The left returns to an old love – saying No to Europe

Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell. Wikicommons/ Judy Cassab. Some rights reserved.It is not often given to one to see one’s
political youth replayed decades later. Reading Owen
Jones appeal to quit Europe in the Guardian
was to bring back so many memories. 

The first Labour conference I ever attended
as a constituency delegate barely out of university was the 1971 Labour special
party conference to adopt a position on entering the EEC. I sat enthralled as
the great orators of Labour – Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Denis Healey, and
Tony Benn – roared out their contempt for Europe, deploying arguments that Owen
uses four decades later.

After all had not Labour’s lost leader, Hugh
Gaitskell, the John Smith of his day, felled just before he could enter No 10,
declared that to sign the Treaty of Rome ‘meant the end of Britain as an
independent nation-state. It would mean the end of a thousand years of history.
It would mean the end of the Commonwealth.’

Had not Denis Healey in 1950 explained in
his Labour pamphlet, European Unity, that ‘No Socialist Party with the
prospect of forming a government could accept a system by which important
fields of national policy were surrendered to a supranational European
representative authority.’ For Healey, British coal-miners’ and steelworkers’
jobs would be safe just as long as we kept a distance from Europe.

There was one voice of dissent. Tony Benn
noted in his diary in April 1970: ‘If we have to have some sort of organisation
to control international companies, the Common Market is probably the right
one.’

On going into opposition, Benn’s line
changed and after 1979 he led the charge to make withdrawal from Europe
official Labour Party policy. In the 1980s he became the champion of Lexit,
Owen Jones’ neat formulation for left anti-Europeanism. The result was 18 years
of Tory government. 

As the wheel of history turns, there can be
no surer way of keeping the Tories in power than lining up with UKIP and
championing the cause of English isolationism. Because one thing did not exist
in the 1970s and 1980s, namely that if we vote to quit the EU, the Scots will
vote to quit the UK and progressive politics will never win a majority alone in
England.

All of Owen Jones’ criticisms are valid but
little to do with the EU. No EU rule prevents Germany from having an industrial
policy. No EU rule stops progressive trade union organisation in Sweden, where
the prime minister is a metalworker unlike the scions of Oxbridge vying to be
Labour leader.

No British government would ever dare take
on Microsoft, Google, or impose a cap on bankers’ bonuses as the EU has.

Owen Jones cites George Monbiot, but surely
even our great green guru accepts that environmental policy in one nation is
nonsense. Acid rain and global warming do not stop at frontiers to show their
passports.

Of course Owen Jones is right to condemn the
handling of the Greek crisis. But having spent three weeks late in June and
into July travelling in Greece, especially outside the Athens political-media
bubble, I found no evidence that any Greek on the left thinks quitting the EU
is an answer.

On the contrary, the Syriza poster that
covered every wall said “Yes to Europe. No to austerity.” The 60 per cent vote
Alexis Tsipras won was a vote to say Yes to Europe as much as it was a vote to
reject the proposals from the ruling centre-right politicians who have made
such a disaster of handling EU economic policy since the banksters’ crash.

In fact, 80 per cent of Greeks polled
regularly say they want to keep the Euro. They say ‘Oxi’ to the wiseacres of
the Anglo-Saxon commentariat who regularly preach that the Euro must go and we
would all be better off back with drachmas, francs, lire, pesetas or punts all
merrily devaluing against each other as the forex speculators made their
killings.

The insane stupidity of how Brussels, Berlin
and the IMF have handled Greece is about the poor quality of the small-minded
conservatives who dominate the European Commission, the European Council and
the European Parliament as well as their helpmates like the conservative tax
lawyer Christine Lagarde of the IMF.

It is the politics of Europe’s current
rulers that must be challenged, not the UK’s membership of the EU. I fear
however, Owen Jones is on to a winner as the forces for Brexit grow daily and
no-one challenges them. Time will tell whether an England isolated from Europe
is as progressive as Owen hopes.

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