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The Left Case for Brexit. Richard TuckЧитать онлайн книгу.

The Left Case for Brexit - Richard Tuck


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Britain from the EU. Faced with that, a generation of Labour politicians have lost their nerve. It then becomes a vicious circle as, with no one on the Left willing to defend Brexit, the cause looks as if it is (to put it in American terms) purely Trump – and then the politicians, and most party members, feel ashamed at being associated with it. Consequently there is no way of recovering Labour’s lost working-class support: as in Scotland, the party drank from the poisoned chalice of the EU, and it may be too late to find the antidote.

       3 Kevin D. Williamson, ‘Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction’, National Review, 17 March 2016. 4 Matthew Parris, ‘Tories should turn their backs on Clacton’, The Times, 6 September 2014. 5 Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan, 2016).

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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


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