Re: In defence of Rejoin

Firstly, my apologies for not noticing your link to the speech in your OP. Very stupid of me. I understand your annoyance. The speech only really mentions the EU in passing, and doesn't explain the specific point I was questioning, which remains unaddressed: you write of the EU "enforcing the neoliberal world order", but the Commission derives its authority from national governments. It is national governments that are enforcing the neoliberal order, and Britain outside the EU has not ceased to be neoliberal. The left-wing argument for Brexit is essentially predicated on the proposition that if a highly left-wing government came to power in Britain it would be unhampered by single market rules so long as Britain was still outside the EU. In order to keep open this remote possibility, we must therefore endure real, concrete harms: a disastrous loss of trade, the curtailment of mobility, and the likelihood of further loss of rights, since the Tories and Reform want to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and repeal the Human Rights Act 1998. All this is very dangerous. Against this I want to come back to my original point (which you also did not address) that the EU does not prevent the adoption of highly social democratic measures, such as a wealth tax (such as Spain levies), a universal basic income, public ownership of utilities and rail, investment in Green energy, and so forth. If we could get to that stage, then I would be very happy indeed. If we could then go further, to something more communistic, then great; but we are surely then positing a world very different from the current world, and we do not know what Europe would look like at such a time. Now, from my side of the Atlantic, the Brexit debate may look different to the way it looks to Americans. There were essentially two wings of the capitalist class. One was happy to exploit workers within the the single market; the other thought that it could exploit workers just that little bit more outside the single market's regulatory framework. The latter group won. Corbyn, of course, campaigned for Remain, though admittedly with little enthusiasm. There were some left-wing Brexiteers at the time, but they have not been very vocal in recent years; the defence of Brexit is very much a right-wing project in Britain. With regard to the 1980s reversal of earlier social democratic gains, one must ask what enabled a right-wing politics to reshape the economic landscape. I would argue that the neoliberals were able to push their agenda because capital had become more internationally mobile, so that they could credibly present the postwar consensus as a threat to investment and productivity. There is a very interesting book called Models of Capitalism, by David Coates, which charts this change. In the 1980s I once saw a TV series called A Very British Coup. It was basically asking: what would happen if a genuinely committed socialist government took power in Britain. The answer, so the series suggested, was that the entire Establishment would mobilise against such a government, and the US would mobilise against it as well. Now this would not matter if one had a population absolutely committed to the socialist cause and willing to make material sacrifices (as the conclusion of the series seemed to posit). But one has to remember that the majority are never likely to have that level of political commitment. A left wing government must not be seen to preside over economic collapse. I fear that if a modestly socialist government took power in Britain today, without the resilience of being part of a major economic bloc, it would be very vulnerable to economic destabilisation and, in the absence of a committed working class willing to bear economic sacrifices, would likely fall from power. That is the left-wing argument for EU membership.