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 members are drawn from.
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