The Left Case for Brexit: Reflections on the Current Crisis

Richard Tuck is the Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government at Harvard University. In this brilliant book he points out that “The central fact about the EU … is that it creates a written constitution and ancillary juridical structures that are extremely hard to alter.” As he explains, “the EU Constitution, its treaties, can only be changed by unanimous agreement of the member states, which renders significant amendment almost impossible.”He suggests that this is very much the EU’s purpose: “Popular politics is precisely what the EU was designed to obstruct. Like independent central banks, and constitutional courts, it is essentially technocratic.” As Labour’s Aneurin Bevan said in 1957, the EEC represents ‘the disenfranchisement of the people and the enfranchisement of market forces’.Polls have found that in all the long-standing Western democracies about three-quarters of those born in the 1930s believe that it is ‘essential’ to live in a democracy, but only a quarter of those born in the 1980s believe this. Tuck comments, “it may well be true that the older and less educated voters were more supportive of Brexit, but (as other people have observed) ‘less educated’ is the same as ‘older’, given the staggering expansion of higher education since the 1990s. The fact that older voters are in general both keener on democracy and keener on Brexit is unlikely to be a coincidence.”Professor Tuck notes “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 [Trans-Pacific Partnership] – that are reshaping the global economic order. While many leftists have clear and well-thought arguments against such trade partnerships, they give their unconsidered support to the EU, though it suffers from all the same failings and more. … 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.” In sum, “The EU was itself Britain’s NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] or TPP, and it also decided all questions of trade for Britain with the rest of the world …”So, “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 had developed, it has consistently undermined standard Left policies such as state aid to industries and nationalisation.”All of which proves that the ‘left’ does not actually want socialism: it is quite happy to embrace capitalism, so long as that capitalism calls itself internationalist. Anybody - left, right or indifferent - who embraces the EU is embracing capitalism.The EU’s famous ‘four freedoms’ all assist capital against labour. As Professor Tuck remarks, “the free movement of people in the EU, as well as of goods and capital, almost necessarily entrenches markets rather than collective planning.” Capitalist governments appreciate this: as a position paper presented to Macmillan’s Cabinet in 1960 said, “the movement of labour works both ways, and might conceivably be of advantage to us as a method of dealing with unemployment.” As Professor Tuck argues, “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 supra-national level, but powerful enough to destroy the old democracies at a national level, in the process handing capitalism a freedom it has always desired.” In fact, “the EU enshrines in near-perpetuity the capitalism of the 1980s.” That decade was of course Thatcher’s heyday.As he observes, “the creation of the National Health Service … would have been impossible in a country with strong constitutional constraints on the legislature, since it required large-scale expropriation of private property in the shape of the old endowed hospitals. That is a major reason why so few countries have adopted the NHS model: in most of them it would have been illegal, just as similar proposals would be illegal in the EU today.”EU rules forbid nationalisation without compensation. The European Court of Human Rights, in a 1986 court case, followed EU rules when it decided that nationalisation entailed a right to fair compensation. Similarly, Professor Tuck notes that Bernie Sanders put forward three key proposals: pull out of or radically modify the trade agreements, greatly increase the tax on the big Wall Street banks and introduce free state college and university tuition paid for largely by the Wall Street tax. Tuck observes, “The British version of these proposals obviously resonates with Labour’s newly energised electorate, but - and I want to stress this – none of them would have been feasible for a British government within the EU.”So, “A future Labour manifesto, if the Remainers in the party get their way, will have to read something like the following: ‘If elected, we are committed to introducing state aid to industries in deprived areas outside London in order to redress the damage done by years of free-market policies, as long as we can find some first-rate lawyers who can persuade a court over which we have no power to see the justice of our arguments, and failing that we are committed to abandoning our policies.’”The EU threatens not just Britain’s independence but our unity as a country. Tuck notes “the judgment of the SNP leaders themselves that continued British membership of the EU offers the best route to independence.”But we have beaten back both these threats. Just as the Johnson election victory confirmed our majority democratic decision of 2016, so our 2016 decision confirmed the Scottish people’s 2014 rejection of secession.Professor Tuck notes that “the carelessness with which Blair approached the twin questions of Scottish independence and European integration was suicidal for his party.” None of his successors have been any better.Unfortunately, Professor Tuck, not knowing much about the Labour Party (and why should he?), suggests that it might reject EU membership. This is not at all likely, given that the party has just elected as its leader Sir Keir Starmer, whose pro-EU policy did more than anything else to cut Labour’s 2019 election vote by a tenth from its 2017 vote.Professor Tuck concludes, “The vote in the referendum was a vote on a constitutional issue, and questions of policy have now to be decided within this new framework - though the framework allows a very wide range of options.” Indeed, the British people now have a wonderful opportunity to build a successful, independent country.