Shiraz Socialist

Irish referendum: a victory for reaction

June 14, 2008 at 5:42 pm (anonymous, capitalism, democracy, Europe, immigration, Jim D, left, politics, religion, socialism, unions)

First of all, let’s be clear: the Irish people have voted by a clear majority (53.6 to 46.4 per cent) to reject the Lisbon treaty. And as the treaty has to be ratified by all 27 EU member states, then the Irish vote should, under the EU’s own rules, kill off Lisbon once and for all. 

Unfortunately, the European Commission president Jose Manuael Barroso continues to insist that the treaty is “alive” and calls upon member states to continue the ratification process. Here in Britain, Gordon Brown has made it clear that the bill implementing the treaty will continue its journey through the House of Lords next week. This breathtaking stupidity plays into the hands of the so-called Eurosceptics, portraying European integration as an undemocratic, elitist project, driven forward against the will of the people, by arrogant, corrupt and self-serving politicians and bureaucrats.

The democratic argument is as plain as a pikestaff: the Lisbon treaty is now dead and should be publicly laid to rest once and for all.

That’s the democratic position and it’s simply embarrassing to hear British government representatives like Ed Balls and the hapless, semi-coherent Jim Murphy trying to wriggle out of it, as both could be heard doing on Radio 4 today.

But the Irish vote was not a vote for anything even remotely progressive, and no-one on the left should delude themselves that it was. Here’s what the virulently anti-European Daily Mail  has to say in welcoming the result:

“The people rejected the treaty for many of the same reasons 82 per cent of the British public have said no themselves in a poll for the Daily Mail last year.

“The Irish feared the Treaty would dilute their country’s power in fundamental areas. The vote was also swung by concerns over large scale immigration from Eastern Europe.”

The Mail then goes on to list “What Swayed Them”:

* New Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowan undermined the Yes Campaign when he admitted he had not read whole Lisbon Treaty

* Voters were baffled by the Treaty’s 346 pages of legalese. Ireland’s EU commissioner said no ‘sane’ person could read it from cover to cover

* Resentment against 230,000 Polish immigrants blamed by many for job shortages. In less than a decade, non-indeginous population of Ireland has shot up from 1 per cent to 12 per cent

* Women voters were put off by a fear that men could be conscripted to fight in a future European Army

* Sinn Fein said that after struggling for centuries to escape British domination, Ireland should not accept a Brussels takeover

* Pro-life campaigners warned the treaty could put Ireland’s abortion ban under threat

* Irish farmers, fattened by  decades of generous EU subsidies, warned their handouts would be drastically cut – with devastating effects for rural areas

* Business said the treaty said the Treaty would force Ireland to raise its 12.5 corporation tax

OK, that’s just what the Daily Mail says. But it’s backed up by overwhelming anecdotal evidence from reliable observers of all political sympathies. Here, for instance is Fintan O’ Toole, assistant editor of the Irish Times in today’s Graun:

“The other decisive factor (apart from a generalised distrust of the ‘political class’ – JD) was, paradoxically, the very incoherence of the no side. It was made up of people who actually can’t stand each other. There were rightwing Catholics who warned (against the advice of Catholic bishops) that Lisbon would open the way to legalised abortion and prostitution, and leftwing liberals who have fought bitterly against those same people in previous referendums on abortion and divorce.

“There were leftwing anti-militarists who warned that the treaty compromised Irish neutrality: we got ‘No’ stickers with nuclear mushroom clouds, as if Lisbon is a suburbof Armageddon. And, in the form of Libertas – a mysterious group that emerged from nowhere with a great deal of money to spend – there were people  with strong ties to US military contractors.” 

So there you have it: all the available evidence suggests that the Irish vote was motivated by incoherent resentment against ‘the political class’, fear of immigration, opposition to abortion, business’s fears about increased corporation tax, farmers’ fears of losing subsidies, and vague (unfounded) concerns about neutrality and conscription to a European army. None of them (apart, perhaps, from the first) particularly left-wing causes. And yet the majority of the “left” insists on seeing this as a “progessive” result. The Morning Star, for instance keeps trying to suggest that the vote was really about the Ruffert judgement and the Irish Ferries dispute - as though the majority of voters were motivated by concerns about Polish builders’ pay rates in Lower Saxony, or (only slightly more realistically) the sacking of Irish ferry workers and their replacement by Latvians…

In fact, both these anti-union decisions by the EU court were the result of the inadequacy of European integration to date,  and the failure of the left and the unions to campaign for and achieve a levelling-up of standards throughout Europe. In any case, both those decisions are entirely irrelevant to the Lisbon treaty, and were most certainly not the issues at stake in the Irish referendum! Meanwhile, improved rights for agency workers and increased protection under the Working Time Directive have been forced upon the British “Labour” government by the EU’s Social Affairs Council, according to the TUC.

The history of the EU and its predecessors is full of examples of the so-called “left” making de facto common cause with the hard-right against European integration, and occassionally achieving ‘success’ in various referenda as a result. Without exception these ‘successes’ have proved to be ‘successful’ only for the right, for racists, for the worst type of shyster businessmen and for reaction and islolationism in general. The anti-European left is a stupid, self-harming left: it needs to get a grip, jettison its irrational anti-Europeanism and start developing a positive programme for European integration.

P.S: These Irish leftists conclude that support for (or refusal to oppose) the EU is a “cargo cult“; in view of their own noticeable failure to put forward one single reason why workers should oppose the Lisbon treaty or, indeed, the EU itself,  I’ll leave it up to readers to judge whether a rational, positive view of Europe, or the traditional Stalinist/”left”-reformist knee-jerk anti-Europeanism, represents a form of ‘cargo cultism’…

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