In 1975 Thatcher argued passionately for Common Market membership. PAimages/PAarchive. All rights reserved.“How’s Lexit treating you?” friends ask, sardonically. “Or is it Regrexit now?” I have to say that I’m not sure, but this I know: the European Union is no friend of the left. Its origins lie in the European Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s, which eliminated import tariffs within Western Europe; over the years this bloc has expanded its scope, powers, and borders, governing fishing policy, phone charges and asylum rights from Lisbon to Latvia; it has acquired a parliament, a president and a court, a social chapter and even a Charter of Fundamental Rights.
At its core, however, it remains a trade deal, like TTIP, with free-market neoliberalism embedded in its institutions. The results of 2016 referendum and the 2017 election present Labour with a historic opportunity to reset our economy, our civil rights, and our relationship with the rest of the world. The arduous pursuit of continued EU membership would, I fear, place all this in jeopardy.
The UK left has a long tradition of Euroscepticism. Labour campaigned to leave the Common Market in the 1975 referendum; on the eve of the poll, the Marxist historian EP Thompson colourfully dismissed this “spoof of internationalism” as a bourgeois fantasy of consumption: “a distended stomach, a large organ with various traps, digestive chambers and fiscal acids, assimilating a rich diet of consumer goods.” Far from empowering workers, he argued, it would empower their cosmopolitan bosses, who
