Political and Economic Analysis of Brexit and the EU

Brexit is just the first blow against the anti-democratic European Union. We should hope for – and work towards – the restoration of democratic, self-determining nation-states across the whole continent.

Universities have not only betrayed their historical mission to foster free inquiry during the Brexit crisis. They also have hard questions to ask about their moral standing, their impact on respect for expertise, and their own management and sustainability.

Finally exiting the EU is a tremendous achievement for democracy. Nonetheless, Boris Johnson’s Brexit is clearly not the “Full Brexit” for which we have been campaigning. Instead, it seeks to downplay or manage away its radical potential. Truly realising that potential remains a task for the future.

Far from being “far right” or Thatcherite, Johnson’s new project is “Red Tory”, projecting a communitarian ethos and proposing far greater state intervention in the economy. This post-neoliberal conservatism is a significant departure, but it is plagued by internal contradictions.

Brexit and the 2019 general election result were 40 years in the making – the result of a relentless class war waged against the British working class.

Labour’s loss of working-class support under Corbyn reflects its continuity with Blairism: its neglect of class politics, its disrespect for national and party democracy, and its dishonesty on the crucial issue of Brexit.

Boris Johnson resolved the Brexit impasse through transforming the class basis of the Conservative Party, renewing his party for a generation, ripping into the Labour heartlands by aligning Brexit with national renewal, and exposing the class divisions within Labour by siding with the poor.

The Brexit Party has made a significant contribution to the election of a pro-Brexit government with an unambiguous mandate to leave the EU, and to the historic realignment in British politics that has followed that election. Its populist politics, however, cannot solve the underlying political malaise that led to Brexit in the first place.

The working-class voters of the North, Midlands and Wales have rebelled against a complacent Labour Party that no longer represents them. The left should not mourn Labour’s demise but seize the political opportunity it represents.

The left lost the 2019 general election for a simple reason: it was on the wrong side of a popular revolt against the status quo.

Ostensibly called to resolve Britain’s Brexit crisis, the 2019 general election is primarily reminding us why the crisis exists. The Leave parties lack real vision for Britain’s post-Brexit future, while the Remain parties refuse to seize the democratic opportunity offered by Brexit to transform the country.

Long Read: The wrangling over the Irish backstop proves that Britain lacks the political authority in Northern Ireland that it needs to make a success of Brexit. If British Leavers want to strengthen popular sovereignty in Britain, they should join the campaign for Irish reunification.

The Supreme Court’s prorogation decision is clearly based on pro-Remain political judgements. But, even more importantly, it is part of a relentless struggle to transform Britain’s constitution into that of an EU member-state – which we will have to fight against even after Brexit.

In reversing Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament, the Supreme Court has acted as the legal wing of Remain. The judiciary’s wings must now be clipped.

The class divide on Brexit is stark. In my working-class home town, young people support Labour and back Brexit, and people discuss politics civilly, regardless of how they voted. At my elite university, I’m called a racist for wanting to leave the EU.

By asserting their right to ignore repeated popular mandates, Remainers in the House of Commons are defying the spirit of Britain's democratic constitution and turning their back on centuries of history.

Anti-Brexit forces committed to making the Labour Party into a defender of the neoliberal status quo are gearing up to bully socialist party members to back Remain. Here's why all the arguments they are using are wrong.

The shadow cabinet's decision to back a second referendum and campaign for Remain has killed off Corbynism. It has destroyed Labour's electoral chances, and Corbyn's radical platform cannot be implemented within the EU.

The EU’s liberalisation directives make it illegal to renationalise key sectors, blocking a key Corbyn manifesto pledge. These directives have been made deliberately impossible to change. “Remain and Reform” simply means remaining locked into neoliberalism.

“Remain and Reform” is a mindless slogan akin to Tony Blair’s “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Just as Blair only ramped up incarceration without addressing the societal drivers of crime, so Left Remainers have no chance of reforming the EU – indeed, they have no idea how to do so.

The Left has always been divided over whether democracy is a cardinal principle, or – as the Stalinists proposed – just a disposable means to an end. Today’s anti-democratic Leftists dislike democracy because they see ordinary citizens as an obstacle to socialist transformation, rather than its vehicle.

