Jacobin recently had an excellent article on left-wing Brexit, which I suggest you read. But this is the graf I want to focus on:
for a Corbyn-led Labour government, not being a member of the European Union “solves more problems than it creates,” as Weeks notes. He is referring to the fact that many aspects of Corbyn’s manifesto — such as the renationalization of mail, rail, and energy firms and developmental support to specific companies — or other policies that a future Labour government may decide to implement, such as the adoption of capital controls, would be hard to implement under EU law and would almost certainly be challenged by the European Commission and European Court of Justice. After all, the EU was created with the precise intention of permanently outlawing such “radical” policies.
That is why Corbyn must resist the pressure from all quarters — first and foremost within his own party — to back a “soft Brexit.”
This is the issue. As Jacobin’s European editor wrote:
And as regards Britain, the facts are EU rules impede Corbyn’s program: you can’t properly nationalise if you can’t abolish internal markets, you can’t build public industry with its state aid rules, you can’t renationalise the NHS with its public procurement rules, etc, etc
— Ronan Burtenshaw (@ronanburtenshaw) April 30, 2018
I have pointed this out multiple times before. The European Union, in its current form (post-Maastricht) is neoliberal at its core. The Euro (which Britain at least did not adopt) was also intended to break local labor power and gut wages.
Watching the EU break Greece upon the wheel to bail out German bankers indirectly, so that they wouldn’t be seen to directly bail them out ought to have been the corpse on everyone’s doorstep that alerted people to the fact that the people running the EU, are, in certain ways, really, really bad people.
The main reason to fear Brexit isn’t “economic apocalypse,” it’s that the EU elites will do everything they can to make Britain pay to send a message.
In other words, mafia logic: “Once you’re part of the family, you don’t ever leave.”
I agree with Jacobin: Britain’s best hope of an economy which works for most Britons is Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister and instituting the policies he has said he would. Moreover, having this work is the best hope for the left in a world where all major multinational institutions and treaties are coercively neoliberal–intended to take economic decision-making out of the hands of voters and to enable free movement of capital above all other considerations.
None of this is to say that Brexit will be without some dangers and costs, but those dangers are mostly of the “save us from ourselves” variety: Tories and Blairite Labour MPs are even nastier than EU elites. And the loss of the ability to work freely on the continent, or for continentals to work freely in Britain is also a loss (though one that need not be inevitable).
But equally, the EU makes it impossible to pursue a lot of actual left-wing policies.
You can have the EU, or you can move to the left.
It’s that simple.
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