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.
I
Yanis Varoufakis is one of the most significant left-wing politicians in Europe. As someone who witnessed one of its major crises from within, he speaks with authority about the character of the EU project. His accounts of the discussions in the councils of Europe about the euro crisis, featuring ignorant and preening finance ministers bent almost exclusively on the exercise of power, are a graphic illustration of what actually happens within the EU.
Varoufakis is also important because despite his first-hand experience of the limits of the EU, he believes it can be reformed. More than that, he hopes that a pan-European Left will be revived through the institutions of the EU, and that hope is repeatedly echoed by pro-EU figures within the British Labour Party. But it would be a profound mistake for the British Left to follow Varoufakis’s loyalty to the European project. To see why, we should go back to the theorist with whom Varoufakis himself continues to identify: the founding father of the European Left, Karl Marx.
One of Marx’s most striking insights was the observation that the various constitutions of the French Republics, and their imitations in other Continental states, were deliberately designed to obstruct progress towards genuine democracy. Though the French Revolution had introduced universal suffrage, its significance was immediately undermined by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and by constitutional structures that precluded the kind of social transformation that the Revolution’s radicals wanted. Marx emphasised this repeatedly in his writings of the 1840s, and the failure of the revolutions of 1848 and the restoration of the constitutional orders in Europe only confirmed his judgment. Accordingly, Marx felt, only a total revolution would be able to overturn the ‘bourgeois’ liberal economic and political constitutions that stood in the way of substantive social change.
But Marx, and still more Engels, thought England was different. The House of Commons was unconstrained by the kind of constitutional apparatus seen on the Continent, since Parliament was (famously) ‘omnicompetent’ and the Lords and the monarchy were largely irrelevant. Marx and Engels concluded that once the English working class got the vote, it would be able to use the House of Commons to achieve its political and economic goals peacefully. The accidents of history that had delivered this exceptional institution meant that revolution ought not to be necessary for the kind of social transformation Marx and Engels had in mind.
The early members of the Labour Party in England (who were more Marxist than their successors cared to admit) understood this, and believed that a properly organised working class, using representation in the House of Commons as its vehicle, could institute radical economic and social change. And compared with the life of the working class in the nineteenth century, working-class life after the growth of Labour vindicated their confidence. Indeed, the greatest achievement of the Labour Party, the creation of the National Health Service, would have been impossible in a country with strong constitutional constraints on the legislature, since it required the 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.
In the 1980s, however, demoralised Labour politicians began to seek the shelter of Continental-style constitutional structures. The most important and obvious of these structures is the EU, which functions for the internal politics of its member states exactly like the bourgeois constitutions of the mid-nineteenth century, though the Blair government introduced various other checks on the House of Commons such as a newly energised and apparently more independent ‘Supreme Court’, and an independent central bank.
The loss of faith in the advancement of left-wing politics through the ballot box may partly be explained by the success of Thatcher, though I would be more inclined to say that it was the other way round, and that Thatcher was victorious over a Labour Party many of whose most important figures had already lost confidence in traditional electoral politics and whose hearts were not really in the struggle against her. The defection of leading members of the party to the new Social Democrats in 1981, largely on the issue of Europe, symbolises this. It is a mistake to think that Thatcher’s victory in 1979 was necessarily the beginning of the long period of Tory government which it turned out to be: the Labour Party split with astonishing rapidity, only two years after Thatcher’s first election, and before the landslide of her second election in 1983. Labour politicians had already succumbed to the temptation to use an external order to put in place left-wing policies before Thatcher began to roll back the achievements of the Left (and in the case of Roy Jenkins, there was also the allure of personal power within the external order). This was precisely the temptation which Jacques Delors dangled in front of the TUC in his famous speech in 1988, and which brought the rest of the Labour Party round to the same position on the EU which the Social Democrats had espoused.
But like all temptations of this kind, it was not what it seemed. The same structures which Delors promised to use in the interests of the working class turned out by the time of the financial crash in 2007–8 to have been used instead to push through a neoliberal economic and social agenda. This would not have surprised Marx: as he understood, this is really the default position of such structures, since their whole point is and always has been to repress what Continental politicians call with disdain ‘populism’ – that is, democracy. As a Marxist, and given his own bruising encounters with EU institutions, Varoufakis should perhaps see this better than anyone. But despite fiercely criticising the way the EU handled the Greek crisis, Varoufakis has remained loyal to the idea that left-wing politics can be pushed through using EU institutions, if only the parties of the Left across Europe can properly coordinate their activities.
History would suggest that this is a vain hope. Even if Europe’s Left parties do succeed in forging a common programme, the EU is not the kind of political entity whose approach to the world can be altered by popular politics. Popular politics is precisely what the EU was designed to obstruct. Like independent central banks and constitutional courts, its institutions are essentially technocratic. Technocracy is not (as some like to pretend) a neutral or rational system of government. Instead, it confers immense power on culturally select bodies whose prejudices will be those of the class their
