Abstract
The Brexit debate has highlighted major divides within British politics and the politics of the left. During the referendum campaign, the Labour Party seemed to divide roughly between lukewarm support for Remain among the new Corbyn leadership, and enthusiasm from the party’s more liberal or centrist membership and, especially, parliamentary elite. Likewise, the trade union movement saw most unions – with the exception of the more militant Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) – support Remain. In contrast, some on the far left advocated Lexit, in opposition to the neoliberal European Union (EU), most notably the Socialist Workers Party. This then combined with the fact that a significant proportion of the Labour Party’s natural constituency voted Brexit, and that low income correlated with support for the Leave vote. That lower income voters also adopted a position that contrasted with that of most of the political elite has also been interpreted by many as a sign that Leave was an anti-establishment vote, as well as being prompted by fears that falling wages resulted from heightened immigration. Since the Brexit vote took place, however, we have seen growing concern that the effect will be detrimental for workers’ rights, and produce damaging divisions, especially between those same groups with low incomes, and increase the potential for xenophobia, racism and racially motivated abuse and violence.
Brexit therefore clearly raises difficult questions for anti-capitalists. As such, Capital and Class has put together the present forum in an attempt to foster further discussion around the issue, specifically from the perspective of class struggle and what the vote means for the left. This forum therefore represents an attempt to bring together a number of important contributions to the debate, reflecting a range of positions that are united only by the fact that we share a concern for how class struggle can be advanced in the complex context of Brexit. The forum initially arose from a roundtable debate which took place at the British International Studies Association-International Political Economy Group (BISA-IPEG) annual conference, at Leeds Beckett University in October 2016. The roundtable highlighted the contentious nature of the Brexit issue, and as such we have since sought to turn contributions to that roundtable into the written contributions in the following pages.
In that earlier roundtable, each contributor was asked to consider the issues raised by Brexit, specifically in terms of the impact that it would have upon class struggle: How can we avoid any economic harm that might result from Brexit falling on the shoulders of the least privileged? How do we avoid an exacerbation of nationalism and the scapegoating of migrant workers? What should class struggle look like in the context of deep political divisions and a potential Brexit-induced economic crisis? How should workers organise in the current context? How does Brexit impact upon the parliamentary left, the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership? And who, anyway, is the ‘working class’ in this new Brexit context?
The responses to these questions were, perhaps predictably, not straightforward. The decision to hold a Brexit referendum represented a compromise between the more pro-market, pro-austerity wing of the Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, and its more traditionalist, anti-immigration wing, particularly prevalent among the party membership and represented at the parliamentary level by Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Redwood, Iain Duncan Smith and Bill Cash (Moore 2015). Either outcome that the referendum offered, therefore, was likely to be unpalatable to the left. Faced with a choice between pro-market, austerity-focused neoliberalism and anti-immigrant nationalism, it was always difficult to see how the referendum could end well for those in Britain seeking to advance some form of egalitarian politics. Despite this, the fact that the Leave vote was most popular amongst both the low paid and those regions where austerity measures had been most sharply felt (Becker et al. 2016), combined with the fact that the majority of the mainstream political elite advocated a vote for Remain, ensured that the Leave vote was at the same time considered an act of rebellion by the so-called ‘left behind’ working class (Ford & Goodwin 2017). Given all of this, it would be surprising if Brexit did produce a straightforward response from those on the left of the political spectrum.
Perhaps the point on which contributions to this forum do agree, is that any response to Brexit requires a continued need to build collective campaigns around principles of solidarity. In her article highlighting the vitality of a number of on-going and contemporary struggles, conducted by precarious workers, Kelly Rogers shows how, rather than representing a plight on the so-called ‘native’ working class, migrant workers are in fact, often by necessity, more able and/or willing to organise in such a way that secures an improvement in pay, working conditions and job security, for all precarious workers. Likewise, as Sanaz Raji points out in her reflections on the post-referendum anti-Brexit campaign and the emergence of new forms of migrant-rights activism, it is all too easy for the perceived negative connotations of Brexit to result in an unthinking association between the EU and a sense of progressive politics. Yet, it is difficult to consider the EU a progressive endeavour when its militarised borders have contributed to the deaths of over 15,000 non-EU migrants. Similarly, there is something problematic when campaigns for ‘migrant rights’ are de facto translated into demands for ‘EU migrant rights’.
There needs, therefore, to be continued and sustained social struggle, informed by principles of social solidarity. But the question, perhaps, is whether this is something that would be (or would have been) best pursued within the EU, or whether it is better off taking place outside of it. As Owen Worth shows in his article, it was the conviction by many on the political left, that something within the institutions of the EU fundamentally precludes the pursuit of solidaristic struggles, which prompted the emergence of the so-called ‘Lexit’ position. Yet as Worth also argues, this position failed to properly consider the likely outcome of the Brexit vote, and the way it would facilitate an even more inhospitable political environment for the left, now that we appear to have the conditions in place for an ultra-neoliberal socio-economy, both promoted and legitimated by a nationalist and xenophobic discourse engendered by the very act of seeking to negotiate the process of achieving Brexit. Similarly, as Phoebe Moore highlights, the EU may have its faults but it has also created a number of important workers’ rights, many of which we stand to lose at the hands of a Conservative ‘hard Brexit’. In this sense, the campaign for the continued free movement of labour is an important and fundamental demand, around which contemporary class struggle can and should be built.
A further question, therefore, is whether the benefits arising from the workers’ rights that have become enshrined in EU law are themselves nevertheless offset by the EU’s market liberalisation project, which much of the EU’s employment legislation has arguably in part been adopted to help create. That is, whether the legislation that is typically heralded by sections of the left as a development in ‘Social Europe’, is outweighed by the neoliberal, pro-market, pro-austerity consensus that has typically prevailed at the supranational level (Bailey 2017). Certainly, it would seem that sections of the British working class appear to have taken this less optimistic view. As Jamie Gough argues in his article, the Leave vote represented the only feasible coping strategy for sections of the British working class, in the context in which they found themselves at the time of the referendum vote. Our hope for internationalist class struggle to emerge, and be successful, therefore needs also to consider ways in which this can be a feasible strategy, in order to be one that can be adopted by working-class people.
Without offering a definitive answer to the question of what class struggle looks like, or should look like, after Brexit, we therefore nevertheless hope that the contributions that make up this forum at least provide an opportunity to consider the obstacles that we currently face and some suggestions for how they might be overcome.