#EUref

Sturgeon’s astonishingly risky EU intervention

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SturgeonThe EU referendum was always going to be a tightrope for Nicola Sturgeon. The risks are manifold: saying something that could ultimately be used against her in future Scottish independence referendum; drawing attention to some of the more unpleasant elements of the independence cause; and appearing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Prime Minister, having previously denounced (and demolished) Labour for doing the same. I always therefore assumed that come the independence referendum Sturgeon, being more risk-averse than her predecessor, would restate her position that she favours British membership of the EU and then stay out of the debate. However, on Monday she delivered a most astonishing speech on Britain’s membership of the European Union – exposing herself to risks on all three fronts identified above, and more.

She acknowledged, though did not dismiss, the inconsistencies in arguing for a “pooling of sovereignty” with other EU Member States while not applying that same logic mutatis mutandis to the United Kingdom. The submission that “there is nothing at all contradictory about independent nations recognising their interdependence” is so packed with contradiction that only a true-believer could fail to spot it.

In the independence referendum the SNP hoped that we would suspend our better judgement and vote with our hearts, rather than our heads – and dismissed the pleas of those who urged us that we do opposite as cynical and negative. The irony of now making the instrumental case for a political union while dismissing the more emotive, nationalistic case for Brexit is clearly lost on her.

Sturgeon made the case for the EU imposing certain certain social standards on the UK (purportedly) against its will:

“In 2013 the UK only increased the minimum entitlement to parental leave as a direct result of European directives. There are other cases – for example minimum annual leave, and conditions for agency workers – where the UK complies with the European minimum and no more. Which begs the question without European regulations would minimum standards be meet the regulation at all?” [sic]

In other words, it’s OK for the European Union to impose laws on the UK that the UK has not voted for, but it’s not OK for the United Kingdom to impose laws on Scotland that Scotland has not voted for. I wrote previously about how the left was generally fine with surrendering control over the levers of power provided the levers are nonetheless pulled in a manner of their pleasing (such as the internationalisation of human rights). However, pulling the levers of power is the core purpose of the SNP and the independence movement. The SNP didn’t give up its pursuit of independence when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister even though Brown clearly enjoyed overwhelming support in Scotland. The fact that the levers of power were being pulled in a manner Scotland chose mattered not one jot to the SNP – what mattered most was who was pulling the levers of power, not how they are pulled – which is where the contradiction in Sturgeon’s position lies.

She continues:

“In fact, when you consider some of the UK Government’s other policies – for example its attempt to further weaken trade union rights – we should be thankful that the European Union sets some basic social standards.”

The 2015 General Election was remarkable for a number of reasons, though one result seldom commented upon is the fact that right-leaning parties won a majority of the vote for the first time since the war (though it was close in the 1950s). For Sturgeon to claim that we Britons should be thankful to the EU for imposing policies upon us that the people of the UK voted against at the last election, while simultaneously crying foul every time the UK pursues policies which “the people of Scotland did not vote for” is bare-faced hypocrisy, and impossible to credibly sustain. The very nature of a political community is one in which individuals and groups subjugate their own desires to the will of the community. The fact that Sturgeon is apparently OK with the principle of laws being imposed against a nation’s democratic will provided those laws come from Brussels and not London, is a conflict that cannot be resolved without exposing some fairly unpleasant truths about some aspects of Scottish nationalism.

Sturgeon further claimed that

“[t]he European Union is good for the prosperity and wellbeing of individuals, families and communities across our country.”

This is a questionable assertion, but whatever the truth of it in the UK, it is most certainly not the case in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, or Italy – where the EU has imposed swingeing austerity on these nations, usually against their will, in order to protect (primarily the financial industries of) Germany and France from contagion. How can a party that claims to be “anti-austerity” be so enthusiastically supportive of political institutions that have imposed the harshest austerity Europe has seen since the war? Sturgeon’s narrow, self-interested, view of the beneficiaries of the European Union doesn’t square with her support for a social Europe. I would also ask this question of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, though their support for the EU is, at least, considerably more tepid. This is a contradiction that Sturgeon conveniently glossed over in her speech.

Sturgeon tail-ended her extraordinary foray into the EU referendum debate with an interview with Channel 4 News. Sturgeon was asked what her supporters might think about her fighting on the same side of a referendum as the Prime Minister. She replied

“[i]f he can appeal to those who agree with him, I’ll appeal to those more inclined to my progressive social democratic view of the European Union – if that maximises the vote to stay in, all the better!”

Substitute “United Kingdom” for “European Union” and that line could as easily have been uttered by Jim Murphy or Johann Lamont.

