Nicholas Costello reflects on what the UK’s vote to leave the EU could mean across Europe
The vote for Britain to leave the EU is not the end of a process. It is the beginning of many processes – within Britain, across Europe, even around the world. It’s a rejection of a world where people feel worse off than their parents’ generation, a world of austerity and growing inequality. People may and do disagree about who or what is to blame for this, but they all agree on the problem. They see the 1% swimming in more and more money while their lives get harder and harder.
Some rightly blame the banks, which really means blaming the capitalist system. Some wrongly blame immigration, an agenda promoted by privately-owned media and the right-wing to divide and rule ordinary working people. Many blame the EU – understandably, as its main role in recent years has been to promote austerity, destroying Greece and straitjacketing all of Europe’s economies in the economic nonsense of stricter and stricter spending limits for government and increasing privatisation of public companies and services.
It’s not just a British thing. It’s a Europe-wide phenomenon. Commentators sometimes stress that Britain is different from the other member states, that it has always been half-in, half-out with its opt-outs and its rebate. All this is true, but it only explains why Britain is the first country where the EU project has started to unravel. There are many signs that it may not stop with Britain. Most member states now have majorities hostile to the EU. France is the key, with a large majority unfavourable to the EU and the danger of a fascistic party, also pledged to quitting the EU, winning the next Presidential election. There are calls for referendums in many countries, even Sweden and Denmark
With Scotland and Northern Ireland having each voted with big majorities to remain, while England and Wales voted to leave, the union may become untenable. In Scotland, the point is obvious: Scotland never voted to leave the EU in its independence referendum, and it voted to remain in the Brexit referendum. Now that the only way to remain is to leave the UK, the case for another independence referendum for Scotland is difficult to argue against.
In Ireland, the idea of building a strong border between the North and the South is appalling. The case for Northern Ireland to leave is inescapable. When clear majorities north and south of the border have voted to stay together in the EU, how can the border be rebuilt? If this logic is ignored, Ireland is a place where there is a real danger that violence could be the reply to any lack of respect of democracy. The only party with a major electoral and organisational strength on both sides of the border is Sinn Fein, committed, of course to a united Ireland and with recent roots in the Irish Republican Army.
Overall, the Brexit vote is a further challenge to the elitist politics and austerity economics of the extreme centre. The game of centre-right and centre-left pretending to be different from each other is drawing to a close. It has worked well for the rich for decades, so the temptation to continue it is great. But the longer it is continued, the greater the explosions when it finally unravels.
Today the established parties have a common discourse, attacking ‘simplistic, populist solutions’ where populism is a term whose aim is to pretend that the far-right, such as the Front National in France, UKIP in the UK, Allianz für Deutschland in Germany, is the same as left-wing parties such as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, Podemos, Syriza, die Linke. In reality, the difference between far-right and left is becoming the most important difference in politics today, as the centre’s formulae of triangulation and focus groups become less and less convincing and win less and less votes. The choice becomes, in more countries, between far-right parties and socialist parties. And this often is a choice of who gets the blame – banks or immigrants?
When far-right and left parties showed well in the last European elections, the response of the centrist establishment was extraordinary. Juncker, the President of the European Commission, pointed out that centrist parties – Christian Democrats and Social Democrats – still had a large majority over ‘populist’ parties. This point is an odd response to the feeling that “They’re all the same”, since it amounts to saying “Yes, we are all the same” and can only accelerate the disillusionment. Corralling the wagons won’t work.
In Britain, the Brexit vote is a great opportunity for socialism. The centre and the right have no substantial answers to the falling living standards, collapsing services and growing inequality that most people face. Only the left does. And the Labour Party, for all its contradictions, is better placed to propose, win support for and implement socialist solutions than it has ever been. If it succeeds in proposing a vision of a society where strong public services and redistribution through taxes develop a fairer society, this can be far more convincing than the hate-filled ‘solutions’ the right advances, of blaming and expelling immigrants.