Читать книгу The Left Case for Brexit - Richard Tuck - Страница 5

As the campaign began over the Brexit referendum which was scheduled to take place on 23 June 2016, I found myself increasingly troubled that there seemed to be few people in the debate putting the old left-wing case against Britain’s membership of the European Union. I started writing short essays for circulation among friends and occasional publication in various online settings, and not long before the vote I was asked to put some of these ideas together into a piece for Dissent, which attracted quite a lot of attention and encouraged me to develop the themes further, and to reply to my critics. The Westminster-based think-tank Policy Exchange invited me to set out my thoughts in a lecture in July 2017, after the referendum and the general election, and that enabled me to develop my ideas further; I would like to thank Dean Godson, its director, for his help and encouragement. I have also continued to write short essays on the subject. This book contains these pieces, in the order in which they were written, to make it clear how I was responding to the complicated twists and turns of British politics over the last three years. Above all I would like to thank the friends for whom they were first written: David Grewal, Daniela Cammack, Alex Gourevitch, Jed Purdy, Chris Bickerton and Maurice Glasman. I would particularly like to thank Daniela Cammack for her help with this text. Many of the essays appeared on The Full Brexit website, the main organ of left-wing Brexiteers; I would like to thank the principal organisers of the site, Peter Ramsay, Lee Jones, Costas Lapavitsas, Martin Loughlin, Danny Nicol, Philip Cunliffe, Mary Davis, George Hoare, Anshu Srivastava and Aislinn Macklin-Doherty. Others have appeared on the Briefings for Brexit website; thanks to its organisers, Robert Tombs and Graham Gudgin.