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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Liberal left orthodoxy holds that Brexit is a disastrous coup, orchestrated by the hard right and fuelled by xenophobia, which will break up the Union and turn what's left of Britain into a neoliberal dystopia. Richard Tuck's ongoing commentary on the Brexit crisis demolishes this narrative. He argues that by opposing Brexit and throwing its lot in with a liberal constitutional order tailor-made for the interests of global capitalists, the Left has made a major error. It has tied itself into a framework designed to frustrate its own radical policies. Brexit therefore actually represents a golden opportunity for socialists to implement the kind of economic agenda they have long since advocated. Sadly, however, many of them have lost faith in the kind of popular revolution that the majoritarian British constitution is peculiarly well-placed to deliver and have succumbed instead to defeatism and the cultural politics of virtue-signalling. Another approach is, however, still possible. Combining brilliant contemporary political insights with a profound grasp of the ironies of modern history, this book is essential for anyone who wants a clear-sighted assessment of the momentous underlying issues brought to the surface by Brexit.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Preface
16 April 2016
22 April 2016
Notes
16 May 2016
Notes
6 June 2016: The Left Case for Brexit
I
II
III
IV
Notes
9 June 2016
Note
17 July 2017: Brexit: A Prize in Reach for the Left
Notes
16 August 2017
Notes
6 November 2017
Note
17 February 2018
Note
28 February 2018
9 March 2018
Notes
11 April 2018
Notes
26 April 2018: Why Is Everyone So Hysterical About Brexit?
17 May 2018
15 July 2018: How to Break Up the Union
Note
1 August 2018
Notes
19 November 2018: The Surprising Benefits to Ireland of a No-Deal Brexit
Note
16 January 2019
17 January 2019: Deal or No Deal
23 January 2019
24 February 2019
12 April 2019: Modest Proposals
3 June 2019
Note
5 July 2019
18 July 2019
Notes
31 October 2019
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
16 April 2016
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The Left Case for Brexit
Reflections on the Current Crisis
Richard Tuck
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Richard Tuck 2020
The right of Richard Tuck to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4227-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4228-4(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tuck, Richard, 1949- author.
Title: The left case for Brexit : reflections on the current crisis / Richard Tuck.
Description: Bristol, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Why opposing Brexit means opposing socialism and democracy”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019038607 (print) | LCCN 2019038608 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509542277 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509542284 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509542291 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: European Union--Great Britain. | Socialism--Great Britain. | Democracy--Great Britain.
Classification: LCC HC240.25.G7 T83 2020 (print) | LCC HC240.25.G7 (ebook) | DDC 341.242/20941--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038607
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038608
Typeset in 11 on 13pt Sabon by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Preface
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.
16 April 2016
On 19 February 2016 David Cameron agreed with the other European leaders on the details of his renegotiation of the terms of membership for Britain in the European Union. The following day he announced that a referendum would be held on membership on 23 June. On 22 February the Commons debated the renegotiation deal, and the campaigning for the referendum began.
Do you remember David Cameron’s renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s membership of the EU? No, I thought not. The details of the negotiation have more or less disappeared without trace from the debate about Brexit, to be replaced by the apocalyptic scenarios of Project Fear, according to which Britain’s exit from the EU will be catastrophic not merely for the British economy but for the entire Western World. At the very least Brexit (we are told) will carve a large hole in the European economy, but – even more urgently – it will apparently disrupt the entire current security system. When American politicians or generals (insofar as the categories are distinct) lecture the British on the need to stay in the EU, they are not doing so out of benevolence for Britain, nor do they even pretend to be doing so; they are doing it, they say, out of anxiety for the future of the post-war European order. The same is true of a certain kind of European politician, for whom the threat of terrorist attacks or Russian revanchism requires ‘more Europe’, and for whom the tearing apart of the EU would be a disaster.
