The Left Case for Brexit
by Richard Tuck
(Polity Books £14.99)

JUST about the most dismal moment of a grim general election campaign must have been Boris Johnson announcing that he would take advantage of the freedoms Britain would acquire upon leaving the European Union to adopt a more proactive state aid to industry regime and implement a domestic-preference public-procurement policy.

Johnson’s sincerity should of course be doubted. But the fact that it was a Tory leader advocating for the state playing a bigger economic role outside the EU than would be permitted within it, rather than Labour doing so, was a measure of how far Labour had lost the Brexit plot.

A Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn would undoubtedly have tried to do the same and more.  But this would have been compromised by its desire to seek close alignment with the EU’s single-market rules.  Furthermore, it had become politically impossible for Labour to admit to there being any potential benefits to Brexit, so hegemonic had “remain” become in the party’s counsels.

Well, we know how that worked out.  Labour’s lack of a positive and plausible agenda for Brexit, which would require leaving the EU as per the people’s mandate of 2016, foredoomed it to defeat in a “get-Brexit-done” general election.  

The fact is that a policy of respecting the referendum result helped Labour secure 40 per cent of the vote in 2017, while opening the door to reversing it shrunk that to 32 per cent two-and-a-half years later.

However, this is a measure of the extent to which the left case against the European Union has failed, over the last generation or more, to sway opinion in the labour movement.  

A combination of the cultural identification of Brussels with a guarantee of Enlightenment values and social rights, together with more prosaic economic reasons turning on trade and supply chains, won the argument.

Richard Tuck, rather immodestly described by his publisher as “one of the world’s greatest historians of political thought” — I for one was hitherto unaware of his work — sets out the case in this book as to why the left got it wrong.

The Left Case for Brexit  is a collection of writings and speeches made over the last few years.  The first is dated shortly before the 2016 referendum, the last in July 2019 — prior to the recent election.  

It is therefore more a set of commentaries on events as they unfolded, rather than a summation of the basic progressive arguments for leaving the EU.

This format makes for a fair amount of repetition, with the various pieces appearing as originally written, without any evidence of subsequent revision, and Tuck makes some questionable arguments. At several points he asserts that leaving the EU will make Scottish independence less likely. As of today, that is not the way things look.

But the main thrust of his case, familiar to Morning Star readers, holds up well. It's encapsulated in an entry dated July 2017:  “The great prize awaiting the left in Britain, and it is now almost within reach, is a genuine Brexit followed by a Labour government.  

“Then the left can re-enact whatever it thinks is good in EU regulations about such things as the environment and working conditions, and whatever immigration policies it wishes, and at the same time free itself from the far-reaching restrictions which the EU imposes on traditional socialism.”

It was precisely those restrictions, Tuck reminds us, that led the labour movement to oppose the original entry into the Common Market, as it then was.  

Symmetrically, most Tories supported the EU for just the same reason.  “More Europe” meant less socialism and Tuck quotes Nye Bevan as arguing in 1957 that the Common Market meant “the disenfranchisement of the people and the enfranchisement of market forces.”

The embrace of the EU by most of the left subsequently has no doubt a variety of roots, including the apparently ineluctable advance of economic globalisation, making political action at the level of the nation state a more problematic project.  

But the main cause, in my view, is that the EU was seized on as a saviour by a movement that had been defeated and no longer really believed in the possibility of attaining its historic objective —socialism.  

The EU was a sort of second-best safety net, ensuring that residual social-democratic protections would remain in place, no matter what depredations national governments in Westminster might visit on the working class.

Additionally, as Tuck writes: “terror of appearing xenophobic has led the left to support structures which in happier days they would have been the first to condemn.” The identification of Brexit with racism is unsurprising given some of its most prominent champions but the identification of the EU with anti-racism is pure magical thinking.

Some on the left have tried to square the socialist circle through the slogan “remain and reform” or, in a more infantile variation, “remain and rebel.”  This takes magical thinking to the point of dishonesty, given the undemocratic nature of the EU and its treaty foundations, as well as the negative balance of political forces at the nation-state and pan-European levels.  

Tuck writes, correctly, that remain-and-reform is underpinned by a profound pessimism about the capacity for change in Britain itself.

That pessimism may seem justified by the election result.  Nevertheless, Johnson’s victory owed a lot to placing himself on the right side of the optimism/pessimism divide. Labour didn’t.

So, Johnson gets the chance to implement his sort of Brexit.  This may or may not include more state aid to industry but it will certainly not go as far as socialism.  There are still plenty of obstacles in the way of that aim, but they no longer include membership of the European Union.  

If Labour can embrace that with hope in its heart, then it can yet win the battle for post-Brexit Britain.