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Alex Callinicos

David Cameron’s cunning plan
goes awry

(Summer 2016)


From International Socialism 2 : 151, Summer 2016.
Copyright © International Socialism.
Copied with thanks from the International Socialism Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).


They say timing is all in politics. Well, sometimes timing in publications is hell. International Socialism’s schedule means that we had go to press before the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union took place on 23 June. Moreover, the gap between Remain and Leave in the opinion polls is so narrow that it would be foolish to bet on an outcome. We’ll publish an updated version online after the result is announced, but here goes an attempt to make sense of the situation in ignorance of whether or not the British people have rejected the EU.

Some things are clear. David Cameron thought it was a clever wheeze to offer a referendum to appease the Tory right. The Financial Times has this telling anecdote about his state of mind when he made the referendum pledge in 2013:

In 2014, when Herman Van Rompuy, a respected former head of the European Council, asked Cameron at Chequers how the British prime minister had allowed himself to get into this precarious position, Cameron replied by making a parallel with the Scottish referendum on independence. “I will win that easily and put to bed the Scottish question for 20 years,” he told his Belgian guest. “The same goes for Europe”. [1]

Cameron’s hubris over the Scottish independence referendum nearly lost the Union. He only managed a narrow victory and that thanks to heavy lifting by Labour that cost it much of its electoral base in Scotland. From the perspective of the ruling class, Brexit would be even more damaging than a Scottish secession. And even if Cameron avoids this outcome, he has shattered his party and his government a year after winning an unexpected general election victory.

The Tories went into the referendum saying that they had learned the lessons of the 1990s, when divisions over Europe wrecked John Major’s government. But, by the final weeks of the campaign, that had been forgotten as the two sides laid into one another ferociously. At the end of May, Tory backbencher and select committee chair Andrew Bridgen became the first pro-Leave MP who had, as the Telegraph put it:

broken ranks ... to declare that David Cameron is “finished” as Tory leader and will have to be replaced after the European Union referendum ... “David Cameron has placed himself front and centre of a disingenuous Remain campaign, setting himself at odds with half of the Parliamentary Party and 70 percent of our members and activists on the most important issue facing our country in a generation,” Mr Bridgen said. “Whatever the result, I believe his position will be untenable”. [2]

The escalating abuse is well summarised by the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley:

All the poisons that have suppurated within the Tory party for so many decades are boiling to the surface. In February, when the starting gun was fired, both sides made pious declarations that they wouldn’t let it get personal. I treasure a quote from Iain Duncan Smith urging the Tory party to conduct a good, clean fight. “Do not play the person, play the ball,” intoned this choirboy. A few weeks on, the same Iain Duncan Smith calls Mr Cameron “Pinocchio”. [3]

In part the antagonisms arise from pre-existing tensions within the government – thus Duncan Smith’s resignation as work and pensions secretary after the budget in March, which launched the intra-party war, gave voice to his long-standing grudges against Tory chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne. But two other factors have been important. One is the succession struggle over the Tory leadership. Cameron has promised to retire before the next general election in 2020. If he loses the referendum he will disappear much more quickly. Boris Johnson’s decision to join the Leave camp is widely seen as a calculated move in his efforts to position himself as the next prime minister.

Probably most important of all, however, is the sheer logic of the referendum campaign. Cameron and the Tory-dominated Remain campaign have unleashed all the dirty tricks techniques he mobilised against Ed Miliband and Labour to win the 2015 general election. The anti-EU Tories are outraged to discover these methods used against them. Partly in reaction, they have started criticising the government, its policies and methods in terms that go well beyond the Brexit debate narrowly defined.

Duncan Smith started this by attacking Osborne for targeting the poor in pursuit of austerity – one of the main arguments of the left since Cameron took office in 2010, but Johnson and Michael Gove have taken up the same themes with gusto. Rubbishing the Treasury and its forecasting serves a double purpose – undermining the Remain argument that Brexit would be economically damaging and weakening Osborne’s claim to succeed Cameron. The most ferocious responses from the Remain camp have been by Major and his former deputy, Michael Heseltine, further rekindling the hatreds of the 1990s.

The growing crisis inside the Tory party poses two questions. Firstly, why have such intense antagonisms developed? Secondly, can they be easily overcome after the referendum? Three left wing Remain supporters, Green MP Caroline Lucas, Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell, and ex-Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, have an easy answer to the first question: “If we leave the EU, who stands to benefit most? The political and financial elites of this country”. [4]

If this is meant as a statement about the interests of British capitalism, it is utter nonsense. The relentless bombardment of statements from business interests attacking Brexit may have been orchestrated from 10 Downing Street but it is for all that genuine. Major investment banks and transnational corporations, the CBI, the Bank of England, Lloyds, the European Round Table of Industrialists, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD ... these are the go-to institutions if one wants to know where leading sections of capital stand, and they have all denounced Brexit. The major exception is provided by the hedge funds, a sector that has struggled since the 2008 crash, many of whose notoriously venal and short-termist bosses don’t like EU threats to regulate them more. Compared, say, to the debates in the 1980s and 1990s over whether or not to join first the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System and then the euro, big business is less divided now over Europe. [5]

