RENEGOTIATION of the Northern Ireland Protocol signalled the desire of the British ruling class for rapprochement with the EU. 

Most of big business and its Tory government never wanted Brexit. The CBI, the Institute of Directors, the City banks and all the major employers’ federations urged the electorate to stay in the EU and its single market. 

They put their money where their mouths were, helping the Remain campaign outspend Leave by £19 million to £13m, while the Cameron-Osborne government spent £9m sending a pro-EU brochure to every household in Britain.

The militarisation of the EU and its ever closer alignment with Nato — sparked by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty and boosted further by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — has already deepened military and security collaboration between Britain and EU member states.

European Political Community

The Ukraine war has also provided the pretext for establishing the European Political Community (EPC), an intergovernmental forum which includes Britain and most other European states.

It promotes further co-operation in military, migration, energy and climate matters and in 2024 Britain will host the fourth EPC forum.

The original EPC was proposed in 1952 as part of the cold war against the Soviet Union. 

A European parliament, president and government would rule western Europe including a European defence community (EDC).

The scheme was scuppered two years later when communist deputies in the French national assembly rejected the planned EDC with its rearmament of West Germany. 

The European Economic Community was then set up instead, followed later by the political and military structures of the EU that exist today.

Financial services

Undoubtedly, leaving the EU and its single market in 2020-21 has created problems for British capital. Aggravated by Covid, its severe recession and an erratic recovery, red tape and delays at ports have affected both imports and exports. 

Although the UK-EU 2020 Trade and Co-operation Agreement provides for tariff-free trade in most goods and free access for a range of services, difficulties exist over “level playing field” issues such as taxation, state subsidies and labour and environmental standards.

In particular, the withdrawal of Britain’s powerful financial services sector from the EU regulatory structure has disrupted market access in both directions.

Efforts to agree a joint approach to regulatory co-operation have stalled. The Tory government’s Financial Services and Markets Bill — backed by Labour and designed to woo the City of London — sows the seeds of future divergence.

That said, City institutions could yet be won to a UK-EU agreement that expands their profit-making operations more than it restricts them.

Claims that the Square Mile fears new EU rules on transparency and tax avoidance are grossly exaggerated. Most of the measures proposed by the EU were already in operation in Britain before the referendum. Others are weak enough to have little impact on the world’s most experienced financial laundrette and casino.

Those sections of monopoly capital seeking greater reintegration into the EU single market are looking to the review of the Trade and Co-operation Agreement scheduled for 2025. 

It could open the way to Britain joining the European Economic Area with its free movement of cheap labour, perhaps via the European Free Trade Association.

More realistically, given the anti-migrant rhetoric of the Tory and Labour Party leaderships, it could lead to some kind of UK-EU customs union.

Of course, the longer-term aim of irreconcilable anti-Brexiters is to overturn Brexit altogether and take Britain back fully into the EU.

The Ditchley Park conclave

Supporters of both perspectives met in conclave at Ditchley Park conference centre in rural Oxfordshire early in February.  

Chaired by arch-plotter Lord Peter Mandelson, others present included Labour’s shadow foreign secretary David Lammy and defence secretary John Healey, all zealous supporters of the EU-Nato bloc.

From the Tory side came pro-Brexit campaigners such as senior Cabinet minister Michael Gove, former Tory leader Michael Howard and ex-chancellor Norman Lamont, as well as pro-EU ex-Europe minister David Lidington.

But that’s not all. 

Big business chiefs John Symonds (GlaxoSmithKline, GSK) and former Brexit negotiator Oliver Robbins (now with Goldman Sachs) also attended, alongside senior ex-Treasury official Tom Scholar and Nato assistant secretary-general Andrew Lapsley.

Big pharma company GSK and top merchant bank Goldman Sachs were enthusiastic backers of the pro-EU Remain campaign in 2016.

The Ditchley Park cabal discussed documents referring to Brexit “acting as a drag on our growth and inhibiting the UK’s potential.”

Many participants lamented a loss of British strategic influence in the world.

According to the documentation, Britain and the EU share the same interests when it comes to corporate technology, energy resources, illegal immigration, “defence” policy, confronting Russia and developing a “fully co-ordinated policy on dealing with China.” 

Imperialists of Britain and Europe, unite! 

Certainly, Tory governments, Labour leaders (whether social democratic or neoliberal), the EU and Nato share the same outlook when it comes to Western superiority, capitalism and socialism.

Mainstream Tory Brexiteers such as Gove and Sunak fear that their party risks losing support from sections of pro-EU monopoly capital.

