On the morning after the vote for Brexit, the Guardian’s newsroom was deathly quiet. There was disbelief that the public had voted the way it had, and the place was in mourning. With one exception the paper’s columnists had backed remain, and the shock of defeat was all the harder to bear because they had expected their side to triumph.
The exception to the house view was me – and I certainly received some old-fashioned looks from my colleagues that day. Judging by my inbox, both then and thereafter, my colleagues were more in tune with the readers than I was, but the editor thought it important that my leftwing case for Brexit should be given a hearing. Ten years on, that case is worth restating.
The first strand in the argument is that Europe isn’t working, and hasn’t been working for a long time. There has always been an economic case for EU membership but it has become harder to make down the years. When Britain was first applying to join what was then the European Economic Community, the major European economies were growing a lot faster than Britain, and were also closing the gap with the US. That is no longer the case. In the more than 17 years since the financial crisis, the US has grown by 87%, compared with the EU’s 13.5% – more than six times as fast.
True, the Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that the economy will be 4% smaller in the 15 years after the referendum than it would have been had the UK remained in the single market – but this finding should be treated with some scepticism. As Jeremy Hunt, who campaigned for remain, told the BBC last week, for the economy to be 4% bigger today it would have had to have grown as fast as the US – something the former chancellor finds implausible.
The second is that Brexit highlighted the weaknesses of Britain’s financial services-dominated economic model, and provided the opportunity to try something different. While it would be wrong to blame Brussels for all Britain’s economic woes, any serious repair job requires a freedom of manoeuvre that EU membership made more difficult.
The government’s decision to impose tariffs to protect Britain’s steel industry and to cut duties on 100 imported food products to ease the cost of living crisis are examples of that freedom being used. If Andy Burnham is serious about reversing “40 years of neoliberalism”, that will require curbs on the free movement of capital, goods and people – all expressly forbidden by single-market rules.
And third, Brexit was a howl of anger from those parts of Britain that felt marginalised and forgotten. It was a vote for a different economic settlement to put right the damage caused by deindustrialisation and globalisation.
This was a problem for both the traditional big two parties but particularly for Labour, because since the late 1980s, it had tacitly accepted that the right had won the big economic arguments. The left subsequently concentrated on cultural battles that it thought it could win. A warmer approach to Europe was part of Labour’s new message.
That shift began in the late 1980s, when the TUC, having suffered three defeats at the hands of Margaret Thatcher, was seduced by Jacques Delors’ vision of a social Europe. The things the unions loathed about Thatcher – in particular the legal curbs on their activities – could be circumvented by solidarity at a European level. As it happened, these social gains proved to be illusory, not least because the EU was just as wedded to austerity and neoliberal economics as Thatcher had been.
But that’s wasn’t the point. Being pro-EU was not about how fast living standards were rising, or whether membership of the single market would boost productivity. Rather it was about a sense of self, something that marked you out as progressive and tolerant and not bigoted or nasty. It became the ultimate expression of identity politics.
In Britain, Tony Blair’s governments embraced the zeitgeist. Globalisation was like the weather, Blair insisted, something that could not be opposed. His third way involved tinkering with the Thatcherite settlement he inherited but no more than that.
That was all very well while living standards were still rising, but it left a vacuum when the financial crisis erupted in 2008. At that moment, when neoliberalism was on its knees, Labour had no convincing analysis of what had gone wrong. The system was patched up, but not fundamentally changed. Austerity filled the vacuum, causing still more hardship to working-class communities that suffered a double hollowing out – first of well-paid manufacturing jobs then of public services.
As Frank Furedi puts it in his new book, In Defence of Populism, “Brexit represented an astonishingly powerful response to the double betrayal of the people. It rejected the hitherto hegemonic outlook of the technocratic-managerial elites and effectively challenged the globalist ideology that dominated the institutions of western Europe.”
Brexit showed that class still matters in politics, and Burnham seems to get that. In his speech after his win in the Makerfield byelection, the man soon to be prime minister talked of how his constituents had “voted for change, they have voted for more power for the north and everywhere forgotten by Westminster”.
We shall see. In itself, Brexit alters nothing. It creates an opportunity for change but by no means guarantees the changes that are needed will happen. But it has unleashed demands for action that will not be stilled. For me, that’s a good thing.
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