We do not need another Brexit debate

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THERE is a glaring — and dangerous — contradiction at the core of the plans Andy Burnham outlined at Labour’s Liverpool conference this week.

It lies in his attempt to combine reversing 40 years of neoliberalism with a not very subtle campaign to get Britain to rejoin the European Union.

The Prime Minister rightly slates the political economy of Margaret Thatcher and her successors for its privatisation, marketisation and deregulation of everything within reach.

Among its consequences is the deindustrialisation of much of Britain which Burnham rightly deplores.

The decision to leave the European Union handed British governments powerful weapons to address those issues.

That opportunity has not yet been taken — unsurprisingly, since post-Brexit governments have hitherto clung fast to neoliberalism in any case. It is the prevailing ideology of finance capital and the City of London which those governments have sought to serve.

Brexit was never going to be a positive in the hands of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss or Keir Starmer. They either bought into the fantasy of Singapore-on-the-Thames sold by a minority of right-wing Brexiteers or found themselves incapable of challenging market-driven assumptions.

But their failure does not change the nature of the European Union. It remains foundationally committed to capitalist market economics, to financial rigour and to deregulation.

Returning to the EU — or simply to its single market — would deprive British governments of the tools needed to tackle Britain’s economic and social crisis.

Public procurement favouring domestic producers. State investment in key industrial sectors. Control over international trade. All this would be impossible with Brussels back in charge.

It would be still worse if rejoining the European Union meant adopting the euro, as the EU may well insist.

Then Britain would cede any form of control over public spending and interest rates to a regime which has a brutal record of imposing austerity and impoverishing societies in the interests of the bankers. See Greece for details.

If support for Brexit is now lower than it was in 2016 it is because the Establishment has resisted any basic change in economic strategy, and the social problems which drove such a powerful vote for change in the referendum have remained unsolved.

It also reflects the absence of economic growth, which is too easily blamed on being outside the EU’s market.

Burnham has declared himself wanting to address those issues. The European Union will be no friend in doing so — it has been there throughout the “wrong turn” with a powerful neoliberal hand on the steering wheel.

The Prime Minister has also said he wants to unify the country. That is a dubious project in a class-divided society. But it will not be assisted by reopening a debate which has poisoned our politics by regrouping people along culture war lines.

This paper is more concerned with class unity, and that will be impeded by opening up a question on which working-class people declared themselves unambiguously 10 years ago, a fact which is probably not unconnected to surveys showing that the Labour Party’s individual membership today is overwhelmingly middle-class.

It is a debate we do not need. What is required is an overdue drive to tackle the social frustrations aggravated by the European Union which the Brexit vote opened up the possibilities of attempting.

Let a reindustrialised sovereign Britain, with the highest regulatory and environmental standards, expand trade with Europe.

But if the debate is forced upon us, the labour movement should not repeat the mistake of 2016. It should say loud and clear that the 2016 vote should at long last be properly implemented in a socialist direction, not be re-run.

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