In my first article on Britain’s European Union (EU) membership debate, I went through some of the central reasons that people on the right of the political spectrum oppose Britain’s membership of the EU, such as the EU’s doctrine of the free-movement of people, allowing large numbers of people on the continent to live in the UK, as well as the arguably restrictive economic regulations which EU member states have to sign up to. However, what I failed to mention was the arguments put forward by Eurosceptics on the left, who often have different reasons for wanting Britain out of the EU in comparison to right-wing Eurosceptics.
Back in 1973, when Britain first joined what was then called the European Economic Community (the actual European Union was has only been around since 1993, but the EEC was the start of this idea of the European Project), many people in the Labour party and on the left were against it and when a democratic referendum was held on whether to remain part of the EEC in 1975, many senior Labour figures, such as Tony Benn and Michael Foot, campaigned to leave – with the backing of most of the Labour party’s members.
However, whilst Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister from 1979-90, more and more on the British left started to think that, as the journalist Owen Jones has put it, “the only hope of progressive legislation was via Brussels.” So eventually when the Labour party re-emerged from the political wilderness in the form of New Labour it was almost universally pro-EU.
But because of the way in which the EU, headed by Germany, is perceived to have bullied countries like Greece into adopting austerity policies which have only served to crush the Greek people and made their debt problems worse, figures on the left are now starting to become Eurosceptic once more.
They oppose Britain’s membership of the European Union on the basis that the organisation works more in the interests of multi-national corporations that it does its own citizens. An example of this, they say, is the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP), an economic deal currently being negotiated between the EU and the United States which will reportedly give corporations the legal power to sue governments if they try to introduce policies which may harm their profits.
Left- wing Eurosceptics also use examples such as TTIP to argue that the European Union is not democratic, another being the way in which it forced an economic policy based on austerity on the Greek people, despite the fact that in their general election they voted for an anti-austerity party.
Furthermore, they argue that the European Union is against the nationalisation of public utilities – a popular policy on the left – and tends to encourage, even enforce, privatisation. As Owen Jones pointed out about Britain’s postal service, “Royal Mail may have been privatised by the Tories, but it was the EU that began the process by enforcing the liberalisation of the natural monopoly of postal services.”
So, those are some of the left-wing arguments for leaving the EU. Do you find yourself persuaded more by right-wing Eurosceptics or by left-wing Eurosceptics?
Sources: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/14/left-reject-eu-greece-eurosceptic
Image: By THOR (Summer Sky in Southsea England) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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