The Left Against the EU
Excerpts: What exactly is the EU and what is the effect of the EU on our national politics and economics? These questions — the most important ones facing the British Left in 2018 — have received little serious treatment across the political spectrum since the referendum. Costas Lapavitsas’ book, The Left Case Against the EU (Polity, 2018; ISBN: 9781509531066; 179pp.), addresses this gap by offering a direct class analysis of the European Union. It points to a clear and unequivocal conclusion: anyone on the Left has to be foursquare against the EU. [...] Almost the entirety of the British “Left”, by which I mean many Labour-supporting Remainers, is deeply Europhile. Their support for the EU, often so equivocal and hesitant before the Referendum, has deepened and hardened. They make a series of unforgivable analytical errors in their analysis of the EU and of Brexit. They frequently equate the EU with Europe. The slogan “for Europe, against the EU” is often...