{"id":892407,"date":"2026-04-14T01:51:24","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T01:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/892407\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T01:51:24","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T01:51:24","slug":"alignment-with-the-eu-wont-help-workers-and-is-a-political-trap-for-the-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/892407\/","title":{"rendered":"Alignment with the EU won\u2019t help workers \u2014 and is a political trap for the left"},"content":{"rendered":"

LABOUR\u2019S plan to bring in a law allowing \u201cdynamic alignment\u201d with EU single market rules,<\/a> so these can be adopted without proper parliamentary scrutiny, should be opposed on both political and economic\u00a0grounds.<\/p>\n

Ministers claim shredding \u201cBrexit red tape\u201d will make things easier for exporters, particularly farmers, but there is a difference between treaty-based agreements on food quality or animal welfare and the wider imposition of single market rules which tie government hands when it comes to subsidies or\u00a0procurement.<\/p>\n

Some argue Brexit was \u201cmis-sold\u201d to the British people because promised benefits have not arrived. We are on dangerous ground if this is used as an excuse to renege on the letter or spirit of a democratic vote, however \u2014 after all the same could be said of most elected\u00a0governments.<\/p>\n

The potential benefits of leaving the EU always depended on winning socialist policies in\u00a0Britain.<\/p>\n

At the time of the EU referendum, we had a left-led Labour opposition committed to re-establishing public ownership of significant sectors of the economy and intervening in the market where this served the public interest \u2014 policies which would have run up against EU rules on competition and state\u00a0aid.<\/p>\n

The hopes the Morning Star and other \u201cleft Leave\u201d supporters had of Brexit were linked to the election of a Jeremy Corbyn-led government: and that did not come to pass partly because much of the left succeeded in turning the Corbyn movement against the referendum result, which undermined its insurgent credentials and tied it up in debilitating parliamentary\u00a0manoeuvring.<\/p>\n

Subsequent Tory and Labour governments have remained wedded to a dysfunctional neoliberal economic model, so the greater freedom to restructure the economy we have outside the EU has not been used much in\u00a0practice.<\/p>\n

But claims that Brexit is to blame for Britain\u2019s economic problems are without\u00a0foundation.<\/p>\n

Starry-eyed views of the EU as a beacon of tolerant liberalism, counterposed to the racist right in Britain, always relied on ignoring the actual politics of the EU and its member states \u2014 with the rise of the far right in France, Italy, Germany and other countries just as prominent as here, and the EU itself adopting increasingly racist border policies leading to mass drownings of refugees in the Mediterranean, and now featuring legislation for third-country detention camps akin to the Tories\u2019 repugnant Rwanda\u00a0scheme.<\/p>\n

Attributing Britain\u2019s lacklustre growth to Brexit rests on similar ignorance about conditions across Europe. Economic stagnation is the pattern across the continent. The British economy has grown since 2016 at a similar pace to the French, and faster than the German or\u00a0Italian.<\/p>\n

Britain\u2019s low productivity, stemming from a refusal by private capital to invest in the productive economy<\/a> when greater profits can be reaped through property speculation and fleecing the public sector, pre-dates Brexit and would not be addressed by a return to the\u00a0EU.<\/p>\n

So much for the economics. The political problems with a revival of pro-EU sentiment on the left are deeper\u00a0still.<\/p>\n

They rest on the assumption that the route to prosperity is \u201cfree trade\u201d when the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour serves capital, not labour. EU single market rules would impede public procurement policies to support domestic industry or agriculture, like a commitment to use British steel in government manufacturing contracts or to supply public-sector institutions like schools with locally grown\u00a0food.<\/p>\n

Blaming Brexit rather than capitalism for the steady immiseration of working-class people hugely underrates the problem we face and limits our ambitions for change\u00a0correspondingly.<\/p>\n

It also risks repeating the culture-war confrontations of the late 2010s which only served to divide the working class and ensured that the left-led government that seemed so close in 2017 never came to\u00a0power.<\/p>\n

The left needs to learn from the mistakes of those years. Reopening the Brexit question would be to repeat\u00a0them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LABOUR\u2019S plan to bring in a law allowing \u201cdynamic alignment\u201d with EU single market rules, so these can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":892408,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-892407","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116400559773844981","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892407\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/892408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}