The Leverage of Restructuring

Although he is sold on this wholly unnecessary referendum business, and although he carelessly leaves open the suggestion that somehow we need the EU in order to deliver "working hours and employment protection, and guaranteed holidays", Seamas Milne writes:

For a generation now the Tories have shown a heroic instinct for self-immolation over Europe. Whatever deal or concession is made, it can be relied on not to last. In January, David Cameron was supposed to have shot Ukip's fox and bought off his restive backbenchers with the promise of an in-out EU referendum by 2017.

But a fortnight ago the rightwing anti-Brussels populists took a quarter of the vote in local elections, and now Downing Street is in disarray as Tory cabinet ministers prepare to abstain on a critical referendum amendment to their government programme put down by their own backbenchers.

The prime minister has rushed to produce a bill to set the referendum commitment in legal stone – though it stands no chance of being passed. Cameron even had to call in support for his negotiate-first-vote-later line from the US president to shore up his position.

In the end it will be Ed Miliband, however, who digs him out of his latest hole. Instead of abstaining and sending Cameron to humiliating defeat at the hands of his own party, Labour MPs have been told to oppose the Tory referendum amendment – for fear of giving ground to the demand for a popular vote.

The Tory backbenchers, who are out for Cameron's scalp, will be back. As two former Conservative chancellors have come out in favour of leaving the EU, and cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Philip Hammond have said they'd vote no if there were a referendum now, Tory pressure for withdrawal has gone critical. It's the bandwagon for the small-state, anti-immigrant UK Independence party – running at 18% and taking lumps out of the Tory vote – that's made the difference, of course.

A good part of Ukip's bubble is as much a xenophobic expression of powerlessness and falling living standards as it is of opposition to the EU, which is well down most voters' priority lists. In a sense, the rise of a rightwing nationalist party only brings Britain into line with the continental norm and has coincided this month with a drop in support for EU withdrawal from 51% to 43%.

But public opinion remains overwhelmingly in favour of a referendum. And, as elsewhere in Europe, the only reason the political elite continues to resist giving people a vote on such a fundamental and changed constitutional relationship is because it fears it may not get the right result.

That's clearly an unsustainable anti-democratic nonsense, which will poison the political water until it's corrected. Unlike in other parts of Europe, where opposition to the EU or its policies has straddled the political spectrum, in Britain it has been dominated since the late 80s by the fake patriots of the Tory right and their cheerleading press. While claiming to champion national and democratic sovereignty against an unaccountable Europe, they're more than happy to swallow subordination to the United States and the City of London. So if Cameron and the Tories are able to monopolise the campaign to change the EU relationship, it's clear what the negotiation will be all about.

Top of the list will be protection of the financial interests that crashed the British economy, along with the ditching of some of the things most British people actually like about the EU, such as working hours and employment protection, and guaranteed holidays.

Cameron hopes to claim victory with some retrograde opt-outs and thus back a yes vote. That would be bad enough, but a successful Tory-led campaign to pull out of the EU would risk unleashing a carnival of reaction, anti-migrant hysteria, more attacks on social rights, and a further lurch to the right.

What has been almost entirely missing from the mainstream British public debate has been the progressive case for fundamental change that has been central to the struggle over the EU and its treaties in mainland Europe. In the 1975 referendum, the left case against the then common market was that it was a cold war customs union against the developing world that would block socialist reforms. But the modern EU has gone much further, giving a failed neoliberal model of capitalism the force of treaty, entrenching deregulation and privatisation and enforcing corporate power over employment rights. 

Claims that the single market would boost growth have proved groundless. But the EU's profoundly undemocratic and dysfunctional structures have been brutally exposed by the eurozone crisis and the devastation wreaked by Troika-imposed austerity.

The fallout from that crisis means the EU will in any case have to be restructured. Given those circumstances and the Tory commitment, it would be both wrong in principle and politically foolish for Labour not to back a referendum.

Miliband worries that a referendum would dominate a Labour government's agenda. But denying the voters a say would make it less likely Labour would be elected in the first place. The Labour leader has already argued for "comprehensive" EU reform, including of restrictions on state aid and intervention. In office, he would need to go a lot further in using the leverage of restructuring to negotiate change, in alliance with others across Europe. But a progressive package of demands should also shift the shape of a subsequent referendum.

What would be fatal would be to allow the nationalist right to continue to dictate the EU agenda and wrap itself in the mantle of democratic legitimacy. The terms of debate have to change – for the sake of both Britain and Europe.