In his casual opportunist way Cameron secured a deal from the EU in February that broadly fitted the interests of capital in Britain (I put it like this because the highly internationalised nature of British capitalism makes it hard to distinguish between the interests of British-controlled firms and of foreign firms – for example, banks and car producers from the United States, Japan and Europe – with significant investments in Britain). The Financial Times explains that in the lead up to the renegotiations with the rest of the EU:

Cameron and Osborne ... took a big strategic decision. While previous British leaders had claimed unconvincingly to be “at the heart of Europe”, the Tory leadership now made a virtue of the fact that Britain was on the margins: it was neither in the euro, nor in the Schengen borderless travel zone and, therefore, at arm’s length from the economic and refugee crises gripping the continent. If the rest of Europe wanted to integrate further, fine. But Britain needed some guarantees. [6]

The eventual deal – whose most important provisions offered greater guarantees of the City’s status as the eurozone’s offshore financial centre and allowed EU migrants initially to be denied welfare benefits – corresponds to Britain’s peculiar in-out position in Europe. The historian Brendan Simms argues in a new book that the security of the British (earlier English) state has always depended partly on controlling these islands (hence the incorporation of Scotland and the subjugation of Wales and Ireland) and partly on building alliances in Europe to prevent the emergence of a hegemonic rival. [7]

But what gave the British state the edge in its competition with other European powers was its becoming the launching pad of industrial capitalism and the closely related development of a global empire. India was in many ways the key, providing British firms with markets and the British state with revenues and soldiers. The 19th century Tory prime minister Lord Salisbury called India “an English barrack in the Oriental Seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them”. [8] Thanks to its Indian army, Britain deployed twice as many troops in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War as did the US, which led the Allied campaign against Japan. [9]

Even where forced in 1947 by imperial overstretch and colonial revolt to abandon India, Britain refused to embrace European integration. Both before and after the Second World War, Winston Churchill advocated a United States of Europe – but excluding Britain. “We are with Europe but not of it,” he wrote in 1930. “We are linked but not comprised”. [10] The post-war Labour government took the same line, standing aloof from the first step towards integration, the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951. Like its Tory successor, it imagined that British imperialism had a future as the “third world power” after the US and the Soviet Union, using the rest of its empire to stay at the top table as Washington’s loyal European partner. [11]

Two events in 1956 brutally destroyed this fantasy. First, the US forced Britain and France to abandon their attempt to overthrow the Egyptian nationalist government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. This debacle was followed by the rapid liquidation of most of the surviving European colonial empires. Secondly, the six members of the ECSC agreed the terms on which the European Economic Community (or Common Market) was established under the Treaty of Rome of March 1957. This provided the framework in which the continental economies leapt ahead of a British capitalism struggling with chronic problems of competitiveness. The moves to join the EEC by successive Labour and Tory governments during the 1960s were a product of a sense of failure and even desperation well expressed by a 1966 Foreign Office paper for the cabinet:

For the last 20 years, this country has been adrift. On the whole, it has been a period of decline in our international standing and power. This has helped to produce a national mood of frustration and uncertainty. We do not know where we are going and have begun to lose confidence in ourselves. Perhaps a point has now been reached when the acceptance of a new goal and a new commitment could give the country as a whole a focus around which to crystallise its hopes and energies. Entry into Europe might provide the stimulus and the target we require. [12]

A similar attitude pervaded the Treasury, which, according to Hugo Young, “remained officially against British entry” into the EEC in 1973 [13], and which still has a reputation for Euroscepticism. Sir Alan Budd, the Treasury’s chief economic adviser in the 1990s, told the Financial Times recently that “such was the despair in managing the economy in the early 1970s that officials thought that joining the Common Market was merely pointless. Britain’s prosperity could not be saved and EEC membership was just the sort of ‘futile gesture’ that was called for”. [14]

In the event, the EEC and then the EU offered a platform on which British capitalism was able to reconstruct itself with a considerable degree of success. European integration has always had a double imperialist determination – first, it was promoted to the US in order to provide it with a stable and prosperous junior partner in western Eurasia, and, second, it has served as a framework for the European imperialist powers, despite their geopolitical subordination to Washington, to pursue their interests globally. [15] Britain too has used the EU in the latter way, but more ambiguously than France or Germany because it has simultaneously sought to preserve its status as the most important partner of the US in the management of global capitalism.