But if we pause for a moment, we can see that there is something odd about this. Force yourself to remember the tedium of the renegotiation, and its footling outcomes: did it have the ring of a discussion conducted under the threat of the collapse of post-war Europe? Did it look like the really vital and urgent diplomatic engagements of the 1930s, in which it was obvious to everyone that major issues hung in the balance, or the similar negotiations of the Cold War? Either the EU representatives at Brussels in 2015–16 were extraordinarily insouciant about the implications of what they were doing, or they thought that Brexit was so unlikely (something which none of the polls, then or now, have supported, even if the balance of probability is for Remain) that it was not worth guarding against by offering politically plausible concessions, or they thought that a Brexit would not in fact be a disaster, and they could afford to run the risk of Britain walking away from the EU.
If they did not think any of these things, then there are only two explanations for the trivial character of the negotiations. One was that they were playing a game of chicken, in which they fully recognised the danger, but hoped to use fear of it as the key element in the negotiations, in order to force Britain into line. The EU of course has form in this regard: precisely this approach was used against Greece, as Yanis Varoufakis has testified. Rather than being offered some reasonable compromise, the Greek people and their government were led to believe that the choice was between exit from the euro – and even from the EU – and submission to the terms offered them. This was a manufactured choice, since they could relatively easily have been offered better terms; but the Greeks’ nerve failed, very reasonably, and they chose to swerve their car away from the centre of the highway.
The Greeks (to continue the analogy) were driving the equivalent of a Reliant Robin, which would have been no match for an armoured Mercedes even in a head-on collision, so the stakes were relatively low for the EU, as the international markets were repeatedly reminded. But with Brexit, the EU and the US are themselves now assuring us that the stakes are very high – though neither did so at all minatorily during the renegotiation. Sensible politicians do not play chicken in a high-stakes situation; neither the US nor the Soviet Union did so during the Cold War, except perhaps in the Cuban Missile Crisis – but that is no model for modern politics, and was anyway solved by a back-room deal rather than the submission of one side. Do we conclude that EU and State Department politicians are not sensible? Or do we conclude that they do not really believe what they say, since if they did, they would – according to their own lights – have been behaving in the most reckless fashion?
The other explanation for the absence of any sense of urgency and importance is that the EU representatives were terrified of offering anything more than trivial concessions, as doing so would have encouraged other countries to seek similar treatment, and the EU project would have begun to unravel. This may be right, but it does not bode well for the future of the project, and confirms that Britain would be best out of it. It reveals that the leaders of the EU do not themselves believe that there is general support for integration, and that the citizens of Europe, given half a chance, would opt for the kind of deal which British Eurosceptics want. Once again, then, the EU leaders are convicted of extraordinary recklessness in seeking to force European union upon unwilling populations by – in effect – a threat of expulsion levelled at one of the major member countries. How long can such a structure last?
22 April 2016
On 22 April President Barack Obama gave a press conference at the Foreign Office alongside David Cameron, in which he produced his famous remark that Britain would be ‘at the back of the queue’ when it came to a trade deal with the US. This remark was widely believed to have been drafted by the British government, given the fact that no American says ‘queue’ rather than ‘line’! But Obama also said of the referendum that ‘the outcome of that decision is a matter of deep interest to the United States because it affects our prospects as well. The United States wants a strong United Kingdom as a partner. And the United Kingdom is at its best when it’s helping to lead a strong Europe. It leverages UK power to be part of the European Union.’
President Obama’s intervention today in the Brexit debate tells us only one thing, but that is something of great significance. It is that President de Gaulle was right when in 1963 and 1967 he vetoed Britain’s application to join the Common Market. In his public utterances on the issue, he stressed (as he said in a famous speech in 1963) that
England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones. She has in all her doings very marked and very original habits and traditions.1
But the French press of the period, and private remarks by French politicians, repeatedly made explicit the specific anxiety which plainly guided de Gaulle’s veto – that Britain would be ‘America’s Trojan Horse’ in Europe. Within Britain, this has usually been seen as an example of French cultural anxiety; but with the crisis of Brexit on the horizon, the American foreign policy establishment is finally coming clean: they might talk about their general desire for a stable and united Europe, but in their eyes Britain’s membership of the EU is and plainly always has been a means of planting a reliable agent of the United States in the heart of the organisation. The French fears of the 1960s were well founded in a quite definite sense, and it is highly likely that the French intelligence services, always preternaturally well informed, were aware at the time of this aspect of American foreign policy. And de Gaulle, with his intimate knowledge of Anglo-American relations as they had been forged during the Second World War, was in an especially good position to appreciate what British membership would mean.
