The Left Case for Brexit

Reflections on the Current Crisis

Richard Tuck

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509542284, 9781509542277
• eBook ISBN: 9781509542291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1 August 2018

Negotiations between the UK and the EU over a Withdrawal Agreement continued during the summer without any very clear appearance of progress.

There is a general sense that the negotiations between Britain and the EU are a shambles, and that British politics in general is broken. This is clearly true in some ways, but we should not misunderstand what is happening, and fail to see that in part it is the welcome reawakening of long-dead political struggles. We tend to think that a single entity called ‘Britain’ entered another entity called ‘Europe’ and that what has mattered since is simply the relationship between these two entities. But in reality the EU and its predecessors – the Common Market and the EEC – were always used for internal British purposes, as a way of securing a semi-permanent victory for one side against its opponents. This process began right at the beginning: the Labour Party consistently opposed the various schemes for European unity in the 1950s, for reasons which Nye Bevan put very clearly in 1957: the Common Market, he said, represents ‘the disenfranchisement of the people and the enfranchisement of market forces’. While Conservatives on the whole expressed enthusiasm for the Common Market precisely for the same reasons: they understood that its general character would make a return to full-blooded Attlee-style socialism almost impossible. It is no accident that Margaret Thatcher both voted for the European Communities Act and was an enthusiastic advocate of the Common Market’s evolution into the single market we have today, with its extensive restrictions on state aid and its enforcement of a high degree of competition in European markets, including the labour market.

From the beginning they also welcomed the free movement of labour: the position paper presented to Macmillan’s Cabinet in July 1960 which formed the basis of all the later negotiations with the EEC recognised that it would be the ultimate consequence of joining, but said, interestingly, that ‘the movement of labour works both ways, and might conceivably be of advantage to us as a method of dealing with unemployment’³⁹ – not a sentiment we can imagine a Labour government ever expressing!

What the Conservatives who engineered Britain’s membership of the EEC were not keen on, on the other hand, was the protectionist tariff regime. The same position paper went so far as to state about temperate foodstuffs that:

It seems out of the question that we could accept the common tariff or the other protective devices … for these products … because of the impact on the Commonwealth, the damage to our trading relations with third countries – in the case of the United States a breakdown of the Trade Agreement – and the consequences for food prices here.⁴⁰

The UK had had a trade agreement with the US since 1938, but it was terminated in 1962 on the grounds that it was largely redundant given GATT. But the timing of its termination is suggestive, given that it was in the middle of the first negotiations to join the EEC. In 1960 the Cabinet had not supposed that the agreement with the US was redundant, despite the fact that a couple of months earlier the EEC had lowered its common external tariff to fit in with GATT and membership of the EEC should therefore (on the reasoning of two years later) not have conflicted with the US agreement.

Both political parties in Britain had traditionally had an ambiguous relationship to protectionism, with Baldwin’s government in the 1930s introducing a range of restrictions on free trade at the same time as many members of the Labour Party opposed them. By the 1950s free trade was once more the ideal on both sides of the spectrum, but it is fair to say that on the whole in the post-war period Labour’s instincts were more protectionist than the Conservatives’, something which became very clear with the so-called Alternative Economic Strategy of the 1970s and 1980s, which attracted a great deal of support from within the party, and which the present leader of the party still seems to espouse in large part. Labour’s hostility to the Common Market was rarely based on a commitment to general free trade; instead, for some people, such as Richard Crossman, their vision for Britain was that it should be what he proudly described as ‘a socialist offshore island’, while for others (notably Hugh Gaitskell in his famous speech to the party conference in 1962) it was as a continued part of a Commonwealth trading area with, to a degree, a common external tariff.

We should not, incidentally, underestimate the import­ance of the Commonwealth to Labour thinking, or treat it as the imperial anachronism it may have been for the Conservatives. Denis Healey in his pamphlet against the Coal and Steel Community in 1950 proclaimed that ‘by transforming four hundred millions of Britain’s Asian subjects into friends and equal partners the Labour Government has built a bridge between East and West, between the white and coloured peoples’, and this sense of the Commonwealth as an alternative to the wholly European – and white – schemes for unity was widely felt on the Left in the 1950s and 1960s. But the critical point is that whatever the actual area which had protective tariffs against the rest of the world, whether Britain by itself or the Commonwealth, on the whole members of the Labour Party felt comfortable with the principle of protectionism.

Once Britain entered the EEC, each party had something it wanted. For the Conservatives it offered a means of entrenching a market economy, while for the Labour Party it offered an alternative to a world of unrestrained global free trade. But the benefit to the Conservatives was incomparably greater, since for them accepting the level of protectionism which the EEC provided was a small price to pay compared with the epochal advantage of – in effect – constitutionalising a market-based economy and society. A few gestures to workers’ rights by the EEC in the 1980s won over some more Labour members, but compared (for example) to the steady encroachment on the real power of trades unions across the Continent under the aegis of the ECJ, these gestures were pretty hollow. But now, as the prospect of Brexit looms, British politics has reverted to the contestation which had been frozen for forty years.

For many Conservative opponents of the EU, the great prize that is within reach is what they always wanted: entrenchment of a market at the domestic level, and full freedom internationally to participate in a global market. For these people, entrenchment of the market could be achieved through something like the Chequers proposals, but it could also be achieved through continued membership of the EEA, since the EEA is in effect a subsidiary of the EU’s single market, but is outside the customs union. It is no accident that Daniel Hannan for a long time has advocated the EEA route, and the prospect may be gathering momentum in right-wing circles. Labour’s instinct, on the other hand, is to stay in ‘a’ customs union with the EU – not necessarily because the leaders of the party actually want this in its own right, since some of them are clearly genuine Brexiteers, but because if some kind of compromise has to be engineered they are not as unhappy with a customs union as they would be with continued membership of the single market.

