Upstream - Sneak Peak: Why the Radical Left Voted to Leave Europe (Joseph Choonara)

Episode Date: June 25, 2016

"Neoliberalism has become embedded in the very DNA of the European Union." It was not just the Right in the UK that voted to leave the EU. Listen to our interview with Joseph Choonara of the Social Worker's Party to hear why some factions of the radical Left in Britain decided that they've had enough of the European Union.

You're listening to an Upstream Sneak Peek with Joseph Chouinara, member of the Socialist Workers' Party and the spokesperson for Lexit, the left-leave campaign for Brexit. For us, it's an argument that goes back a long time in British politics. Really, if you take the last referendum in the 1970s on membership of one of the European Union's predecessor bodies, most of the radical left were opposed to membership on the basis that what we were being asked to join at that time was essentially a large capitalist organization that would be involved in driving for attacks on working class people. What's happened since then has, if anything, reinforced

that impression of the European Union. You see, if you look at the most recent phase, and in particular, if you look at Greece, the European Union has been the key body driving for austerity in Greek society with an incredibly detrimental impact on Greek people. In France at the moment, where there's a huge battle going on between government and labor unions, students and so on, over the implementation of a new labor law, the European Union doesn't simply support the government led by François Hollande. It recommended many of the attacks that Hollande is currently trying to force through. In instance after instance, you can see the European Union acting as a manager, often a quite dysfunctional manager, of neoliberal capitalism. And it plays this role not just in Europe, but on a global scale underneath the ultimate authority of the US.

The European Union is sort of like a second partner to the US trying to manage global capitalism. the US trying to manage global capitalism. So for all these reasons, we thought that it was important that there was a left critique of the European Union within the campaign. Part of the difficulty is that much of the more mainstream left, the social democratic left, the trade unions and so on, moved to a much more favourable estimation of the European Union in the 1980s. The reasons for that were largely to do with the rise of Thatcherism in Britain, Reagan in America played a similar role, in which unions and the Labour Party came to see the European Union as a sort of barrier against that neoliberal offensive. What I think that misses is the extent to which neoliberalism has become embedded in the very DNA of the European

Union. And in a sense, the European Union now reflects that Thatcherite, Reaganite drive across the whole of Europe. So that's the reasons really why we established the Exit Left Leave campaign. It's a fairly small campaign, a modest campaign, but we thought it was important there was a left voice calling for exit..