Leaving aside the feelings of Continental politicians, now they have been told that what they always suspected was indeed the truth, and leaving aside the humiliation of British citizens on learning that their country has been acting as a secret agent for the US within the EU for fifty years, there is a serious question about what has now been revealed. The State Department’s devotion to European union under all administrations should always have been more of a puzzle than it has normally appeared. There is much we do not know about its real motives, and about its attitude to British membership. For example, Richard Crossman, a member of Harold Wilson’s Cabinet at the time of the renewed application in 1967, recorded in his diary that the Wilson government had turned to the Common Market only after an attempt to construct a North Atlantic free trade area between the US and Britain was rebuffed by the Johnson administration. Was this payback for Wilson’s successful manoeuvrings which kept Britain out of the Vietnam War? Certainly, one would not have expected that America’s most important military campaign since at least the Korean War would be fought without any British military involvement, while Australians and New Zealanders died on the battlefields of Vietnam (this should always be remembered by people who talk about Britain simply as America’s poodle). Or was it already the policy of the State Department that Britain should be inserted into a Continental structure which was now being talked about quite openly in foreign ministries around the world as prospectively a political union? As Con O’Neill, the British representative to the EEC from 1963 to 1965 (and the man who led the successful negotiation to join), said in the characteristically flippant terms of the British diplomat:
Mao Tse Tung declared that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Professor Hallstein [the President of the Commission from 1958 to 1967] operates in a more sophisticated environment; but he has always declared he is in politics not business, and he may well believe that power grows out of the regulation price of Tilsit cheese or the price of a grain a hen needs to lay one egg. I think it does.2
There were – and still are – good reasons for the US to fear the EU rather than welcome it; beneath the veneer of Western solidarity there has always been a clear vein of anti-Americanism in the politics of the EU. During the Cold War this was obscured by the urgency of forming a united front against the Soviet Union, but even that requirement cut two ways: NATO and the military actions of the 1940s and 1950s such as the Berlin airlift were the most effective means of maintaining the Iron Curtain, and an independent Continental foreign policy led by France was not the most obvious pillar of Western security (and one should not forget the ever-present temptation of German unity bought by a promise of neutrality which the Soviet Union dangled in front of Germany throughout the Cold War, and which in a subtle fashion may turn out in the long run to be the bargain the Germans accepted). Nowadays, one would have thought that any objective analysis of a traditional kind would conclude that the EU was potentially more of a risk to the US than to Russia: it is the EU which is economically successful, which can interfere with American companies in one of their largest markets, and which can increasingly play an independent – and, as it turns out, often catastrophic – role in foreign affairs, as in the disastrous Libyan adventure cooked up by Britain and France, who seem to see themselves as the basis of a kind of EU military force. But America’s fears of the EU have been assuaged over the years by Britain’s presence; the extraordinary level of integration in foreign policy between the two countries has been a guarantee that the EU will not develop in an openly hostile way.