They have been spooked by Keir Starmer’s fresh drive — echoes of the Blair-Brown “prawn cocktail” offensive in the mid 1990s — to win FTSE bosses to the party’s business-friendly agenda.

One measure of the drive’s success is Labour’s £2 million gift from Lord Sainsbury — chief funder of the Remain campaign — together with other donations from energy, accountancy and PR firms.

Anti-Brexit myths

Naturally, pro-EU zealots have seized upon every mishap since 2016 as proof that Brexit is already a “catastrophe.” It is held responsible for the flatlining of Britain’s economy, as though Covid never happened.

Something that definitely didn’t happen was the immediate slump and mass unemployment predicted by Chancellor George Osborne and the Bank of England should Britain vote Leave in June 2016. 

Nor, despite frequent forecasts to the contrary, has the Northern Ireland Protocol tipped that province into bloody sectarian civil war. The disappointment is palpable.

Guardian columnist Martin Kettle’s claim that the same racist “bubble of Anglosphere exceptionalism” produced both Brexit and the poor form of the English cricket team collapsed in 2022 as England went on to beat New Zealand, India, South Africa and Pakistan.

Undaunted, pro-EU fanatics are determined to rewrite history. 

There was, allegedly, little opposition to the EU and its Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties until David Cameron foolishly decided to consult the pig-ignorant electorate. Pre-2016 opinion polls show otherwise. 

Remainers then fought a righteous referendum campaign against mighty odds, robbed of victory only by the counting of votes. They then denounced referendums as the tool of fascist demagogues, before demanding a second one.

Apparently, Leave campaigners — assisted by Vladimir Putin’s bots and oligarchs — had duped 17.4 million gullible, undereducated, elderly, racist northerners into voting for Brexit. They yearned for the return of blue passports and the British empire.

The Ashcroft survey of 13,000 referendum voters indicated, rather, that the most popular reason for supporting Brexit was the restoration of democratic sovereignty and that a small majority of left-of-centre voters opted for Leave. 

For haters of “Brexshit,” the biggest lie was the pledge emblazoned on a Leave campaign bus to save £350m a week in contributions to the EU and spend it on the NHS instead.

Yet this pledge has been honoured, according to the King’s Fund. Even past its Covid peak, spending on the NHS is now £752m a week higher in real terms (at present-day prices) than in 2015.

Nonetheless, England is doomed now that Tory-Brexit lies and corruption have taken root. It’s as though the lies of empire, atomic weapons, Iran, Suez, Bloody Sunday and Iraq never happened.

No stink of corruption ever surrounded political party funding, the honours system, Saudi Arabian arms deals, parliamentary expenses or privatisation.

Without EU protection, we will lose our trade union freedoms — although EU membership did nothing to block a dozen Tory anti-union laws after 1979.

The real issue is whether our working-class movement will fight to retain and restore its freedoms. 

Brexit benefits? 

Critics are on more solid ground when they ask where are the benefits of Brexit.

True, EU public procurement rules have been relaxed in order to benefit local businesses. VAT on sanitary products has been abolished (but not in the EU).

A new deal with the EU has has expanded Britain’s fishing quotas in British waters. Scotland and Wales have repatriated scores of mostly minor powers from Brussels (while others are being centralised in Westminster and Whitehall).

However, post-Brexit freedoms have not been used to reform or abolish VAT altogether, rebuild progressive regional development and agricultural policies, regulate the movement of capital or invest state-backed capital in renationalised rail and postal services. 

Under cover of Brexit, the 2020 Internal Market Act robbed the Scottish and Welsh parliaments of key economic and financial powers.

How different it might have been had Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to victory in 2019. And who organised the sabotage from within Labour’s own ranks?

Those devout EU disciples Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Tom Watson, Hilary Benn and Keir Starmer who hung the “second referendum” noose around their party’s neck.

Fooling the electors 

Nowadays, Starmer understands that Labour cannot win the next general election without regaining many of the 52 Leave-voting seats it lost last time.

Most of them are marginal, former Labour voters having abstained rather than switch to the Tories.

Even so, Starmer’s pledge to keep Britain out of the EU and its single market should fool nobody.

As prime minister, backed by Sainsbury and co, he would be looking for some kind of free trade or customs agreement as a step towards rejoining the EU.

For now, the capitalist classes of Europe still have more in common than divides them. 

They want to suppress political and industrial rebellion at home, subjugate a disobedient and maverick Russia, maintain their super-exploitation of the Third World, contain emerging powers such as Brazil and India and put China back in its box under Western economic, political and military domination.