I feel like it was necessary to write out a long, detailed article on why I deem it necessary to vote to leave the European Union on June 23rd. I wrote a piece for The Independent around a month ago making a plea to supporters of Jeremy Corbyn to follow the Lexit campaign out of the European Union, but I only had 600 words to do so. Hopefully I can expand on some of my thoughts and feelings here.
I’ve seen moderate social democrats to more radical progressives like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore back the United Kingdom staying in the European Union. Whilst the likes of Clinton and Obama backing a Remain vote is more than predictable, genuine left-wingers ought to have second thoughts about our relationship with Brussels.
The past
Anyway, before we start talking about the up and coming referendum, it is imperative to travel all the way back to 1975, a time when left-wing Euroscepticism was a dominant force in the Labour Party. Towering figures such as Tony Benn and Michael Foot campaigned against joining the EEC then, and it is quite telling to look at some of the predictions they made. Tony Benn’s Arguments For Socialism (1980) makes a number of claims about the future direction of travel of what we now know as the European Union. The first being a distinct lack of democratic accountability, not at all dissimilar to other products of globalisation such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. Moreover, it also addressed the decimation of not only Britain’s manufacturing industry, whereby he claimed Britain and other countries in the Common Market would simply not be able to compete in what was essentially a ‘survival of the fittest’ modus operandi (the fittest being Germany). All you have to do is look at the declining manufacturing base of countries across the Eurozone today to realise that this was not all down to the governments of Thatcher and Major. A portion of the responsibility must be reserved for the European Commission. The relevance in this now is all too clear to me: Benn and Foot were right.
Before I get into the specifics of why I want to leave this June, I want to address a specific criticism leveled at the Lexit campaign. Namely, it doesn’t have a sufficient platform to challenge the European Union, therefore it doing so is playing into the hands of the Conservative right. The roots of this noiselessness can be traced back to Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, and their ‘modernisation’ of the Labour Party. If they had not transformed the Labour Party into a predominantly EU-friendly organisation, would Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage still have a complete monopoly on the Brexit narrative today? The only way we’re going to create a left-wing voice in this debate again is if we actively choose to partake in it. Our failings in regards to this over the last two decades are the reason why this debate is so horrendously right-ward looking. Here I hope to put it right.
The present
The first issue ever present with the European Union, and the Commission in particular, is the lack of democratic accountability to the electorate. It has moved from the realms of the undemocratic to the anti-democratic. Those who say that “the European Commission doesn’t make laws, it only proposes them” are blindly endorsing this top-down system of policy initiation, which the Commission have a monopoly on. Let it be clear, these people are unelected, and are unaccountable to not only the British electorate, but the entirety of the European Union’s electorate. This unaccountable executive body does more than just initiate the policy process, what worries is that they are agenda-setters within that process. As John King aptly puts it in the New Statesman:
If the main legacy of the European Enlightenment was the collectivisation of political power in the hands of the masses, then the EU model is the antithesis of this: centralising decision-taking in the hands of an unaccountable technocratic elite
A line peddled by lots of figures on the left during this campaign is that “another Europe is possible”. Perhaps, but it is clear that another European Union is not. As mentioned previously, this is an anti-democratic, supranational organisation that will happily suppress the will of national governments and their electorates for orthodoxy. It beggars belief (to me, at least), how so many advocates of a ‘reformed’ European Union are naïve enough to think that this isn’t a structural problem, a systemic problem within the architecture and DNA of the European Union as an institution itself. This architecture, namely neoliberal economics, has been foisted upon the people of Greece despite a resounding OXI vote against another ‘extend and pretend’ bailout deal. The complete lack of respect for the will of the Greek electorate reeked of an authoritarian form of globalisation which the left should not be trying to make incremental reform to, but break down completely.
After all, economists and political scientists across the world have argued that a deviation from neoliberal economics towards a redistributive, socially just economy at the supranational level is “structurally impossible” . Fritz Scharpf asserts that the neoliberal bias structurally embedded within the European constitution means it is impossible to develop the left-wing European Union that we (yes, me included) desire. Interestingly, he goes on to claim that these structural conditions therefore render the ideological positions of European Commission members and the party-political composition of the European Parliament (which lacks power to begin with) completely irrelevant. We, the left, according to this theory (which I happen to concur with), are strictly limited with regards to the political programme we can pursue due to the systemic free market bias present within European law. So surely, that means that we should be looking to reform our national government outside of it? Aaron Bastani hits the nail on the head when he says:
The question nobody is asking is “who is empowered if Britain votes to remain”? Doesn’t it send a message to Europe’s various institutions that they can act with impunity, decimating the continent’s weaker countries in the name of the continent’s northern financial interests?
Doesn’t it send a message to the ECB that even the most eurosceptic country in the bloc can watch them instigate a run on the banking system of another member state, Greece, in order to undermine a democratic vote, and they still won’t vote to leave?
