Rewind. What the hell am I talking about? The EU referendum - the returning of a Conservative majority government in last week's orgy of electoral masochism means that we will see one by 2017. I've been thinking about this question since then: neither of the options seem very attractive, yet many on the left feel will undoubtedly feel obliged to pitch their red flags behind either the 'Yes' or 'No' camps. By inclination, no doubt nurtured by reading a lot of Tony Benn at an impressionable age, I feel the pull of the 'No' brigade more. Yet I'm troubled, not least by the prospect of a debate dominated by the jingoistic right. A very helpful session on the issue at today's They Don't Represent Us conference (organised by rs21) concretised my train of thought on this - the left should actively abstain in an EU referendum.
I'll explain what I mean by active abstention in a bit; but first, the cases against 'Yes' and 'No' votes respectively.
Should I stay?
People younger than myself, a distressingly growing proportion of the population, tend to associate support for EU membership with left-of-centre politics. Those older than myself recall clearly a time when opposition to the EEC, as then was, indicated a suspiciously socialist orientation. We'll return to this latter group presently; for the more youthful, the EU is associated with an outward-looking, metropolitan confidence, an internationalist retort to the Little Englandism of Ukippers. It is upwardly mobile and forward looking, an upmarket brunch in the face of Nigel Farage's beans-on-toast. It stands as the Guardian to the Daily Express. You get the idea.
All of this is so much ideology, and like any successful ideology, contains a good deal of truth (albeit partial and one-sided). The EU certainly is a dynamic, relentlessly modernising, entity - and as such appeals to those liberal-minded bourgeois who have little to lose and everything to gain from change - and in this it reflects the capital whose creature it is. Neo-liberal capitalist accumulation is nothing if not international, generously cosmopolitan in its preparedness to exploit anyone regardless of nationality. It is also a regime of accumulation that is characteristically imposed by international institutions. The World Trade Organisation, the G20, the IMF, and the World Bank are the better known amongst these. The EU is another: from its free-trade origins, it has gravitated towards more explicitly liberalising constraints on member economies, passing competition legislation that renders nationalisation difficult, and imposing tight budgetary constraints within the Eurozone. The organisation is utterly institutionally bound up with liberalisation in the cause of its constitutive capitals, the latest manifestation of this being the TTIP treaty proposed with the US. The EU is no economic friend of the left. It is a unity of states in the cause of big capital. This is not our internationalism; we look for an internationalism of workers.
Nor is it, whatever impression the bigoted denizens of UKIP-land might imagine, a soft touch on immigration. Whilst treaties guarantee free movement within the EU (although this can be, and has been, suspended), for migrants from outside the EU, that is - almost universally - from poorer parts of the world, very often ones affected by wars waged by EU member states (and adversely affected by non-preferential trade arrangements with the EU), the story is very different. Hence the term 'Fortress Europe', which doesn't begin to catch the horror of people drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach a Promised Land that doesn't want them. The EU's response to this relentless human misery has primarily been to increase funding to Frontex, a border agency. Let's be clear, this is not a pro-migrant institution; it simply wants to draw the boundaries of exclusion in different places, and on a different basis, from UKIP and the Tory right.
Yes, but, the left advocate of a 'Yes' vote might urge, doesn't the EU offer benefits in terms of human rights, and in particular workers' rights? Wouldn't exit threaten these? In part, this line of response is based on the misapprehension that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a creature of the EU. It isn't; the UK is a signatory in virtue of its membership of the Council of Europe, a body to which states can belong without being EU members, as indeed several do. The EU Social Chapter certainly does afford workers certain minimal rights, as does the Working Time Directive. The UK, however, already permits an opt-out from the maximum 48h-hour working week of the latter legislation, and it would be naive to suppose that workers aren't put under considerable pressure in some industries to do just this. Meanwhile, increased international competition in a capitalism still struggling to restore profitability combined with the marked core-periphery development of the EU (and especially Eurozone) economy will create intense pressure from government and business to revoke, modify, or ignore social legislation. In the face of this workers will only be protected by our capacity to organise to fight these attacks. Yet, if we had the strength to do that, the EU would no longer appear as a beneficent safeguard against unscrupulous employers. "No saviours from on high deliver".
Regardless of all this, forget the suggestion that the 'Yes' campaign will be some kind of internationalist counterpart to the xenophobic right. Enthusiasm about the EU is perfectly compatible with member-state nationalism, and Cameron -- having negotiated some no doubt deeply reactionary concessions on migration from the Commission -- will go to the electorate claiming to have 'won a good deal for Britain'. He will line up alongside the Labour front bench and the CBI in a union-jack wrapped Better Together revival, promoting 'Britain's interest in Europe'. It is likely to be as much a poisoned chalice for Labour as its Caledonian forebear. The left should have none of it.
