02.07.2026

Ten years after

Brexit went hand-in-hand with the promise of national freedom, economic dynamism, the shredding of bureaucratic regulations and a massive NHS spending boost. Few would argue nowadays that anything like that has been delivered, writes Paul Demarty

It is now 10 years since the Brexit referendum took place and so, unsurprisingly, there is a great deal of retrospection going on. Politicians, pundits and the rest, on all sides of the old debate, are fighting to determine the meaning of this event in memory. All claim to have been vindicated by subsequent history, but all are deluded.

That, in the end, is the meaning of Brexit - for Brexiteers and remainers alike: merely that it became such an inexhaustible source of self-deceit, of victories forever just around the corner, of impossibly contradictory expectations that could never be realised and only managed by the poor sods who were put in charge.

There was always something illusory about it. Telling the story must, in the end, return us to the beginning of the cold war, and the reshuffle of leadership roles in the west. Alex Gordon, general secretary of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, and perhaps the country’s least repentant Lexiteer, has this part of the history roughly right in his own anniversary piece, so we may as well quote him (since we are going to be rather mean to him later on):

The Suez debacle was the moment when Britain’s ruling class was forced abruptly to come to terms with its subaltern role in the new cold war world order. France continued to fight and lose bloody and disastrous colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. Britain’s rulers opted to become the US poodle. A core element of the US geopolitical strategy was to use Britain’s ruling class as an agent inside the European Economic Community (later the European Union), founded with the 1957 Treaty of Rome, one year after the Suez crisis.¹

Thus, when Britain finally entered the EEC, it was as a US hireling, “with a mission to promote US banking, commercial and strategic interests”. Here, we meet a certain blind spot of Gordon’s - he prefers to focus on the EEC’s and later EU’s pro-market policies, putting “strategic interests” last, but that was foremost for the Americans. Britain served their interests in preventing a European superpower from arising to meaningfully challenge the US for hegemony within the cold war and post-cold war west. We pushed the EU to expand, thereby reducing its strategic and political coherence.

Britain’s role in the EU and its predecessors, in other words, was always Janus-faced, involving a fundamental strategic dishonesty. And so the debate over British membership in the European confederations has, likewise, always been athwart the basic reality. The story must be told separately, really, about the bourgeois parties and especially the Conservative Party, as well as about the left. It was the Conservatives - once they were reconciled to their new role as ‘Greece to the new Rome’ - who took the initiative to bring Britain in, succeeding finally during Edward Heath’s government in 1973.

Splits

Back then, however, the Tories were already split on it. The far right of the party, including standard-bearer Enoch Powell, but also the then-infamous Monday Club of Tory MPs, were in uproar. Their rightism was deeply nostalgic for empire, and they had not been disabused of their nostalgia, as they should have been, by Suez. This was a weak point in the mainline-Tory armour; this faction, of course, could not openly admit the extent to which Britain’s global power had been truncated by World War II and its aftermath (thus self-serving analogies like Greece and Rome).

With the downfall of Heath’s government, membership of Europe was put, for the first time, to a referendum vote by Harold Wilson. That brings us to the left. In the cold war context, the ‘official’ CPGB and its fellow travellers in the Labour Party followed the diplomatic line of the Soviet Union, which was essentially to avoid provocations in western Europe and secure, in the long run, friendly neutrality in those countries. The EEC was seen, not unreasonably, as the civilian counterpart to Nato, likewise a US-dominated alliance structure. Most of the further-left effectively tailed the CPGB on this point.

The short-term result was that both the Tories and Labour were, each of them, split. A Labour left strongly influenced by the CPGB opposed membership of the EEC, and they found very unlikely allies among the likes of Powell, who famously shared platforms with technocrat-turned-leftist Tony Benn (the two had encountered each other during the war, in fact, and according to Benn later on, retained some kind of residual friendship, in spite of their extreme opposition in politics). Opposed to them were the Atlanticist-realist factions of both parties, the Labour right and the Tory-mainstream éminences grises.

