to the European project. To see why, we should go back to the theorist with whom Varoufakis himself continues to identify: the founding father of the European Left, Karl Marx.

One of Marx’s most striking insights was the observation that the various constitutions of the French Republics, and their imitations in other Continental states, were deliberately designed to obstruct progress towards genuine democracy. Though the French Revolution had introduced universal suffrage, its significance was immediately undermined by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and by constitutional structures that precluded the kind of social transformation that the Revolution’s radicals wanted. Marx emphasised this repeatedly in his writings of the 1840s, and the failure of the revolutions of 1848 and the restoration of the constitutional orders in Europe only confirmed his judgment. Accordingly, Marx felt, only a total revolution would be able to overturn the ‘bourgeois’ liberal economic and political constitutions that stood in the way of substantive social change.

      But Marx, and still more Engels, thought England was different. The House of Commons was unconstrained by the kind of constitutional apparatus seen on the Continent, since Parliament was (famously) ‘omnicompetent’ and the Lords and the monarchy were largely irrelevant. Marx and Engels concluded that once the English working class got the vote, it would be able to use the House of Commons to achieve its political and economic goals peacefully. The accidents of history that had delivered this exceptional institution meant that revolution ought not to be necessary for the kind of social transformation Marx and Engels had in mind.

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