Or should I go?
Nor, of course, should the left line up alongside the other union-jack clad campaign we will have the dubious pleasure of witnessing two years hence. Farage and the Tory right will fight a deeply reactionary front in referendum battle, focused in immigration and a populist anti-bureaucracy directed against the modest provisions of the Social Chapter and similar legislation. It is likely to drag the centre of political gravity further to the right, and may well succeed in cementing UKIP's electoral constituency, winning them new seats in 2020. All the while the hard right will be lurking in the wings; racial attacks will increase, as they always do when the 'threat' of immigration is talked up. In no way can the left do anything other than condemn utterly this coming carnival of reaction; there can be no repeat of the 1975 referendum campaign, which saw left-wingers share platforms with the likes of Enoch Powell. Groups like Stand Up to UKIP will need our support in the run-up to the referendum.
But, hang on, you might say: surely nobody on the left is advocating arguing for a 'no' vote on the basis of the xenophobic and socially reactionary positions of UKIP and the Tory right? We remember the days when the most prominent opponents of EEC membership were figures on the Labour left. Tony Benn, Peter Shore, and their ilk argued that the EEC would make it impossible for a radical Labour government to nationalise industries, and impose controls on capital and trade, in accordance with the kind of programme laid out in the Alternative Economic Strategy. As indeed it would*. Be in no doubt, the kind of reformism espoused in Labour manifestos within easy living memory is incompatible with EU membership. Syriza and Podemos may yet discover this if they ride out the immediate impact of the Eurozone crisis with their principles intact.
Allow me at this point to draw my readers' attention to reality, a region the left sometimes has difficulty inhabiting. The UK is not Greece, nor is it Spain, nor do we live in the early 1980s. We cannot argue that EU membership is all that stands between a radical Labour programme and its social democratic fruition. The most left-wing scenario for Labour in the next few years has Andy Burnham as leader - pause and think about that, Andy Burnham. A vote to exit the EU would not be followed by a latter-day Michael Foot imposing controls on capital and inflating the welfare state, but rather by a right-wing Tory closing borders to people whilst welcoming their openness to money, asa revival of the City of London casino combines with further attacks on social provision. This would bring in its wake a further shift to the right in political discourse and popular ideas, from which only UKIP and the further right would gain. In the current British political context a 'No' vote will only fuel the flames of reaction.
For this reason it is also foolish to propose a left 'No' campaign, separate from the official one. This suggestion fails to recognise with due humility the weakness of the left and the hegemonic state of neo-liberalism, combined with a worrying rightward shift on immigration. We could only run a distinct campaign that didn't simply feed the reactionary whirlwind on the basis of significant pre-existing strength. We do not have that; and we can only do politics in the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. In any case, the nature of those elements most likely to push for such a campaign - those behind NO2EU and various Stalinists - does not fill me with confidence that it would be free from chauvinism.
If I go, there will be trouble, and if I stay, it will be double
So I don't think the left should support either the 'Yes' or 'No' campaign. This does not mean I think we should say or do nothing for the length of the referendum debate, tempting though it will undoubtedly be to leave the country as the day draws near. In fact, there's an important message to get out - the inadequacy of these two options: transnational neo-liberalism matched with state-level nationalism, versus Little Englandist reaction married to a more Atlanticist capitalism - points the way towards what I think that message should be, these terms of debate are utterly bankrupt, and this is so because they are dictated by capital. We could argue creatively for active abstention - spoiling ballots, or whatever, the details aren't important - but use the conversations we have and the material we distribute in doing so to argue for a different kind of politics. Against both campaigns, we should argue unabashedly in favour of immigration. Against both campaigns, we should argue in defence of the welfare state, and in favour of orientating the economy to people rather than profit.
Neither is revolutionary. But both are considerably better than anything we'll hear from mainstream politicians, and I think this is probably the best way the left can make a positive contribution to what will be an otherwise absolutely toxic political atmosphere.
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[ETA] I should add, the above is directed at the English debate, partly because this will dominate the UK polity, and partly because, since I live in England, it's the context in which I have to reach a decision. But let me predict now that the SNP, Plaid, and Sinn Fein - all of whom favour EU membership with varying degrees of calls for reform (about which I'm sceptical, but there we are) find a way to stand back from the fray and thus avoid a Better Together style complicity ('we can't decide for the UK as whole'/ 'we will run a separate Scottish/ Welsh/ Irish' campaign or whatever), I assume that the SDLP will fall behind the Labour leadership.
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*I don't think the AES-style strategy was perfect in its day, prone as it undoubtedly was to degenerating into fortress-economy nationalism. What a future radical left programme (if that doesn't already sound too utopian) would need to build in would be international alliances (with the likes of Syriza and Podemos, for instance).
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