Given this history, it is not surprising that British politics now appears to be in a condition of crisis, since the original temptation which was put in front of post-war politicians, that they could lock in their own policies for their country in near perpetuity, is still there, even if full membership of the EU is no longer (we presume) available to them. They are playing for high stakes, and we should not expect them to do so in an atmosphere of calm. Labour’s position in this struggle, however, is not quite the same as the Conservatives’, since for many Remainers in the party (I think) the EU is not intrinsically desirable. What they want is to stop the Conservatives using a post-EU settlement to achieve the domestic goals the Conservatives always wanted – this is why, despite the manifest evidence to the contrary, so many people on the Left cling to the idea that outside the EU workers’ rights in Britain would be undermined. What they have instinctively spotted is that some versions of a Britain outside the EU might indeed lock in a Thatcherite economy, though what they fail to see is that a Britain inside the EU would fare little better.

But if this is right, the best prospect the Left has for defeating this possibility is the hardest Brexit that can be contrived. A customs union nowadays will not remain as merely an old-fashioned common external tariff system; it will increasingly be configured through the judgments of the ECJ (which will have to be involved in some fashion) into a system with considerable domestic reach, which will inevitably be of a neoliberal character, given the fundamentally market-based structures of the EU. The only thing which will allow the Left to roll back the last forty years of market entrenchment is opening up a space in which democratic politics can determine the shape of the British economy, and British society in general, as it did from the coming of universal suffrage until 1 January 1973. If at some point the electorate votes for Conservative policies, so be it; the policies can at least be reversed through the simple means of a general election, rather than what we are finding to be the agonising process of breaking away from a supranational entity.

These are big issues, of an extremely far-reaching kind, and one would not expect a democratic society to be in anything other than turmoil about them. The key thing is for us all to recognise this, and not lose our nerve: the turmoil itself does not matter, and is indeed the outward sign of a healthy politics, just as the dramatic moments recently in the House of Commons are the outward sign of its waking to its old role after its forty-year sleep. What would matter would be a desire to suppress the turmoil by forcing us back into the structures of the EU, whether actually under that name or not. If the politics of the last couple of generations is broken, so much the better, and we must live with that fact until democracy has properly re-established itself.

Notes

  39  National Archives CAB 129/102/7, formerly C (60) 107, p. 9.   40  National Archives CAB 129/102/7, formerly C (60) 107, p. 3.

19 November 2018: The Surprising Benefits to Ireland of a No-Deal Brexit

On 14 November 2018 the ‘Draft Agreement on the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union’ was published. The agreement itself was mostly concerned with transitional arrangements such as the status of EU and UK citizens in the others’ jurisdictions, continuity for bank accounts, etc. But it also contained a protocol detailing what came to be known as ‘the Irish backstop’, in which the UK expressed its commitment ‘to protect North–South cooperation and its guarantee of avoiding a hard border, including any physical infrastructure or related checks and controls, and bearing in mind that any future arrangements must be compatible with these overarching requirements’, and in order to secure this it agreed to create a ‘single customs territory between the Union and the United Kingdom’. Professor David Grewal of Yale Law School and I published the following article in the Irish Times.

It is taken for granted on both sides of the Irish Sea that the worst kind of Brexit, from the point of view of the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Republic, is one in which Britain ‘crashes out’ of the EU without a negotiated settlement. The Northern Ireland Secretary has even said recently that if Britain trades with the EU under WTO rules there will have to be a hard border in Ireland, and that this may undermine the Common Travel Agreement between the two countries. But surprisingly, ‘no deal’ may in fact be the best kind of Brexit for the two countries.

To understand this, we first have to remember that Britain and the Republic already offer one another’s citizens privileges which other EU citizens do not enjoy. There is in effect a passport union between the UK and Ireland, with freedom of movement for British and Irish citizens, no restrictions on employment, and immediate rights to vote in Parliamentary as well as local elections. This is the case without there being any need to check at the border whether anyone crossing it is a British or Irish citizen. So an obvious question is, in the event of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit, why could goods not be treated in the same way as people, with goods crossing the land border in Ireland being privileged and treated differently from those coming from elsewhere in the EU?

The immediate answer to this question is that WTO rules would preclude it. They do not permit one member to allow special trading privileges to a province of another member, and for these purposes the EU counts as a single country, being a customs union with its own membership of the WTO. So if a Britain outside the EU wished to grant the same kind of pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• 16 April 2016
• 22 April 2016
• 16 May 2016
• 6 June 2016: The Left Case for Brexit
• 9 June 2016
• 17 July 2017: Brexit: A Prize in Reach for the Left
• 16 August 2017
• 6 November 2017
• 17 February 2018
• 28 February 2018
• 9 March 2018
• 11 April 2018
• 26 April 2018: Why Is Everyone So Hysterical About Brexit?
• 17 May 2018
• 15 July 2018: How to Break Up the Union
• 1 August 2018
• 19 November 2018: The Surprising Benefits to Ireland of a No-Deal Brexit
• 16 January 2019
• 17 January 2019: Deal or No Deal
• 23 January 2019
• 24 February 2019
• 12 April 2019: Modest Proposals
• 3 June 2019
• 5 July 2019
• 18 July 2019
• 31 October 2019
• End User License Agreement