Furthermore, it is not just the economics within the European Union that tell me it is time to leave, but it’s economic policy towards the developing world, in particular the global South. The ‘trade and aid’ deals it insists on patting itself on the back about are actually a continuation of Europe’s colonial past. The belief that the European Union is a force for good in the global South can easily be disproved by their so-called philanthropic efforts. Instead, these neo-colonial trade deals are exactly the kind of economic policy that is keeping countries in poverty. In previous decades, governments in Africa could impose a tariff on countries from the European Union, however, the latest trade deals with the global South insisted on scrapping these tariffs, effectively making sure that African producers, particularly in the agricultural sector, cannot compete. Alethea Kant explores Western trade deals with West Africa in fantastic detail:
Meanwhile, Europe can import freely all the incredibly things West Africa has to offer. A variety of fruits, minerals, fish, timber, and more, without paying any duty. The EU can take African raw materials, turn them into something else, and then sell them back at a cheaper price. As a famous Ghanaian proverb goes, ‘it is the fool whose own tomatoes are sold to him’
Not only this, but the Common Agricultural Policy within the European Union provides such a huge subsidy to farmers here that they can flood the market in the global South, and consequentially, they are able to sell it for less that it costs to actually be produced in Africa. Under previously negotiated loan conditions with EU countries, the IMF and the World Bank — many countries in Africa are prevented from offering any state aid to their farmers. The lack of tariffs and their domestic market being undercut drastically means only one thing for the people of Africa, harsh cuts on public expenditure — in a place of immense hardship where people are struggling to alleviate poverty and disease. This is adaption apartheid on a continental scale.
There is a common theme recurring that I want to stress. Many of my comrades on the left see the European Union as the solution to the problems we face, when in fact, it is the problem. Another example of this is the rise of the far-right in Europe. Authoritarianism breeds authoritarianism. The policies inflicted on the people of Greece are exactly what have caused the rise of Nazi Golden Dawn. Similarly, fiscal policy and decimation of industry across the Eurozone has given rise to migrant-baiting xenophobes who want to blame refugees on the lack of jobs school places, housing, and the shortcomings of other public services.
(P.S — I want to talk more about the migrant crisis, the EU’s acquiescent attitude to American foreign policy and their treatment of Portugal and Greece in a lot more depth — but I’ll save that for another time.)
The future
Okay, so we’ve established that the European Union is generally a bad thing for both left-wing prospects and arguably the entire European working class, but we knew that already, right? What concerns most people who are intent on voting In is simply what happens when we leave. They’re under no illusions that the EU is on the whole — a diabolical institution — but they’re scared and pessimistic about our prospects of success outside of it. Hopefully I’ll be able to quash some of these fears, outlining a basic proposal for where we go next (and although it seems a stretch now, it is far more likely to become a reality than any reform of the EU that isn’t just incremental).
The first issue the left has is Boris Johnson. Quite frankly, people are batshit scared of him becoming Prime Minister without the leash of the European Union, and so they should be. Whilst I understand this approach, let me be absolutely clear: if Boris Johnson wins a General Election after Brexit on a right-wing platform — then he should become Prime Minister and enact that platform. The whole argument about voting ‘In’ to stop Boris Johnson has an undemocratic sentiment to it, but that doesn’t surprise me, considering everything the EU touches results in that sentiment being present at some stage. Why on earth should the left (who I presume to be democrats) circumvent the will of the British electorate and prop up an anti-democratic institution which is the direct antithesis of everything we stand for — simply because we think we might lose? That comes from a position of short-sighted defeatism.
The answer is not to cede power to the European Union. The answer is to become politicized and win a battle of ideas against that floppy haired Etonian through persuasion, media strategy (particularly digital + crowdfunding), in essence, a genuinely competent political strategy. Society in general, and millennials especially, are fleeing from an intellectually and morally bankrupt centre-ground. They’re looking for new answers to the world’s problems, and most of them have found answers in platforms offered by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn (whose platform, by the way, will be incredibly difficult to enact should we vote to remain). A Johnson victory in 2020 is by no means certain. Let’s not forget that if 2984 Green voters had worked with Labour in some of the key battlegrounds of the 2015 election, David Cameron would have been denied a majority. That would have opened up the prospects of a progressive coalition with the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru.
If we can unite the left around a strong policy platform, a scenario where Boris Johnson doesn’t get a whiff of power is entirely plausible. Furthermore, it is infinitely more likely of coming to pass than the reformation of the European Union, which I view as a naïve pipedream that can only end badly.
I wanted to end on a quote from my article for The Independent that expresses my thoughts perfectly:
The rise of Corbyn over the summer of 2015 was based on a rejection of incremental change to a corrupt, debauched system and laying the foundation for a new and better path instead. We should apply this same leap of faith to the EU referendum.
In my next post, I hope to pad out the policy platform that will lead the left to power after a Lexit in more detail. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!