The Left and Leaving the European Union

Tom Kibasi has a good piece on the fallacies of "leftist" thinking that welcomes leaving the European Union on the basis that it is a "neoliberal" project.  I put "neoliberal" in inverted commas since those who use it seem to have no idea what it means.  Rather like the word "Zionist".

A word that puts together Thatcher, Cameron, Gordon Brown and Blair just doesn't really make sense.  In particular, to suggest that the last Labour government was keen on reducing the size of the state (as Cameron and Thatcher certainly were) ignores that Labour under Blair persistently increased spending.  This spectacularly applies to the NHS where Blair's 6% growth per year in budget was the highest level the NHS has ever had.  Labour's fetishization of better management, strong commitment to equalities and faith in constitutional reform also don't really sit well in right wing traditions.

Kibasi's points can be summarised as:

• The EU is dominated by a distinctively Social Democrat/Christian Democrat ethos that tends to value social bonds and demonstrably has greater social equality than the Anglo-Saxon model.  The whole Brexit project is predicated on the idea that stripping away government is the real way to thrive.
• The "Left's" view of a sudden transformation completely changing society in a few years is historically unrealistic.  Certainly if one takes the Attlee government which is the most plausible model I can think of (although many leftists at the time denounced it and many are hostile to its achievements even now), it was the product of literally decades of work and reform as well as years of preparation through the war years.
• A belief that rules against "state aid" preclude "left wing solutions such as nationalisation, which flies in the face of the widespread nationalisation and use of subsidy that is easily observable across the EU.
• A failure to understand the value of the rule of law.  
• An apparent lingering view in parts of the Left that nationalisation without compensation is either possible or desirable.
• The belief that the UK is inevitably sidelined in Europe whereas it is precisely the influence of London which often makes for some of the "rightwing" approaches that the "Left" decry.
• The blaming of the EU for migrants coming in to undercut local wages which is actually a feature of our own Anglo-Saxon approach rather than the EU.  
• The belief that the EU is a protectionist entity that keeps non-European people out, whereas by defintiion the EU is not an ethno-centralist form of government and leaving it would (and I would argue demonstrably is) leading to a particularly small minded ethno-polity that values keeping out the other and sidelining ethnic minorities.
• A failure to understand the importance of international co-operation in the modern world.