The pro-Europeans carried the day in the 1975 referendum, but the post-war settlement at large was on its last legs, and so the politics of EEC membership began to change. The Tories chose as leader Margaret Thatcher, a representative of the extreme pro-market ‘new right’ faction, and during her long reign she sought to push Europe in the direction of serving as essentially a free-trade zone (tariffs still existed in the EEC). This effort culminated in the 1986 Single European Act, which set in motion what later became the Maastricht Treaty.

Already by this point, however, Thatcher’s attitude had cooled markedly. The suggestion that she might have to accept some kind of compromise in the direction of European social democracy drove her mad. In a famous speech in Bruges in 1988, she fumed: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” This, among other things, began to fracture her support among Tory MPs, contributing to her downfall in 1990.

The end of the cold war all but removed the old left from the scene altogether. So much was invested in the USSR as an alternative pole of power, even by people who would not have thought themselves terribly pro-Soviet. (It is strange even now reading the Morning Star’s coverage of the Europe issue: not so much a case of ‘generals without armies’ as ‘tankies without tanks’.) With the left marginalised so, the Europe issue was repolarised once again: on the one side, a broad consensus of capitalist politicians, in Tory and (New) Labour variants, and on the other, the Tory right. While she remained in relatively strong health, Thatcher could serve as the Eurosceptic figurehead from the back benches and then the Lords.

Yet to look at the Europe debate in those days in primarily Westminster-political terms would be too restrictive. It was in that period that the rightwing press truly began to drive Euroscepticism. Journalists for the Murdoch papers and others - including a certain Boris Johnson - began to retail endless stories about largely-factitious Brussels regulations (straight bananas, smaller condoms to flatter the Italians …). And, whenever the EU, as it was by then, was enlarged, there was a new hurricane of nativist hysteria about who was about to arrive, mob-handed, to take our jobs.

Referendum

From there we can skip forward: the fundamental dynamic remained as it was: the Tory right and reactionary press permanently leading the charge against Europe; with Labour and the Tory moderates, integrated more closely with US statecraft, favouring a one-foot-in approach, so as to prevent the emergence of a powerful European bloc that could become a real great-power competitor. This was an asymmetric war, at least in terms of feeling. The Eurosceptics could go full-bore; the pro-Europeans, however, always had to maintain a certain distance and disrupt closer integration of the EU, so as to follow US strategy.

When Tory prime minister David Cameron finally promised a referendum, hoping to shore up his right flank enough to prevent an outright Labour victory in the 2015 general election, he anticipated another coalition government, and the fanatically pro-European Liberal Democrats would ‘force’ him to stay his hand. But he had so successfully ensured that shit would roll downhill onto his junior partners that the Lib Dems were all but wiped out, and the Tories won outright. He then hoped that the inertia of the status quo would save him. Indeed, even the Mail on Sunday backed ‘remain’ in 2016. Yet the result was otherwise.

The trouble was that the rightwing press campaign was always a pack of lies. There was no great recovery of sovereignty on the other side of Brexit - indeed the UK was never primarily subordinated to Brussels, but to Washington. The particular motives of the Brexit constituencies were subjected to almost comical humiliation. Fishing communities supposed they would be rid of hated quotas, but ended up with worse ones. As for the unionists of the Six Counties, who voted in large numbers for Brexit, it seems never to have occurred to them that a break with the EU immediately posed the choice of an economically ruinous hard border with the Irish republic and a politically humiliating border in the Irish Sea.

As for the left, it too was divided on the Brexit issue. The residual cold-war policy still held at the time of the referendum for the CPB, Socialist Party in England and Wales and Socialist Workers Party; most of the rest took one look at the actually-existing Brexit movement and aligned with pro-Europe liberals. The SWP seems to have discreetly dropped its Brexitism. They would have been happier, in truth, as remainers; with their entire public policy nowadays being essentially liberal anti-racism and fearmongering about the likes of Nigel Farage, the SWP’s historic policy is merely an embarrassment.