In the days before the radical extension of qualified majority voting to most important matters that come before the EU Council of Ministers, Britain’s role as a Trojan Horse was very straightforward, since it could veto measures that it – or the State Department – opposed. That is no longer the case, as the demand for Brexit within Britain testifies; the central fear of the advocates of Brexit is after all that Britain, with its special interests which are seldom shared by other countries within the EU, will be consistently outvoted – it has been in the minority more than any other state in the last decade, and that is only likely to get worse. Most opponents of the EU in Britain would be mollified by a return to the voting arrangements which were in place when Britain joined. But the State Department does not yet appear to have drawn the obvious conclusion, which is that Britain will not be an especially effective Trojan Horse in the future. Even its military role, as it has come increasingly under the spell of French military revanchism, will be far less reliable as a means of projecting American influence inside Europe. At the extreme, the Horse may be turned against the Greeks themselves, and that prospect ought to keep undersecretaries of state awake at night far more than the prospect of Brexit. The very reasons which drive the campaign for Brexit should – if the State Department were thinking clearly – make it very unconfident that the old order will be maintained even if Britain stays in the EU, and very fearful of what may happen if the existing project simply limps forward for another generation or more. One might even say that the last couple of decades have seen an historic defeat for American foreign policy; the European settlement in which Britain functioned as its arm within the EU was gradually transformed in the course of a subterranean diplomatic struggle into a new arrangement in which Britain cannot play the role assigned to it. Overconfident as ever, the British Foreign Office has clearly continued to pretend to the US that it holds the key to Europe; the snag is that one day the State Department will discover that the locks have been changed.
There are wider issues which the question of America’s attitude to Britain and the EU raises. Secrecy has always been part of the business of international affairs, with negotiations conducted entirely in private, and possibly without the agreements which are made ever becoming fully public. In the past there were secret treaties (such as Charles II’s infamous Treaty of Dover, which in retrospect bears some similarities to the EU treaties!), and though they have largely vanished, the world of diplomacy still operates with a far higher level of concealment and subterfuge than would ever be acceptable in domestic politics. Traditionally, citizens have accepted this: the ambassador, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country, did not usually threaten the internal political structures of his nation, and if he did he would be summarily dismissed or prosecuted. One of the deep problems of the modern international order, of which the EU is the most extreme example, is that this is no longer the case. International agreements bite deep into the internal organs of states, but they are arrived at by the same opaque processes by which they have always been handled. Given the traditional division between executive and legislative, moreover, and the fact that foreign affairs are usually the special province of the executive, this feature of the modern world has handed enormous new powers to governments. The American senators who blocked the US membership of the League of Nations may have known (at some subconscious level) what they were doing – just as Weber said the reactionary opponents of civil service reform in nineteenth-century America knew what they were doing when they resisted the move to a modern bureaucracy. The fact that we do not really know exactly why Britain is in the EU, and the smell of secrecy which hangs over both the history of its accession and the recent diplomacy to keep it in the EU, are among the principal reasons for wishing to get out.
Notes
1
‘French President Charles DeGaulle’s Veto on British Membership of the EEC, 14 January 1963’, at
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125401/1168_DeGaulleVeto.pdf
.
2
Quoted in Helen Parr,
Britain’s Policy Towards the European Community: Harold Wilson and Britain’s World Role, 1964–1967
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 19.
16 May 2016
By mid-May it was becoming likely that Hillary Clinton would win the Democrats’ nomination for President, but Bernie Sanders’ supporters still had some reason for hope. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 53% of respondents said they would vote for Sanders if Trump were the Republican nominee, and only 39% for Trump, whereas Clinton and Trump were in a dead heat ...
One of the curious ways in which British and American politics continue to run parallel with one another – think Thatcher/Reagan and Clinton/Blair – is that in both countries at the moment class war, and class contempt, have unexpectedly reappeared. In both countries, moreover, one of the key issues has been international trade: in the US the argument is over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and in the UK the argument is over Brexit. But on both sides of the Atlantic, trade has come to stand in for a much wider range of threats which the old working class faces. The difference between the two countries, however, is that in America the Left has understood this and – to a degree – has been able genuinely to speak to it, while in Britain the Left has remained imprisoned in the mindset of the Clinton/Blair years, however much it might ostensibly deny it.
The degree to which commentators in this new world feel able to express their contempt for the pathetic losers stranded by the glorious capitalism of the recent past is quite astonishing. From the United States comes the infamous article by Kevin D. Williamson from the National Review in March 2016 about Garbutt, a decaying industrial town in upstate New York:
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American under-class is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. If you want to live, get out of Garbutt...3
But that can be exactly matched by a column in the London Times eighteen months earlier by the socially liberal Conservative Matthew Parris writing about a by-election in Clacton-on-Sea, a decaying seaside town in Essex. UKIP duly went on to win the seat.
