Varoufakis believes that the EU may change, and many in the British Labour Party agree. But the kind of shift in European politics that Varoufakis and others want to see is simply not possible within the present structures of the EU: it would require sweeping institutional change of a kind nowhere on the agenda. Without that, like the Labour Party in Britain, the Left in Europe is reliant purely on an article of faith – a conviction that the Left must prevail, even in the face of all the constraints imposed on popular sovereignty by the EU.
The British governing class in the late twentieth century threw away the most valuable institution it had inherited, an institution whose preservation was the most obvious imperative for their predecessors: a House of Commons that was not constrained by a constitution. A vote to stay within the EU will render their casual trashing of it irrevocable, and end any hope of genuinely Left politics in the UK.
II
If these fundamental considerations were not enough to persuade the Left to vote to leave the EU, pragmatic politics should do so. The Labour Party since Blair has made a fundamental misjudgment about how to gain power, a misjudgment intimately related to its stance on the EU: this is its misunderstanding of Scottish politics.
It is now clear that the Labour Party, in the shape in which it has existed for upwards of a century, is dead. The loss of Scotland, as many commentators have observed, renders it virtually impossible that the Labour Party will rule again in a united kingdom; and since England has been a fundamentally Tory country since the seventeenth century, and shows no sign of becoming markedly less so, it is hard to see anything like the old Labour Party taking power in England alone. Something along these lines has been the obvious prize dangling in front of the Tory Party since Scottish nationalism became a serious political force, and David Cameron – whether through extraordinary luck or extraordinarily good judgment – has seized the prize without (so far) having to break up the United Kingdom in order to do so. In the aftermath of the debacle of the 2015 general election people both inside and outside the Labour Party have been quick to blame its failure on its rotten boroughs and sectarian politics in the West of Scotland, with long-festering resentments and disillusionments finally coming to the surface. But there is a much more fundamental reason why Labour sooner or later had to fail in Scotland.
Modern Scottish nationalism is essentially the working out within Britain of the logic of the EU. Scotland joined the Union in 1707 explicitly to enjoy an economic union with a large market and a global trading power, and there is no need for it to stay within the old union when a new one beckons; why have an intermediate level of politics in Westminster when everything can be much more easily decided directly between Edinburgh and Brussels? To see this, one need only consider whether Scottish nationalism could be a credible movement if the EU did not exist. The EU’s institutions guarantee Scotland virtually the same freedoms of trade and movement with England which the 1707 Union provided; the only missing element (as the equivocation of the referendum campaign demonstrated) is a common currency, but the EU offers some security to an independent Scotland even in this area, at least as compared with the risks of a wholly independent and wholly Scottish currency, the failure of which was a principal reason for the British Union.
Indeed, one does not have to imagine this: one only has to think back (if one is old enough, as I am) to the days before Britain joined the Common Market, when Scottish nationalism was largely a joke, and its supporters’ principal activity was moving the Welcome to Scotland sign from one side of Berwick-upon-Tweed to the other. Even after Britain’s accession, as long as the Common Market appeared to be merely a somewhat loose trading arrangement it played no part in Scottish nationalism – indeed, the SNP had violently opposed the accession. But once the Common Market began to take its current shape, the power of European integration to advance its cause began to dawn on the SNP, and as soon as it switched to an enthusiastically pro-European position in the 1980s its electoral fortunes began to improve.
There is little to set against the power of this logic. The ties of sentiment between Scotland and England can be maintained if both countries are united with one another via the EU as easily as in a United Kingdom; witness the ways in which strong ties continued between England and Ireland despite their separation since 1921, as long as freedom of movement and a high degree of economic integration were guaranteed. Enemies of Scottish nationalism often deny that an independent Scotland would be part of the EU, but no one is convinced: given the character and ambitions of the EU, is it at all plausible that an independent Scotland would be left outside while England stayed within? It would surely become a second Ireland, welcomed as an independent nation at Brussels, whatever the Spaniards (in particular) might say or do.
These obvious thoughts do not need to have been in the forefront of the minds of the almost half of the Scottish electorate who voted for independence in the referendum, though they have certainly been in the forefront of the minds of the SNP leaders; it is enough that the EU is simply now part of the necessary background to any discussion about the separation of the two countries, and as its clear logic works its way to a conclusion it is hard to see the old United Kingdom surviving. Even if it does, in some precarious fashion, the plausibility of Scottish independence in this context will remain, and will continue to attract large numbers of voters to the SNP and away from Labour.
The Labour Party should have remembered that more than the other parties it was a creature of the United Kingdom; it only came into being towards the end of the UK’s most powerful century, and from the start it was heavily represented in all four nations. It even organised in Ireland prior to 1913, when (in an ominous precedent for the current Labour Party) it withdrew in the face of Irish Home Rule, creating in its place a separate but affiliated Irish Labour Party which has continued as a party in the Republic until the present day. From this perspective, the carelessness with which Blair approached the twin questions of Scottish devolution and European integration was suicidal for his party.
It remains one of the great oddities of modern British history that the powerful voices within the Labour Party in the Wilson and Callaghan years opposing membership of the Common Market were so easily silenced after the party’s defeat in 1983 (when its manifesto had included a pledge to withdraw from the EEC), and that the Conservatives and Labour so swiftly swapped places on this issue: in many ways the objective interests of the two parties remained what they had been in the 1970s, and the instinctive suspicion of European integration felt by many people in the Labour Party corresponded to the structural position of the party in British electoral politics. This is leaving to one side, of course, the well-founded character of the suspicion that European integration would prove disastrous for the cause of traditional socialism, as European history over the last two decades has so amply demonstrated. 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 supranational level, but powerful enough to destroy the old democracies at a national level, in the process handing capitalism a freedom it has always desired.
Is there any rowing back from this disaster? All that the current leaders of the Labour Party offer is an act of will: a resolution that there must be a Labour government once again in the UK. But none of them are providing any plausible analysis of how such a thing can be achieved. At the moment it looks as if Cameron may succeed in setting the capstone on his historic defeat of the Labour Party by engineering a victory in a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the EU, supported in doing so by the very Labour politicians whose future the EU is destroying. Such a framework will continue to facilitate Scottish independence and prevent a United Kingdom Labour Party from effectively rebuilding in Scotland. But suppose that the vote in the referendum goes in favour of leaving the EU; what then? The SNP has moved quickly to declare that it will not be bound by such a result if Scotland votes to stay in the EU, and Nicola Sturgeon has attempted to argue that each constituent nation would have to be in favour of leaving before the UK as a whole could leave. This illustrates the extreme importance of this issue for the future of Scottish nationalism, and the judgment of the SNP leaders themselves that continued British membership of the EU offers
