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The Left Case for Brexit. Richard TuckЧитать онлайн книгу.

The Left Case for Brexit - Richard Tuck


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       On 19 February 2016 David Cameron agreed with the other European leaders on the details of his renegotiation of the terms of membership for Britain in the European Union. The following day he announced that a referendum would be held on membership on 23 June. On 22 February the Commons debated the renegotiation deal, and the campaigning for the referendum began.

      But if we pause for a moment, we can see that there is something odd about this. Force yourself to remember the tedium of the renegotiation, and its footling outcomes: did it have the ring of a discussion conducted under the threat of the collapse of post-war Europe? Did it look like the really vital and urgent diplomatic engagements of the 1930s, in which it was obvious to everyone that major issues hung in the balance, or the similar negotiations of the Cold War? Either the EU representatives at Brussels in 2015–16 were extraordinarily insouciant about the implications of what they were doing, or they thought that Brexit was so unlikely (something which none of the polls, then or now, have supported, even if the balance of probability is for Remain) that it was not worth guarding against by offering politically plausible concessions, or they thought that a Brexit would not in fact be a disaster, and they could afford to run the risk of Britain walking away from the EU.

      The Greeks (to continue the analogy) were driving the equivalent of a Reliant Robin, which would have been no match for an armoured Mercedes even in a head-on collision, so the stakes were relatively low for the EU, as the international markets were repeatedly reminded. But with Brexit, the EU and the US are themselves now assuring us that the stakes are very high – though neither did so at all minatorily during the renegotiation. Sensible politicians do not play chicken in a high-stakes situation; neither the US nor the Soviet Union did so during the Cold War, except perhaps in the Cuban Missile Crisis – but that is no model for modern politics, and was anyway solved by a back-room deal rather than the submission of one side. Do we conclude that EU and State Department polit­icians are not sensible? Or do we conclude that they do not really believe what they say, since if they did, they would – according to their own lights – have been behaving in the most reckless fashion?

      The other explanation for the absence of any sense of urgency and importance is that the EU representatives were terrified of offering anything more than trivial concessions, as doing so would have encouraged other countries to seek similar treatment, and the EU project would have begun to unravel. This may be right, but it does not bode well for the future of the project, and confirms that Britain would be best out of it. It reveals that the leaders of the EU do not themselves believe that there is general support for integration, and that the citizens of Europe, given half a chance, would opt for the kind of deal which British Eurosceptics want. Once again, then, the EU leaders are convicted of extraordinary recklessness in seeking to force European union upon unwilling populations by – in effect – a threat of expulsion levelled at one of the major member countries. How long can such a structure last?

       On 22 April President Barack Obama gave a press conference at the Foreign Office alongside David Cameron, in which he produced his famous remark that Britain would be ‘at the back of the queue’ when it came to a trade deal with the US. This remark was widely believed to have been drafted by the British government, given the fact that no American says ‘queue’ rather than ‘line’! But Obama also said of the referendum that ‘the outcome of that decision is a matter of deep interest to the United States because it affects our prospects as well. The United States wants a strong United Kingdom as a partner. And the United Kingdom is at its best when it’s helping to lead a strong Europe. It leverages UK power to be part of the European Union.’

      President Obama’s intervention today in the Brexit debate tells us only one thing, but that is something of great significance. It is that President de Gaulle was right when in 1963 and 1967 he vetoed Britain’s application to join the Common Market. In his public utterances on the issue, he stressed (as he said in a famous speech in 1963) that


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