Читать книгу The Left Case for Brexit - Richard Tuck - Страница 12

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 in second place’.⁷

It is the Right that ought to applaud this kind of structure, and the Left that ought to be hostile – this is the paradox at the heart of the current British argument about EU membership. Free trade is never the unalloyed 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.