[U]nderstand that Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere. Its voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.
So of course Ukip will do well in the by-election ...
If you want to win Cambridge you may have to let go of Clacton.
From the train leaving Stratford at platform 10a, you can see Canary Wharf [where many of the biggest banks in London are based], humming with a sense of the possible. You must turn your back on that if you want to go to Clacton. I don’t, and the Tories shouldn’t ...4
As Parris’s invective testifies, in Britain UKIP, whose raison d’être since its foundation in 1993 has been to get Britain out of the EU, is the movement which has managed to reach these voters, and indeed in many northern towns, and now South Wales, has managed to peel them away from their traditional Labour loyalties. UKIP is universally despised by the liberal intelligentsia, and in this respect as in many others it resembles the Trump wing of the Republican Party; though since it operates outside the traditional party structures it has very little chance of achieving any real political breakthrough in ordinary elections. But in the current Brexit campaign it is yoked in a somewhat uneasy fashion to quite prominent figures from the Conservative Party, with the campaign as a whole coming to look rather more like an insurgency within the mainstream right-wing party – and with the one of the main leaders of the campaign, the former Mayor of London Boris Johnson, as many commentators have pointed out, strangely resembling Trump, including his distinctive hairstyle, his reputation made partly through appearances on TV shows, and a history of womanising. There are important differences, though: Johnson as Mayor presided enthusiastically and with great popularity over what must be the most culturally mixed city on the planet, and it is hard to imagine a President Trump addressing Congress in Latin, as Johnson on occasion addressed the London Assembly. He is also genuinely funny and charming, in a way Trump will never be. His success as Mayor in fact illustrates an important truth about Brexit (which may not have a parallel in the US): there is little enthusiasm for the EU among the large non-European population of the capital, and of the country as a whole. South Asians, for example, understand that EU immigration policies will inevitably make it harder for people like them to come to Britain in the future.
Nevertheless, the similarities between the electorate which has been looking to Trump and Sanders as its defenders against a globalising, capitalistic and meritocratic elite (with this last trait perhaps being the most significant, as Thomas Frank pointed out in a brilliant book5), and the electorate which is currently looking to a Brexit, are very striking. But as I said, there is one major difference: there is no British Bernie Sanders. For a while it looked as if the new leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, might play the role; he even has a long history of opposition to the EU and voted against it in the last referendum. But he has disappointed almost all his followers, and has allowed himself to be captured by the pro-EU forces in his party. The Labour figures associated with Brexit have failed to catch the public’s eye, and the result is that Brexit is seen as largely a movement within the Conservatives. And yet, as the American primaries have shown, there is a real left-wing case to be made for the necessity of giving this deracinated working-class electorate a real voice of the traditional kind, and the one American politician who has seen this has so far reaped unexpectedly great rewards. But in Britain almost all my friends say that they cannot support Brexit because of the political and cultural identities of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, even though most of them simultaneously voice scepticism about the EU, and even though most of them are long-range enthusiasts for Sanders.
Why is there no Sanders campaigning for Brexit? Why in a country without a major modern tradition of socialism is a self-described socialist doing so well, while in a country with a long-standing supposedly socialist party no one is willing to step up and fight this cause? The last time the question was put to the vote, heavyweight figures from Labour campaigned against the Common Market, including the man now seen as in some sense the model for Corbyn, Tony Benn. But there is no one like that within the party today. Some rather feeble gestures are currently being made towards the old working-class English electorate: Tristram Hunt, the former Shadow Secretary of State for Education (and, oddly enough, a biographer of Engels), has recently urged his party not to neglect it, and allow it to fall into the hands of UKIP. But Hunt and the figures like him in the party can offer nothing any more which that electorate wants: it has correctly perceived that the only kinds of change which will make a real difference to it are precisely those which are precluded by Britain’s membership of the EU, not to mention by all the structures (such as an independent central bank) put in place by the last Labour government. Labour politicians still believe that political science – the technical organisation of a party – can win back its lost ground; but as Hillary Clinton is discovering, only political theory can do that.
