What the fuck is wrong with the Labour left?

I would never normally write a piece decrying ‘the left’ as it would be a pointless exercise. And their struggles, and inadequacies, are usually my struggles, and inadequacies. But I am fuming. Bear with me. Give me a couple of minutes, please.

The vote last June for the UK to leave the EU was a freak event. There is every reason to think that it was, in part, driven by the same forces of complacency that drove the Tory victory of 2015. Namely, Labour couldn’t get its people out. Most people in the cosmopolitan areas thought Remain would win and many didn’t bother voting. The old and wealthy and angry went to vote, in large numbers. It’s a very modern election in the UK, a sleepwalk, a path of least resistance for most, but which leads to, for most people, an unexpected and unwanted result.

Because of this vote, some people think that ‘the people have spoken’. But we agree, don’t we: that democracy should be a process, not a single one-off event where one single, close referenda result marks an unreversable junction, a high-speed trainline along which the nation is then forced, forever more.

In fact, this referendum on continued membership of the EU confused many and confuscated the issues. The Leave campaign tapped into dark undertows of reaction and racism which have been brewing for many decades. It lied, again, and again. And with the EU being a difficult, and often ugly institution, we did not make the case for Europe that needed to be made. And the result for the UK is the biggest political tragedy since the Second World War.

Now, a digression: why did Harold Wilson want to join the Common Market, back in the 1960s? What made him think, in his somewhat insular fashion, that somehow this would make sense, for a Labour government?

Was it because Wilson saw that the UK, shorn of its empire, was hopelessly exposed unless it became part of a wider bloc with the only countries who could offer a form of modernisation, a different model? Perhaps he saw that capitalism was still playing to scale. Perhaps he saw that the expertise that Britain needed, the links with developed countries that Britain needed to replace its lopsided imperial trading links, offered the best chance of a post-imperial future, in a world where Japan might provide TVs to Australia, Canada and South Africa.

Or maybe Wilson saw that, without being part of Europe, the UK would become a vassal state, dominated and ultimately controlled by a fairly disinterested United States, which could cripple the pound sterling with a flick of a switch, if, for example, the UK failed to provide the military assistance which it was expecting. As indeed happened, a consequence of Wilson not providing troops for Vietnam.

The question of Europe is still, in 2017, not just a political question, or an economic question. It is a geo-political question. For a post-imperial power, Europe has offered respite, a way of avoiding a confrontation with decline. But the UK, as a whole, hasn’t fully engaged with Europe — despite the massive amounts of foreign travel, it hasn’t been enough. Britain has, indeed, become more subservient to the United States, at least militarily. The UK political classes have blamed Europe for problems, have actively worked to prevent European solutions, for example, in regards to unregulated capital. Britain has become resentful, and the planned attacks upon the organised labour movement in the 1980s have succeeded in fracturing and souring many working class people against communal action.

And what is worst of all: the European Union being shaped by the UK’s neo-liberalism: the same people (Peter Mandelson) who have agitated for enlargement, knowing the inequality this would create within the EU, knowing that the heavily casualised UK labour market would be further pressured by an influx of people from very poor countries. The EU with a huge commission dedicated to competition, and no commission for co-operation. No social security floor, no safeguards against slave labour, as inflicted by its member governments.

What Brexit represents, therefore, is a culmination of a set of negative circumstances, aided by austerity, but most of all, driven by the UK governing class — Cameron was the cherry on top of a dogshit cake. If there is any future for UK manufacturing and science, it is as part of European research and a European supply chain, and, crucially, if there is any future for the UK as an independent country, with a distinct foreign policy, it is as part of a European Union that increasingly has to distinguish itself from the US. If there is a future for young people in the UK, it is as part of a continent to which, if they want to, they can work in, study in, travel in.

So — where are the Labour left in this? Apart from some honourable exceptions, many seem to see Brexit as an ‘opportunity’. They want a slice of shitcake. In fact, it seems they want us to eat shitcake forever: the cake which was cooked up by successive neoliberal policies. They think Brexit is a release from the bonds of Brussels, and they think that the European nationals working in the UK are the problem, not the deregulated labour market, or the inequalities in Europe.

In fact, they’re signing up to stereotypes, and looking towards protectionism. They’ve become Liberal Unionists, all of a sudden. Whilst the working class face a huge attack on living standards, and yes, of the prospects of the young, the care of the old and sick. The shutters come down on international study, and the vestiges of a ‘knowledge economy’ (which does date mostly from the Wilson era) are discarded. It’s a historical reverse, and the Labour left are so very calm, as the country drifts away, sleepwalking off a cliff into the Atlantic. Only a second referendum, where either a hard or soft Brexit is offered as a choice, next to no Brexit, gives us a chance, a hand on the edge of the cliff, to claw back. If we go off the cliff, the consequences will be dire, most people will be angry for years to come, but people will not turn to Labour. Then we will truly meet our post-imperial future, and it will be ugly.