Читать книгу The Left Case for Brexit - Richard Tuck - Страница 9

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.

On the question of whether Britain should leave the European Union, the British Left has been nearly uniform in supporting ‘Remain’. This option seems especially attractive since those on the Right advocating ‘Leave’ range from open racists concerned with the recent growth of immigration to romantic global free-marketeers. For entirely understandable cultural and political reasons, the Left has not wished to be associated with that crowd. But in supporting ‘Remain’, the Left is making a profound mistake, one capable of destroying its future, whether Britain is in or out of the EU.

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.

As a consequence of these mistakes, the British Left risks throwing away the one institution which it has, historic­ally, been able to use effectively – the democratic state – in favour of a constitutional order tailor-made for the interests of global capitalism and managerial politics. As the jurisprudence of the EU has developed, it has consistently undermined standard Left policies such as state aid to industries and nationalisation. Constitutional structures that are largely outside the reach of citizens have, in the modern world, tended almost invariably to block the kind of radical policies that the Left has traditionally believed in. The central fact about the EU, which the British governing class has never really got its head around, is that it creates a written constitution and ancillary juridical structures that are extremely hard to alter. Neither British politicians nor the British electorate are used to this, since Britain has never had such a thing, and they are treating the referendum as if it were a general election campaign, with short-term victories that could be reversed in a few years, rather than something with the long-term implications of the votes in 1788 on the American Constitution.