The ‘Lexit’ campaign might have come to nothing but Corbyn and McDonnell believe leaving the EU could precipitate a socialist government
Jeremy Corbyn is a Brexiteer. He has wanted the United Kingdom to be outside the European Union, and its forerunners, since the 1970s. Corbyn, when he was a Haringey councillor in 1975, voted to end Britain’s continuing membership of the European Economic Community in the national referendum. As a backbench member of parliament, Corbyn voted against the ratification of the Maastricht treaty in 1993, on the grounds that the commission would impose ‘foreign policy on nation states that have fought for their own democratic accountability’. Corbyn broke the Labour whip again when he voted against the Lisbon treaty in 2008.
During the 2015 leadership election he told the GMB hustings ‘I would advocate a “no” vote if we are going to get an imposition of free market policies across Europe.’ Given Corbyn’s definition of ‘free market’ includes getting a haircut or buying some chewing gum, there is no doubting his anti-EU credentials.
In 2016, as pro-EU campaigners were fighting for the future of their country, Corbyn appeared on a late-night chat show and announced his passion for staying in the EU was ‘seven, or seven and a half’ out of 10. The leader’s campaign was lacklustre – unlike the general election campaign where the Islington member of parliament gained both energy and credibility.
On that terrible morning after the ‘Leave’ vote, Corbyn immediately told the BBC that ‘article 50 must be invoked now so that we negotiate an exit from the European Union’. Whenever possible since then, Corbyn has pressed for further, faster disengagement from Europe, using the three-line whip to corral Labour MPs and sacking those who rebel.
So what is Corbyn’s left-exit vision? Time and again he seems to be making common cause with the United Kingdom Independence party and the right of the Tory party, but why? To understand this, you must understand the ferment of leftwing politics in the 1970s and 1980s, when Corbyn’s politics were formed and cemented. Corbyn is a devotee of Tony Benn. He voted for Benn for deputy in September 1981 and ran the Benn for leader campaign in 1988, attempting a coup against the mandate of a democratically-elected leader of the Labour party.
By the mid-1970s, Benn had developed a version of socialism far removed from that of Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson or James Callaghan. This included the thesis that dark forces control the world, and a leftwing Labour government would be challenged by this conspiracy of bankers, civil servants, Americans and the security services. Worst of the lot were the unelected bureaucrats of the EEC. Benn wrote that ‘Britain is now, in law and in practice, a colony of this embryonic west European federal state.’
There was no equivocation in Benn’s position. He proposed the idea of a referendum to Wilson in 1975 and led the ‘Out’ campaign alongside Enoch Powell. These anti-capitalist and anti-migrant forces opposed the EEC, then the EU, for the next 40 years. Benn called the EU ‘the most bureaucratic, terrifying system in the world’ – more than, say, North Korea or Iran. Towards the end of his long, eventful life, Benn told the Oxford union the EU was ‘building an empire’ and he did not want Britain to be part of it.
Few argued the Bennite ‘Lexit’ position in the referendum – even fewer do so now. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell remains the last carrying the flame. Last month, he said ‘The bottom line for me in the new relationship we have with Europe should be designed on the basis that we can implement our manifesto.’ This conjecture that the EU holds back socialism might be nonsense, but it has purchase.
So what is it that the Labour leadership wish to implement from the 2017 prospectus that the EU would forbid? The Lexit shadow chancellor would argue: state investment, renationalisations and increased spending. Without Brussels and EU law, it is true McDonnell would be at liberty to subsidise coal and steal production, renationalise the railways and water companies and blow the budget deficit further.
Ignore the fact that the Trades Union Congress has demolished the myth that the radical, if not foolhardy, interventions in the economy have not happened due to the European Commission. In each case they found the UK government wanting. But it is true that without any ‘state aid rules’, rigourous oversight of nationalisations and no central bank to check over budgets, all of these tasks will be easier.
McDonnell would argue that without the EU breathing down our necks his calls for renationalisation might have met more fertile grassroots support in the 2015 steel dispute. This ignores that it was not the EU who stopped the government opting for nationalisation but good sense. The owner did not deserve to be let off the hook that easily, and the steel unions representing the workforce did not believe this ‘silver bullet’ offered a future for the sector, nor did it address the fundamental problems of the global decline in demand. In the end, it was some pretty effective lobbying by Community union’s general secretary, the local MP and having a Labour government – with no powers of compulsory purchase – in Cardiff Bay that convinced the Indian conglomerate to stay.
Corbyn, with his old pal McDonnell, are the inheritors of this worldview and warped economics. They see their role in politics to support the twin track of ‘national liberation’ struggles – which gets them into terrible alliances with bad people in the Middle East, Northern Ireland and Latin America – and nationalisation. There is little wonder this pair appear more Brexit than Theresa May and half her colleagues. Fingers crossed there are sunny uplands afterall.