Political theorist Sheldon Wolin’s ideas are a useful guide to thinking about the EU’s “managed democracy” and Brexit as an instance of “fugitive democracy”, a sporadic rebellion against elite control. This helps understand why Brexit is hard to achieve, but also provides lessons for the left on future organising.

Having tacitly accepted that “Remain and Reform” cannot change the EU, some desperate Remainers are urging a strategy of “Remain and Revolt”. This betrays deep ignorance. EU law is supreme in member-states’ domestic courts, making it practically impossible to revolt against it.

Our Parliament of Liars must be stopped in its tracks: all democrats need to vote for The Brexit Party at the European elections. But this can only be a stop-gap. The Brexit Party is not a solution to the underlying sclerosis of democratic politics that led us into the European Union in the first place. It is itself a product of this sclerosis.

By threatening the established parties, The Brexit Party now provides the only meaningful counterweight to a Remain establishment intent on neutralising or cancelling Brexit. However, its severe political limitations will prevent it playing any more meaningful role in resolving the crisis of representation and transforming British society.

A signatory of The Full Brexit’s founding statement explains his decision to stand for The Brexit Party. All of Britain’s major political parties are committed to a feeble Brexit in name only, or cancelling Brexit altogether. TBP is the only major force fighting to defend democracy by carrying through the referendum result, and deserves the support of everyone committed to a Full Brexit.

Brexit has exposed the fact that it is not only the Labour Party's right wing that has succumbed to neoliberalism. By embracing the European Union, so, too, has the party's left.

Amid talk of a “Brexit betrayal”, Revokers are again whipping up fears of “far-right” reaction. But it is their own authoritarianism, not fascism, that is the greater threat in Britain today.

Remainers offering a sop to Leavers have admitted the EU's imperfections but argued Britain can reform the EU from within. This claim is nonsense. The EU's constitutional structures deliberately make change virtually impossible, reflecting the pro-business agendas hardwired into the Union from its inception.

The constitutional crisis precipitated by Brexit is without precedent since the seventeenth-century English revolution. But, unlike then, there are no revolutionaries able to seize the moment. Instead of turning the world upside down, it's the actors themselves that are upside down, with the left clinging to the status quo while conservatives champion its destruction.

The EU referendum has plunged British politics into an interregnum, a deep crisis of the prevailing political and economic order. Grasped properly, this offers the British left a route out of its longstanding malaise, by re-engaging working-class voters and pursuing policies outlawed by EU treaties.

With parliament now approaching its moment of decision, a second referendum, not a “no deal” Brexit, is the true “cliff edge” facing Britain. Parliament's authority rests on its representation of the people. If MPs repudiate their repeated promises to implement the EU referendum result, their already tattered authority will be destroyed.

Claims persist that voters backed leaving the EU out of nostalgia for Britain's imperial past. In reality it is Remainers who most bemoan Britain's post-Brexit loss of standing, reflecting the fact that the EU was long seen as a new form of “empire”, capable of extending British influence after its colonies gained independence.

The crisis and chaos engulfing British politics is not simply a symptom of incompetent leadership or bad policy choices. It expresses a deep crisis of representation in the political system, which Brexit did not cause, but only revealed. British elites have lost the capacity to represent societal interests and their authority has, accordingly, imploded.

In March 2017, the Labour Party announced “six tests” that it would use to evaluate any Brexit deal struck by the government. This was always a flawed approach, betraying the party’s cowardice and incapacity to lead the country. And now, Labour stands badly exposed, because Theresa May’s Brexit deal largely meets Labour’s tests.

Working-class Leave voters are often accused of being stupid - duped by a slogan on a bus - racist, or both. Rather than sneering, researcher Luke Telford went to listen to them. What he found, talking to Leave voters in the deindustrialised north, was that they backed Brexit in a bitter rejection of the status quo, after years of political abandonment and economic decline.

Although the EU places enormous limits on democratic control over the economy, so do various alternatives to full EU membership. Indeed, a “no deal” Brexit may be the only option to enable socialist policies in future.

