EEC withdrawal: left or right?

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NEIL Kinnock has switched his position on the EEC, abandoning the call for withdrawal.

For labour movement activists it will be a new warning that Kinnock cannot be trusted an inch. For Kinnock's vocally anti-EEC trade union backers like Clive Jenkins and Moss Evans, it will be an embarrassment.

But it may also help to raise broader questions. Some of us have argued for many years that there is nothing left wing about British withdrawal from the EEC - but we have been very much in a minority.

Now, in the election for Labour leader, the main prowithdrawal candidate will be Peter Shore.

Eric Heffer, questioned on the EEC issue in Tribune last week, was a bit evasive but eventually said what some of us have been saying for a long time:

'I would think that rather than us getting bogged down in an argument about being in or out of the Market, what we really ought to be doing is building up connections with European socialists and developing a programme for a socialist Europe on a wider basis."

These shifts are a response to the widespread hostility from working class voters on the doorsteps to Labour's EEC withdrawal policy.

Arguments against EEC entry, and then for withdrawal, have been pumped out for over 20 years. Until quite recently they had a majority of working class opinion behind them.

Voters saw EEC withdrawal as leading to a disastrous loss of trade for Britain. They were fundamentally right. Over Kinnock 30% of Britain's national income is foreign trade; and over 40% of that trade (as against less than 20% in 1965) is with the EEC.

Unless EEC withdrawal were coupled with negotiation of some associate status which would minimise its effects (as almost certainly it would bel, it would be an economic disaster for Britain.

Brussels In the 1970s, blaming 'Brussels' for Britain's economic ills was plausible and popular. After four new years of world slump, it rings very hollow. The clock of international capitalist integration cannot be turned back. Like the rest of the 'siege economy' Alternative Economic Strategy' British withdrawal from the EEC is now seen by more and more workers as an irrelevant and gimmicky response to capitalism's crisis.

Another reflection of this is the recent proposals from West European Socialist or Labour parties and trade unions for a European AES' - promoted most strongly in Britain by Labour MP Stuart Holland.

Holland still calls for British withdrawal, arguing that this Euro-AES means "joint progressive action by countries in and out of the EEC" . but the progressive idea contained in the Euro-AES (amidst, in my view, a lot of muddle) - i.e. the need for a common strategy by the European labour movement - contradicts Holland's own key argument for EEC withdrawal, "regaining autonomy". The project of British "autonomy' is utopian and diversionary.

Backward

Kinnock, characteristically, could only find the most backward nationalist terms in which to express a new position: "our policy must make the interests of the British people paramount. We cannot accept anything less than Gaullist reformism as our policy towards the EEC."

But perhaps the new shakeup in labour movement thinking on the EEC will lead others to internationalist conclusions: that the answer to European capitalist integration is not British withdrawal, but cross-Europe links between workers; not 'capitalism in one country', but a European workers' government; not British sovereignty, but maximum Europe-wide integration of the fight for workers' sovereignty.

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Agenda no.138 June

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by Martin Thomas