For our part, we called for a spoiled ballot, for good and bad reasons. The good reason was that the referendum was a manipulative instrument, designed to put the issue to bed on the cheap; and that, indeed, has been borne out by events: the very fact that the ‘wrong’ answer was given, and that years of political paralysis ensued, was a useful demonstration of the limits of plebiscitary politics. If there is not in fact a government available to implement a policy, it is useless to choose it; referendums only work at all if you get the ‘right’ answer according to the reigning government. ‘Direct democracy’, on any scale larger than a public meeting, is merely a Bonapartist instrument.

The bad reason was that we did not anticipate that Brexit was actually on the table at all. It was a kabuki dance, as James Marshall wrote in the Weekly Worker at the time,² and, if Hillary Clinton won the US presidency, she would instruct the PM - whoever it was - to ‘sort it out’. We therefore over-indexed on the fakeness of the European debate as a whole, and failed to take into account the global drift to the chauvinist right - which ensured, of course, that there was no Clinton to get it ‘sorted out’.

Broken dreams

Brexit has crushed every dream it has thrown up. Despite the fervent hopes of remainers, rejoining is still politically toxic, and sensible centrist politicians wish the remainers would shut up about it. Post-Brexit Britain has taken in more migrants, to the rage of the nativist right. There is no prospect of a swashbuckling middle power emerging, as the hardcore Thatcherites hoped. The American yoke, under the more extractive policy of Trump’s second term, is no longer quite so easy.

Lexitism is all but dead. The left remainers were right, at least, that this was always going to be a far-right project. The question, again, was always: if Brexit happens, who gets to implement it? And the answer was always: one or another faction of the Conservative Party. Alex Gordon’s article, which we have already quoted, is a strange old read. He writes: “Those EU nostalgics today who dream of Britain rejoining the EU have consistently failed to explain how British firms, which are now massively subject to US ownership through mergers and acquisitions, would reconcile those interests with EU regulations.” What a bizarre objection! Is it the policy of the CPB today to welcome US ownership of British firms?

He concludes: “The democratic vote to leave the EU in 2016 has disoriented Britain’s ruling class who can no longer rule in the old way. The question is whether the working class and those who are crushed by the interests of the financial oligarchs of the City of London will choose to live in a new way.” Well, has anything in the last 10 years given you hope on this point, comrade Gordon? Do be so kind as to let us know.

The truth is that this was always magical thinking. The Lexiteers had a point, of course. The EU is, indeed, a bosses’ club, as they always told us. It is marked out as such by instruments like the fiscal rules insisted upon by the German leadership of the bloc, but more importantly by the very political structure of the EU, which is judicialised to within an inch of its life. There is no legislative or executive recourse to overthrow the decisions of the courts, and the courts rule in favour of the bosses. State aid rules problematise the ability of members to invest. The Lexiteer-Keynesian economist, Larry Elliott, wrote in his own ‘why I was right’ article:

While it would be wrong to blame Brussels for all Britain’s economic woes, any serious repair job requires a freedom of manoeuvre that EU membership made more difficult. The government’s decision to impose tariffs to protect Britain’s steel industry and to cut duties on 100 imported food products to ease the cost of living crisis are examples of that freedom being used. If Andy Burnham is serious about reversing “40 years of neoliberalism”, that will require curbs on the free movement of capital, goods and people - all expressly forbidden by single-market rules.³

The fundamental error of the Lexiteers - whether zombie-tankie Gordon or trentes glorieuses nostalgist Elliott - is to suppose that any of this was actually on the ballot. It was not. The EU put up serious bureaucratic and judicial obstacles to the policies they favour; that is true enough. But they are not the fundamental obstacles. The latter are located not in our immediate neighbourhood, but in the whole US-dominated world order. The choice in 2016 was not Brussels diktat versus freedom, but domination by the US, somewhat mediated by Brussels diktat, versus domination by the US straight from the fire-hose.

As such, rescuing Britain from its financialised senescence is not a matter of getting room for manoeuvre by seceding from the strictures of the EU. It is a matter of constructing a unified political bloc of sufficient size, strength and economic diversification to resist the economic and plausibly military assaults of the US hegemon.