For many, deciding how to vote in the EU referendum was a “no brainer”, given that voting Leave was portrayed as being strongly associated with racism. However well intentioned, this stance leads to contradictions for progressive Remainers, as they struggle with ambivalent sentiments towards the working class and anxieties around the “benefits” of global capitalism.

One of Remainers’ great fears is that Brexit will undermine workers’ rights. This rests on a total misunderstanding of the EU. As labour historian Professor Mary Davis explains, Far from gifting rights to British workers, the EU has systematically undermined the rights workers won for themselves in domestic struggles.

How did immigration become such a flashpoint in British politics and the EU referendum? Drawing on his new book, The Rise of the Right, an anthropolitical study of the English Defence League, Steve Hall explains how the abandonment of working-class communities by the political left has created a vacuum in understanding and representation, which the right has moved to fill.

Remainers' "Project Fear" is heavily based on doom-laden economic predictions about the impact of Brexit. But there are three key reasons to doubt these predictions: their dubious assumptions, their reliance on outdated "gravity models"; and their exclusion of many potential benefits of Brexit.

Many forecast doomsday scenarios for universities if or when we leave the EU. This is nonsense. British universities are not dependent on the EU for their survival and are far more susceptible to British government policy. With the right policies in place, there is no reason why our universities cannot thrive outside the EU.

Efforts to implement Brexit have been shambolic, yielding precious little progress. This is not because of the intrinsic impossibility of the task. Rather it reflects the legacy of Britain’s integration into European structures, which has left the political and bureaucratic establishment unable to imagine a future for Britain outside of the EU.

For many Remainers, the EU stands for internationalism and openness, while Brexit can only mean nationalism and a turning-inwards. This is misguided. The EU does not offer genuine internationalism but a thin, phoney cosmopolitanism. Jetissoning the myths around the EU is required to rebuild the national solidarity upon which genuine internationalism can be refounded.

Today it seems that being “left-wing” means being pro-EU, while wanting Brexit can only be “right-wing”. In reality, there is a strong tradition of left-wing Euroscepticism, reflecting core values of popular sovereignty and democracy. The British left’s retreat from these values, and the working classes it once represented, underpins its disastrous embrace of the EU.

Since 17.4 million Britons voted to leave the EU in June 2016, they have been persistently slandered as dupes, xenophobes or worse. In reality, Leave voters were no worse informed than Remain voters and, while concerned over immigration, they are not, by and large, intolerant of foreigners. They were primarily driven by hunger for political change, after decades of being ignored and scorned by the political elite.

The left often thinks that the UK is a neoliberal island in a social democratic Europe, making Brexit a retrograde step. In fact, the EU has locked in neoliberal policies across Europe. Brexit is essential to break away from these policies and revitalise Britain’s lacklustre economy.

In an essay written during the referendum campaign, Maurice Glasman set out the evolution of the EU from a cooperative confederation into a capitalist club. The EU has become an alternative to Labour having a serious politics of national transformation, of building the coalitions necessary to constrain capital and strengthen democracy. Brexit is an opportunity for Labour to think anew.

In an essay published during the referendum, Richard Tuck argues that the British left's embrace of the EU risks throwing away the one institution which it has, historically, been able to use effectively—the democratic state—in favour of a constitutional order tailor-made for the interests of global capitalism and managerial politics.

Today, sovereignty is widely derided and demands to “take back control” sneered at as mere code for populist, xenophobic attitudes towards immigration. In reality, for ordinary voters, “taking back control” means re-subordinating politicians to them. It is so essential precisely because the EU has allowed political elites to avoid democratic accountability for decades.

The EU is anti-democratic - but not in the way that right-wing Eurosceptics think. It is not a supranational body, with "unelected bureaucrats" running things from Brussels. The EU is a network of national governments, which have retreated from their own populations into making closed, secretive agreements among themselves. Restoring democracy requires withdrawing from the EU.

The EU is anti-democratic - but not in the way that right-wing Eurosceptics think. It is not a supranational body, with "unelected bureaucrats" running things from Brussels. The EU is a network of national governments, which have retreated from their own populations into making closed, secretive agreements among themselves. Restoring democracy requires withdrawing from the EU.