None of this is explosive, though it certainly provides the SNP’s critics (for what they’re worth) with some ammunition. What’s most remarkable is that such a risky speech is entirely out of character for cautious Nicola Sturgeon. Plenty of other political leaders who have won landslide victories became over-confident. Ultimately, it was their over-confidence that was their undoing.

Why I’m a reluctant left-wing Brexiteer

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To be lumped-in with the Faragian “Little Englander” stereotype of those who are extremely sceptical about the European Union (and who, admittedly, probably comprise the vast majority of such sceptics) is an extremely uncomfortable position for a socialist to find himself in. The belief that all humans are inherently equal and that accidents of birth should not predestine someone make us fundamentally hostile to nationalist notions of exceptionalism (whether explicit or implicit). We comfort ourselves with the fact that ours was once the prevailing opinion within the political left, championed by heroes like Tony Benn, Michael Foot, and my own particular favourite, Peter Shore (pictured above).

In the coming weeks, I intend to provide a left-wing critique of the European Union. Subsequent blogs will consider the role of the European Court of Justice, in particular, in entrenching a neoliberal ideology into the legal orders of EU Members States; the one-way street of privatisation and marketisation that is driven by the EU; and the EU’s ideological choice to impose harsh austerity measures in response to the Eurozone crisis. All of these, I believe, demonstrate that the EU forces Member States to adhere to conservative ideology.

I have never been a rampant Europhile (as a student, I regarded the Young European Federalists with considerable disdain), and have always looked upon the European Union with a critical eye, believing that significant reform was necessary, but possible. Two parallel processes have led me to conclude that such reform is not possible. The first, is that in becoming more expert in European Union law, as a student and then a lecturer and writer, I have come to conclude that only the wholesale revision of the core principles of the Union could transform the EU from a neoliberal, free-market union to a social union. Second, recent events in Europe have convinced me that no will exists within EU institutions to make such a change and, indeed, the institutional support for neoliberal free-market capitalism has become more trenchant, and more harsh. Both of these I intend to deal with more comprehensively in the coming weeks.

In essence, there are two orders of complaint about the path that the European Union has taken.

The first order complaint is fairly ideologically neutral: that the European Union deprives the citizens of Member States of any direct say over matters that would usually be the subject of political discourse and division. Invariably, the main proponents of this argument appear to be drawn from the right. Complaints about the surrender of sovereignty can frequently be heard from the Conservative benches of the House of Commons, but seldom heard from the Labour benches.

The second order complaint is distinctly partisan, and from a left-wing perspective more worrisome: that having been deprived of any direct say over matters that would usually be the subject of political discourse and division, we have had imposed upon us a free-market ideology from which we are not at liberty to depart.

Though the preference for free-market ideology has been evident, in particular in judgements of the ECJ, since the early days of the EEC, the abandonment of the façade of ideological neutrality came during the 1980s. During this period we saw the entrenchment of a consensus that arose in the 1980s, when almost every Minister in the Council was drawn from the centre right. This consensus led to both the Single European Act and the Treaty of Maastricht. Unlike in domestic politics, that ideological choice cannot be undone by a majority, even a relatively sizable one. A similar uniformity of ideology as was evident in the 1980s would be necessary before a reversal of this ideological choice became possible, let alone likely. Such uniformity becomes less and less likely as more and more states are represented at the Council.

It is surprising, therefore, that so many on the Conservative benches are so antagonistic towards the European Union, relative to those on the Labour benches. If Conservatives don’t like that their political autonomy over the ideological direction of the country has been stripped away, they can at least console themselves with the fact that the levers of power of which they have been deprived are nonetheless being pulled in a manner that is, for the most part, to their pleasing. For example, John Major’s government actually quite liked the EU’s deficit-limitation rules because they represented the entrenchment of “good conservative values”. Arguably, John Major is the most successful Conservative Prime Minister in British history because he succeeded in entrenching conservative ideology in the British Constitution in a manner that no other politician in the history of the Kingdom had ever achieved.

By contrast, the more elitist elements of the left are quite at peace with not pulling the levers of power themselves provided that they are being pulled in a manner of their pleasing (the internationalisation of human rights is a good example thereof). But in EU Member States control over the levers of power has been surrendered and that power is being exercised in a decidedly right-wing manner. It is astonishing, therefore, that the Labour Party should be the strident defenders of the European Union, while it is the Conservatives who are amongst its harshest critics. The Labour Party has convinced itself that the European Union can be a vehicle for left-wing ideology when sixty years of evidence has shown that the opposite is, in fact, the case.

So my objection to the EU is not rooted in some intrinsic objection to the internationalisation of exercise of political power. My objection is that the internationalisation of that political power has been to entrench a conservative ideology to which I am fundamentally opposed, and to prohibit the governments of Member States from acting in any manner that departs from that ideology.

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