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Preface
As the campaign began over the Brexit referendum which was scheduled to take place on 23 June 2016, I found myself increasingly troubled that there seemed to be few people in the debate putting the old left-wing case against Britain’s membership of the European Union. I started writing short essays for circulation among friends and occasional publication in various online settings, and not long before the vote I was asked to put some of these ideas together into a piece for Dissent, which attracted quite a lot of attention and encouraged me to develop the themes further, and to reply to my critics. The Westminster-based think-tank Policy Exchange invited me to set out my thoughts in a lecture in July 2017, after the referendum and the general election, and that enabled me to develop my ideas further; I would like to thank Dean Godson, its director, for his help and encouragement. I have also continued to write short essays on the subject. This book contains these pieces, in the order in which they were written, to make it clear how I was responding to the complicated twists and turns of British politics over the last three years. Above all I would like to thank the friends for whom they were first written: David Grewal, Daniela Cammack, Alex Gourevitch, Jed Purdy, Chris Bickerton and Maurice Glasman. I would particularly like to thank Daniela Cammack for her help with this text. Many of the essays appeared on The Full Brexit website, the main organ of left-wing Brexiteers; I would like to thank the principal organisers of the site, Peter Ramsay, Lee Jones, Costas Lapavitsas, Martin Loughlin, Danny Nicol, Philip Cunliffe, Mary Davis, George Hoare, Anshu Srivastava and Aislinn Macklin-Doherty. Others have appeared on the Briefings for Brexit website; thanks to its organisers, Robert Tombs and Graham Gudgin.
16 April 2016
On 19 February 2016 David Cameron agreed with the other European leaders on the details of his renegotiation of the terms of membership for Britain in the European Union. The following day he announced that a referendum would be held on membership on 23 June. On 22 February the Commons debated the renegotiation deal, and the campaigning for the referendum began.
Do you remember David Cameron’s renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s membership of the EU? No, I thought not. The details of the negotiation have more or less disappeared without trace from the debate about Brexit, to be replaced by the apocalyptic scenarios of Project Fear, according to which Britain’s exit from the EU will be catastrophic not merely for the British economy but for the entire Western World. At the very least Brexit (we are told) will carve a large hole in the European economy, but – even more urgently – it will apparently disrupt the entire current security system. When American politicians or generals (insofar as the categories are distinct) lecture the British on the need to stay in the EU, they are not doing so out of benevolence for Britain, nor do they even pretend to be doing so; they are doing it, they say, out of anxiety for the future of the post-war European order. The same is true of a certain kind of European politician, for whom the threat of terrorist attacks or Russian revanchism requires ‘more Europe’, and for whom the tearing apart of the EU would be a disaster.
But if we pause for a moment, we can see that there is something odd about this. Force yourself to remember the tedium of the renegotiation, and its footling outcomes: did it have the ring of a discussion conducted under the threat of the collapse of post-war Europe? Did it look like the really vital and urgent diplomatic engagements of the 1930s, in which it was obvious to everyone that major issues hung in the balance, or the similar negotiations of the Cold War? Either the EU representatives at Brussels in 2015–16 were extraordinarily insouciant about the implications of what they were doing, or they thought that Brexit was so unlikely (something which none of the polls, then or now, have supported, even if the balance of probability is for Remain) that it was not worth guarding against by offering politically plausible concessions, or they thought that a Brexit would not in fact be a disaster, and they could afford to run the risk of Britain walking away from the EU.
If they did not think any of these things, then there are only two explanations for the trivial character of the negotiations. One was that they were playing a game of chicken, in which they fully recognised the danger, but hoped to use fear of it as the key element in the negotiations, in order to force Britain into line. The EU of course has form in this regard: precisely this approach was used against Greece, as Yanis Varoufakis has testified. Rather than being offered some reasonable compromise, the Greek people and their government were led to believe that the choice was between exit from the euro – and even from the EU – and submission to the terms offered them. This was a manufactured choice, since they could relatively easily have been offered better terms; but the Greeks’ nerve failed, very reasonably, and they chose to swerve their car away from the centre of the highway.
The Greeks (to continue the analogy) were driving the equivalent of a Reliant Robin, which would have been no match for an armoured Mercedes even in a head-on collision, so the stakes were relatively low for the EU, as the international markets were repeatedly reminded. But with Brexit, the EU and the US are themselves now assuring us that the stakes are very high – though neither did so at all minatorily during the renegotiation. Sensible politicians do not play chicken in a high-stakes situation; neither the US nor the Soviet Union did so during the Cold War, except perhaps in the Cuban Missile Crisis – but that is no model for modern politics, and was anyway solved by a back-room deal rather than the submission of one side. Do we conclude that EU and State Department politicians are not sensible? Or do we conclude that they do not really believe what they say, since if they did, they would – according to their own lights – have been behaving in the most reckless fashion?
The other explanation for the absence of any sense of urgency and importance is that the EU representatives were terrified of offering anything more than trivial concessions, as doing so would have encouraged other countries to seek similar treatment, and the EU project would have begun to unravel. This may be right, but it does not bode well for the future of the project, and confirms that Britain would be best out of it. It reveals that the leaders of the EU do not themselves believe that there is general support for integration, and that the citizens of Europe, given half a chance, would opt for the kind of deal which British Eurosceptics want. Once again, then, the EU leaders are convicted of extraordinary recklessness in seeking to force European union upon unwilling populations by – in effect – a threat of expulsion levelled at one of the major member countries. How long can such a structure last?
22 April 2016
On 22 April President Barack Obama gave a press conference at the Foreign Office alongside David Cameron, in which he produced his famous remark that Britain would be ‘at the back of the queue’ when it came to a trade deal with the US. This remark was widely believed to have been drafted by the British government, given the fact that no American says ‘queue’ rather than ‘line’! But Obama also said of the referendum that ‘the outcome of that decision is a matter of deep interest to the United States because it affects our prospects as well. The United States wants a strong United Kingdom as a partner. And the United Kingdom is at its best when it’s helping to lead a strong Europe. It leverages UK power to be part of the European Union.’
President Obama’s intervention today in the Brexit debate tells us only one thing, but that is something of great significance. It is that President de Gaulle was right when in 1963 and 1967 he vetoed Britain’s application to join the Common Market. In his public utterances on the issue, he stressed (as he said in a famous speech in 1963) that
England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges,