Leftist progressives almost universally protested, and have continued to whinge about, the 2016 Brexit referendum result in favour of the UK leaving the European Union. This response is a spectacular failure of socialist principle and a betrayal of left-wing history. By contrast, pro-Brexit voters understood what the contemporary Left has refused to see, namely that the European Union is anti-democratic, an unaccountable political union of Europe’s political and corporate elites.
The EU is a free-market capitalist club ruled by an unaccountable bureaucracy. It began life in the early 1970s as the ‘European Common Market’, a giant free trade zone. In 1972, the UK, under the Edward Heath Tory government, joined the ‘European Community’ (the forerunner to the EU) without putting the decision to the British people because Whitehall knew the government would lose a referendum: polling after the deed showed that Britons were against EC membership by almost two to one.
In 1975, the new Labour government did hold a referendum on EC membership but the pre-referendum popular majority of two in three Britons against staying in the EC wilted (with two in three voting to remain in the EC) against a ‘Project Fear’ strategy of the Remain campaign, accompanied by persistent dishonesty regarding the true aims of the EC which was presented as a simple, and rather boring, trade club posing no threat to British political sovereignty.
It wasn’t until 2016 that Britons were asked again. To pacify internal party rumblings from Tory Brexiteers, and head off vote spillage from the Tories to the radical anti-EU party (UKIP), the David Cameron Tory government held a referendum on EU membership in 2016, and Brexit was the popular winner who had had enough of the EU’s relentless encroachment on British national democratic sovereignty.
The EU’s elected parliament is a toothless sham – its elected members from each member-country are democratically elected but the EU parliament can neither propose nor repeal laws. It can only amend legislation whose sole author remains the unelected European Commission. The European Court of Justice rulings repeatedly over-ride national laws in favour of EU directives. EU law, for example, makes it impossible for a British government to re-nationalise Britain’s railways.
An EU article of faith is that the EU, for all its faults is redeemed by its aim to unify Europe against divisive nationalism. This rationale assumes that nationalism was the root cause of the two world wars but this is simplistic. Nationalism can contain the seeds of reactionary politics at an international level but it needs the catalyst of militarism or totalitarianism or fascism or the imperialist contest for resources and markets to be activated in a negative fashion.
For all the sovereignty-sapping trouble Brexit entails, it costs British taxpayers a net £250 million a week. This is money that could be spent on so many worthy things that actually benefit the British people.