Britain, a small and modestly endowed island, could never be any such thing. British global hegemony was built, quite transparently, on a vast territorial empire. I take it that neither Gordon nor Elliott presumes to rebuild such an empire. They believe, or appear to believe, that we can literally go it alone, with advantageous bilateral agreements with other countries to take care of minor matters like rare-earth metals and clean energy.

It would be foolish to say that the EU is such a bloc per se. Its political structures are fractious and subordinated systematically to international (and therefore American) capital. It is somewhat analogous to the antebellum US, in fact, whose political domination by King Cotton ensured its subordination to the king (and later queen) of England. One of the enduring results of the Union victory in 1865 was a far more centralised state, finally with its own national fiat currency and ability to conduct large-scale industrial policy. Likewise, the territory of the EU (plus, for present purposes, Britain) could so resist in principle. It has enough people, enough farmland, enough natural resources and industrial capacity.

A serious socialist policy for Europe, and for Britain in Europe, must start from this perspective. National sovereignty is a lie: it has never existed, and never will. Under feudalism, we had a mixture of personal sovereignty (of the prince or duke or king) and imperial sovereignty, with a high degree of devolution between empire and fiefdom imposed by mere technological necessity. Under capitalism, we have ended up with formally independent, roughly national states, radically subordinated to a new capitalist-imperial sovereignty. The illusion of independence may be granted to favoured dependents by the true, imperial sovereign; or it may not. Brexiteers, left and right, have convinced themselves of the reality of this illusion.

Pierce the veil

The socialist answer to this problem is, first of all, to pierce the veil - to see things as they actually are, and not conspire in the illusory politics of national sovereignty. It entails, secondly, rejecting the parallel illusions of ‘remainism’ - that the EU (or, for that matter, more recent alternative repositories of hope, like the Brics) represents a serious alternative sovereign to the world empire. Global hegemony is written into the script of capitalism; multipolar arrangements are always epiphenomena of transitions between hegemons, so far always signed and sealed by means of global war. We would probably not survive another one of those.

The central question is thus the construction of a transnational polity capable of overthrowing this cycle. It must not be an empire, certainly, in the sense we use that term in the modern capitalist world, of open and extractive domination by superior powers over dependents. Instead, it must be a polity capable of universally legitimate decision-making on matters concerning the whole of that transnational society; it must therefore have unified democratic political organisations capable of building that legitimacy.

This is the sort of thing we all used to call an international - and that is the real missing piece here. Not only do we not have an international: we scarcely have the raw materials for the parties of an international. But back to condition one: we must look that reality squarely in the face. We must start from what we need, rather than wishcasting some political meaning onto intractable events like the Brexit referendum. We need a supranational organisation of communists - a super-state within a super-state - capable of coercing multiple national states at once, and ultimately capable of taking power in multiple states in a coordinated fashion.

From there, we may build a common polity capable of resisting the world empire and, ultimately, replacing it. The replacement will have to be radical in its devolution of decision-making to regional and local levels. I would argue that, in this respect, it would more resemble feudal empires than capitalist ones - the Holy Roman Empire without the Holy Roman Emperor (or the countless princelings). But the truly egalitarian structure of such an ‘empire’ would authorise the retirement of that word. In this context, we may still have some use for the word, ‘commonwealth’, though it has a particular and degraded usage in modern Britain and its former colonies. The real sovereignty of the capitalist empire, and the fake sovereignty of the capitalist nation-state, would be supplanted by the sovereignty of the socialist commonwealth.

Europe is a potential stage for such a commonwealth, but it will never be on the ballot in a cheap referendum.

1. morningstaronline.co.uk/article/brexit-revolutionary-act-10-years.↩︎

2. ‘The in-out kabuki dance’ Weekly Worker April 14 2016 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1102/the-in-out-kabuki-dance).↩︎

3. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/23/leave-eu-european-union-brexit-10-years.↩︎