New Labour's pro-Europeanism

Nosemonkey has a question:

But why have Labour shifted towards supporting the EU, having been so massively opposed to it for so many years? The rest of the radical policy changes the party’s gone through during the last twenty years make perfect sense - they’ve increased Labour’s electoral viability. But support for the EU is - rightly or wrongly - an electoral liability in the UK.

If you take the usual line that the shift from old to New Labour was designed to bring the party closer in line with the thinking of the country at large, jettisoning unpopular socialist rhetoric in the process, how to explain the shift to favouring the EU, when the EU is supposedly so unpopular with the public?

The key event here is the 1987 election, I think. If the 1983 wipeout could be justified by the Falklands effect, the particular incompetence of Michael Foot as leader and the creation of the SDP, these factors were either absent or greatly diminished by 1987. Yet Labour barely dented the Tory majority. So much for British socialism.

That was when the talk started of the EU being used to “open a second front against Thatcherism” with the help of Jacques Delors, who turned from being a crypto Gaullist co-ordinator of industry for the benefit of the boss class to a helpful comrade reining back the worst excesses of Thatcherism into a “social Europe.”

This was a particular trope of the old Kinnockite soft left, which is significant for the question at hand, since it was this faction that provided the intellectual roots for the Blairite project. Over time, the “social Europe” changed into the “single market”: pro-Europeanism remained as a vehicle for people heading rightwards while still wanting to seem vaguely progressive and fluffy (as did rainbow coalition politics at local authority level).

I was working for a Euroscpetic Labour MEP at around this time and was on hand to hear very serious people stop talking about the social Europe sand start talking about the wonders of the Rhenish Model of capitalism. Now the same kind of people talk about reforming Europe in a pro-market direction. Europe historically was a major part of the Blairite journey, almost to the point where its encoded into the DNA of New Labour. “Europe” represents, to them, the process that made them part of the establishment. It was and is the New Labour Eton.

Comments

[Igor Belanov]

You have to remember that Labour is only 'pro-Europe' in the sense that it believes coming out of the EU would do more harm than what it sees as the unpalatable process of incremental supranationalism that the EU represents. In most ways its European policy differs little from that of Thatcher. She was a great enthusiast for the Single European Act, while opposing almost everything else that the EEC did. Basically this is what the Labour government has done- talk up market reform and oppose any other measures.
Take into consideration also that amongst the elites there is at least a cautious acceptance of Europe and this is what 'New Labour' has sought to appease, as well as the tabloid-exacerbated xenophobia of sections of the public.
Labour's opposition to the EEC in 1983 was seen as an electoral liability because it went against what was regarded at that time as a vital national interest. That view is still prevalent now among important groups. Thus while New Labour would like to appeal to the xenophobes and is opposed to Euopean supranationalism in the institutional and social sense, it doesn't want to be 'left out' in Europe.

[Matthew]

Being pro the EU is not an electoral liability, surely? If it was the Tories would have ditched that long ago. All opinion polls shows a majority (of those expressing an opinion) remaining in favour of membership.

[ejh]

I think it's one of those odd things where the electorate don't actually want the politicans to agree with them - sort of like why Michael Howard did so badly at his election. A bit like the way football supporters demand changes in the line-up but would never respect a manager who actually went along with them....

[Nick L]

Blairites were genuinely pro-Europe because it goes hand in hand with all the talk of globalisation and being beyond left and right, beyond the national state, being beyond the balance of power etc. Boring old trade unions, nations and classes, they are in the past; the future is a shining world of supranational governance, dynamic enterprise and economic integration!

Blame Giddens, that's what I say.

[ejh]

Giddens, Giddens. I used to work, for a few weeks, in the warehouse of his distributors (the same warehouse where Norman Geras' Marx and Human Nature lay covered in more dust than I've ever seen on any book anywhere). All over the shop floor there were pallets and pallets carrying copies of Sociology, ready to be shipped out all over the world like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was like working in Giddensworld. Even now, if I see a copy of Sociology (as I did this week, in my local library) all I can think of is pallets.

[Bert]

You're spot on, I think.
The key group in the 80s was the 'moderate' leadership of the trade union movement. There was a big-deal speech by Delors to the TUC conference in 1988 - it sealed the pro-EU commitment that Labour's had ever since.
Organised labour saw no prospect for anything good coming from Westminster via national politics. And there was a ready-made agenda waiting for them at reception in Brussels.
Whatever the subsequent disappointments of this route, the national debate is hardly much more favourable to pro-union labour legislation than it was in the late 80s.
Some, like the RMT, are now kicking against the pricks; most stick with the moderates' non-confrontational approach. But industrial conflicts take place within a European-regulated context that nobody questions.
Business (a key New Labour constituency) is pro-EU. It nudges the political class away from social Europe. The unions lobby in the other direction, and have developed relationships and alliances that encourage continued engagement. Meanwhile The Sun rallies working class europhobia around the flag - it's nationalist rather than class-based.
Bennite anti-europeanism, of the type that's so strong in France for example, is nowhere in Britain.

[jamie]

"Being pro the EU is not an electoral liability, surely?"

It always works for Labour because the subject doesn't come up without sections of the right immediately going nuts. It's as though somebody talked about airport expansion and half the Tory benches rose and demanded to know the "truth about area 51"