The Left Case for Brexit. Richard Tuck

Kingdom; it only came into being towards the end of the UK’s most powerful century, and from the start it was heavily represented in all four nations. It even organised in Ireland prior to 1913, when (in an ominous precedent for the current Labour Party) it withdrew in the face of Irish Home Rule, creating in its place a separate but affiliated Irish Labour Party which has continued as a party in the Republic until the present day. From this perspective, the carelessness with which Blair approached the twin questions of Scottish devolution and European integration was suicidal for his party.

      It remains one of the great oddities of modern British history that the powerful voices within the Labour Party in the Wilson and Callaghan years opposing membership of the Common Market were so easily silenced after the party’s defeat in 1983 (when its manifesto had included a pledge to withdraw from the EEC), and that the Conservatives and Labour so swiftly swapped places on this issue: in many ways the objective interests of the two parties remained what they had been in the 1970s, and the instinctive suspicion of European integration felt by many people in the Labour Party corresponded to the structural position of the party in British electoral politics. This is leaving to one side, of course, the well-founded character of the suspicion that European integration would prove disastrous for the cause of trad­itional socialism, as European history over the last two decades has so amply demonstrated. Both democracy and socialism require a state, and the EU looks increasingly as if it will offer its residents something far short of a democratic state at the supranational level, but powerful enough to destroy the old democracies at a national level, in the process handing capitalism a freedom it has always desired.

Is there any rowing back from this disaster? All that the current leaders of the Labour Party offer is an act of will: a resolution that there must be a Labour government once again in the UK. But none of them are providing any plausible analysis of how such a thing can be achieved. At the moment it looks as if Cameron may succeed in setting the capstone on his historic defeat of the Labour Party by engineering a victory in a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the EU, supported in doing so by the very Labour politicians whose future the EU is destroying. Such a framework will continue to facilitate Scottish independence and prevent a United Kingdom Labour Party from effectively rebuilding in Scotland. But suppose that the vote in the referendum goes in favour of leaving the EU; what then? The SNP has moved quickly to declare that it will not be bound by such a result if Scotland votes to stay in the EU, and Nicola Sturgeon has attempted to argue that each constituent nation would have to be in favour of leaving before the UK as a whole could leave. This illustrates the extreme importance of this issue for the future of Scottish nationalism, and the judgment of the SNP leaders themselves that continued British membership of the EU offers the best route to independence. But what would actually happen depends on the nature of a post-referendum settlement with the EU, and no one has any idea what that might look like; indeed, the pro-EU camp will make it their prime objective to keep any possible post-Brexit settlement completely unclear, as the pro-Unionists did in the Scottish referendum.

It should be said that the most likely arrangements following Brexit bode only a little better for the future of the United Kingdom than does continued membership of the EU. It is extremely unlikely that Brexit would leave the UK standing in the same relationship to the EU as (say) Canada does; that is, as a wholly foreign country. But if that were to be the case, and Scotland were subsequently to leave the UK and join the EU, there would be a completely unprecedented situation, since for the first time in post-medieval history there would be real barriers to trade and the movement of population within the islands of Ireland and Britain. Even after Irish independence, as I said, there was continued integration of the two populations and to all intents and purposes of the two economies, with Ireland recognising in 1973 that if the UK were to join the Common Market it would have to follow suit. Already there are some voices being raised in Ireland suggesting that a Brexit might entail an Irish exit as well, and a break with the EU of this radical kind would certainly cause major problems for both Ireland and an independent Scotland – so great, indeed, that it would probably deter Scottish voters from supporting independence.

      But this is extremely unlikely as a post-Brexit scenario. Much more likely is that Britain would enjoy something like the relationship with the EU which Norway has; this is indeed the option often cited by opponents of British membership. The relevance of this to Scottish nationalism is that Norway has two kinds of relationship to the EU; one is its membership of the European Economic Area, along with Iceland (and Lichtenstein), but the other is its continued membership, also along with Iceland, of the Nordic Passport Union. The Nordic Passport Union guarantees free movement of people and an integrated labour market among the Scandinavian countries (which is why both Iceland and Norway have to belong to Schengen – just as the Irish, with in effect a passport union with the UK, cannot belong to Schengen as long as the UK stays outside). This would indeed be the obvious model for an England outside the EU but still integrated with the other two insular countries inside it.

      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.

III

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