The European Union is far from perfect, but a Leave victory on 23 June would result in a substantial shift to the right in UK politics.
The polls show the Leave and Remain camps as neck and neck with only a couple of days until the referendum, and that should terrify those across the left as support for the right-wing of the Tory party continues to creep upwards.
The referendum debate has already shifted UK politics to the right, with the centre ground somewhere between the more moderate Tories campaigning to Remain and the right-wing of the party pushing to Leave. The left has been sitting on the sidelines of the debate completely, with Jeremy Corbyn staying relatively quiet on the subject, and the Liberal Democrats and the Greens struggling to find a platform to get their voices heard.
However, as the centre ground lurches right, some within the Labour Party have decided that this referendum would be a good time to highlight some of the issues they have with the EU. Many of these complaints are very real problems with the institution, but to use them as the basis of a push to Leave, making an unholy alliance with those even former Tory ministers have called “racist” and “xenophobic”, only harms their overall cause.
For all its ills, the EU currently stands as a body that is holding the UK back from sliding ever further towards the right and into the hands of UKIP. It forces the Tory party to compromise, to uphold workers’ rights and human rights, when their own plans have long been to dismantle these protections to make the UK more “competitive” for business.
The case left-wing case for an exit, or “Lexit”, has been made with the claims that the EU is a liberal capitalist organisation, and deals like TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) will have a negative impact on workers’ lives. Whether TTIP will be passed by the EU in its current form is up for debate, but even if it is there is evidence to say that a Tory government wouldn’t introduce a similar treaty between the US and UK directly if we voted leave. This is exactly the kind of deal the Leave campaign have promised to bring in to ease trading relations between the UK and elsewhere – if anything the terms could be more onerous because the UK would have less bargaining power.
Rather than play into the hands of the right, the left should be standing together to make a case to Remain in the EU and then try to make reforms from within. There is a democratic deficit, with the appointed Council the body able to propose laws rather than the directly elected Parliament, and there is plenty of waste, but they can be reformed.
David Cameron failed to gain any meaningful reforms from the EU because he went to Brussels thinking he could bully a 27-state union into submission in order to quell what was at the time an internal spat within his own party. And the reforms he wanted, such as changes to free movement of people, are sacrosanct within the EU project.
However, there is wide support across the EU for major reforms. Many would like to see a more democratic system, with both houses elected by the European public, and all see the monthly upheaval of the European Parliament between Strasbourg and Brussels as a farce – it is a failure of Cameron’s diplomacy that he did not use his chance to reform the EU by pushing for these changes.
The EU in its current incarnation does need reform to better serve all the people within its boundaries, but staying in the union is the only way to get those changes made.
