For the best part of the last 30 years, support for the European Union and Britain’s role within it has been a badge of honour for the left. Just why is this?
Time was when – until around the mid-1980s or so – much of the British left favoured withdrawal from the then European Economic Community (EEC), while the Conservative Party was split. So much so that pro-European Tory MPs and ministers, infuriated by Margaret Thatcher’s mounting antipathy towards the European project, brought the Iron Lady down in 1990 for reasons which now appear bizarre. After her fall, the whole issue of Europe would poison the party, root to tip; while the highly Europhile New Labour grasped the political nettle. Even entry into the euro seemed likely at one point.
Yet the British left’s quarter-century-long enthusiastic support for all things Europe is at odds not only with UK public opinion, but increasingly, the facts on the ground. The euro experiment has been a political, economic and social disaster: impoverishing huge swathes of southern Europe, tying it to a currency with no escape, and robbing member states of anything resembling democracy or control of their own destinies. Freedom of movement, the dream of so many pro-Europeans, is imploding in tandem with the Schengen agreement. EU political institutions not only profoundly lack democratic legitimacy, but are inert, helpless, in the face of the greatest refugee crisis since 1945. National governments cannot agree on what day of the week it is, let alone how to collectively respond; anti-immigration sentiment is rising across much of the continent. Is the very thing which was designed to help bring peace and stability to a region so often ravaged by war now unwittingly serving to provoke not unity, but mounting anger and division?
By the end of 2017, perhaps as soon as next year, the British people, denied a voice on their country’s role within the EU for over four decades, will go to the polls to decide whether the UK should remain… or leave. This article challenges my fellow travellers on the left to do what they have so often neglected: to scrutinise the EU’s very many failings, think long and hard, and ask yourselves: is staying in really worth it?