Britain’s Right will soon be clamouring to rejoin the EU – and the Left will be defending Brexit
The attitude you have towards Brexit and the EU is one of the clearest indicators of where you stand politically. If you are a Remainer who regrets Brexit and wants to rejoin the Single Market or even the EU then you are almost certainly on the centre to Left of the political spectrum. If however you were an ardent Leaver and still support Brexit even if disappointed with the failure to take advantage of it, then you are fairly sure to be on the Right. There are clearly some exceptions – such as the few advocates of Lexit, including Mick Lynch – but the general rule holds.
This is because Brexit stands as a proxy roughly speaking for a range of views on other issues, notably migration, and shows where you stand on the increasingly dominant issue in politics, that of nationalism versus globalism and traditional identity versus self-definition. The liberal cosmopolitans identify their views with the EU and their opponents’ with Brexit. History suggests that this state of affairs may not be permanent.
It is hard to imagine now but at one time support for leaving the EEC (as it then was) was a defining Left-wing position while the Right (including people like Mrs Thatcher) were strongly in favour of closer links with Europe. It was Thatcher who championed the European Single Market. In 1983 leaving the EEC was a central part of the Labour Party’s programme, while anti-EEC Conservatives were a small and scattered remnant – rather like today’s Lexiteers.
All this changed between roughly 1987 and 1993. Conservatives became increasingly sceptical or even hostile towards the European project as they became aware of the goal of closer union it had since its emergence in the 1950s. The Left came to see the EU as the bulwark for its values of social liberalism and an interventionist form of market economy. A sudden swap of positions happened.
Something similar could happen over the next decade. The liberal Left will fall out of love with European politics and become alienated from the direction the EU is taking. The Right meanwhile will become more attracted to them and will see the EU as the best vehicle for realising its goals. Supporting rejoining will become a Right-wing or even far Right cause while opposing this and supporting closer links with the US will be the Left.
One reason is the direction European politics is taking. The liberal Left’s projection onto the EU of its values on issues such as immigration and national identity versus cosmopolitanism reflects their ignorance of what is actually going on. Across Europe the trend is towards nationalist populism and ever harsher policies on immigration. As the UK Left and Right become aware of this – maybe after an event such as an RN win in France or the AfD entering government in Germany –their feelings will switch.
The other factor is the transformation of the British Right by culture wars politics. Increasingly the Right is defined by opposition to a kind of cultural politics that originates in the US. As European countries like Hungary become the exemplars of an alternative to that, the EU becomes attractive as both the place where Right politics is strongest and as a geopolitical check on the cultural dominance of the US. Most of the Right will become less Atlanticist and more sympathetic to Continental conservative traditions.
Political switches of this kind happen suddenly but once they happen we quickly forget that things were once different. In fifteen years it will be taken for granted that to be on the Left is to be Eurosceptic while sympathy for the European project is a feature of the Right. The memories of the way things are now will soon fade, just as the bitter debate of the 1980s is now forgotten.