This ambiguity has a material base in the evolution of British capitalism itself. In a very important new book Tony Norfield highlights the re-emergence in recent decades of the City of London as the leading international financial centre (Wall Street may rival it in size but it is heavily involved in servicing the much bigger American economy). London dominates trading in foreign exchange, over-the-counter derivatives, and international bonds, as well as the market for international bank loans. Norfield traces the efforts since the 1950s of successive British governments, sometimes in conflict with US policies, to support the City, which he describes as “part of a mechanism through which British capitalists operate in and extract revenues from the rest of the world, something which defines Britain’s status as an imperialist power”. [16]

Norfield, however, relates London’s role in key financial markets to a broader hold on productive capital internationally as well:

In 2013, Britain had the second largest stock of foreign direct investments, worth $1,885 billion ... While the UK figure represented only 30 percent of the total US investment stock of $6,350 billion, it was larger as a share of the national economy. Data from the Financial Times table of the Top 500 global corporations in 2011 show a similar position. The UK was in second place behind the US, with 34 companies having a total market value of $2,085 billion. The US had 160 companies with a value of $9,602 billion. Another survey shows that, of the world’s top 100 non-financial corporations in 2013, ranked by the value of their foreign assets, 23 were US companies, 16 were British and 11 were French, while Germany and Japan each had ten. The three biggest UK-based corporations held the second, sixth and seventh places: Royal Dutch/Shell Group plc, BP plc and Vodafone plc. [17]

British capitalism thus remains, as it has been since the industrial revolution, the most internationalised of the major economies. This gives it a global orientation, and helps to explain the efforts the British state has made to remain a major military power, albeit almost always operating in tandem with the US. Using five measures of power – nominal GDP, stock of outward FDI, international banking assets and liabilities, share of currency in foreign exchange trading and military spending – Norfield places Britain “a distant second behind the US”, but ahead of China, Japan, Germany and France. [18] From a liberal perspective Simms concurs, calling “the United Kingdom the last great European power”, behind only the US and China. [19]

British capitalism’s global positioning makes it an uneasy EU partner. Its semi-detached status was underlined by the opt-out it secured from the euro in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which was rapidly followed by sterling’s ejection from the ERM on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992. Concerns about the City were a major reason why Gordon Brown as Labour chancellor blocked Britain joining the euro in the late 1990s. [20] Tony Blair tried to compensate for staying out by promoting greater European military cooperation under US leadership, a policy whose highpoint came in the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. Blair’s strenuous participation in the invasion of Iraq, against French and German opposition, put paid to this. [21]

The great irony is that Britain’s insistence on keeping sterling, and therefore staying out of the most important European project since the Treaty of Rome, has not stopped London becoming the financial capital of the eurozone. Not only does the City dominate euro-trading, but, the Financial Times reports, “three quarters of European capital markets and investment banking revenue is transacted in the UK, according to Oliver Wyman, the management consultancy”. [22] The drive in the past few years further to integrate the eurozone in response to its near-terminal crisis threatened to upset this delicate balance – for example, by trying to force trading in the euro to take place within the eurozone. But what Cameron secured in Brussels were some concessions protecting the City’s status alongside recognition of Britain’s special status (for example, exemption from the Treaty of Rome’s pledge to “ever-closer union”). If Brexit is defeated, these promises will be tested, but the European Commission is promising to make it easier for City hedge funds to operate across the EU. [23] In any case, if Leave wins, all bets would be off. Investment banks based in London could find themselves shut out of the single market.

So, if the interests of British capitalism place it firmly in the Remain camp, why all the fuss in the Tory party? The answer can probably be summed up in two words – Thatcher and UKIP. Margaret Thatcher pledged to reverse British decline. She achieved significant successes – launching a full-scale neoliberal offensive, inflicting major defeats on the organised working class and reinforcing the economic shift to the City with the Big Bang deregulation of 1986. But restoring Britain’s imperial glories was beyond her powers (or indeed intentions). There have been humiliations aplenty – Black Wednesday, military failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 crash – highlighting British capitalism’s vulnerability in a fast-changing global system where the distribution of power is shifting.

For the Thatcherite wing of the Tory party, in near-rebellion under Major’s government and (unlike Cameron and Osborne) hostile to Blair’s attempt to fuse neoliberalism and social democracy, the EU became the symbolic enemy, into which all their frustrations were concentrated. Tearing loose from the EU has become a Great Escape that would allow Britain to recover the reality of sovereignty to an extent that probably even the US doesn’t enjoy. For some Tories, for example, Gove and ex-defence secretary Liam Fox, who strut as British versions of the American neocons, this ideological fantasy is joined to another, that Britain could have a radiant future in a free-market “Anglosphere” together with the US and ex-white Dominions such as Canada and Australia. The slight embarrassment about this option is that it is strongly rejected by the putative partners. Barack Obama’s very vigorous intervention in the Brexit debate during his visit to Britain in April was in essence a restatement of the traditional US policy of promoting European integration and of supporting Britain’s membership precisely to ensure that Washington has a powerful and sympathetic ally when decisions are taken in Brussels. Just as with Donald Trump’s capture of the Republican Party on a platform that breaks with US imperialism’s strategy since the early 1940s of constructing a global liberal capitalist order underpinned by American military power, we have the paradox of the main party of big business pulling away from the interests of capital.

Brexit, then, isn’t the basis of an alternative strategy for British capitalism. What has given it legs is a process of generational recomposition of the Tory activist base that has made Euroscepticism the norm and reduced the pro-EU wing of the party to an ageing rump represented by figures from the past such as Heseltine and Ken Clarke. This transformation has then been reinforced by the rise of UKIP. Nigel Farage’s achievement has been to take what have traditionally been the preoccupations of a relatively small minority with the threat that a European “superstate” poses to British sovereignty into a popular cause by reframing the question of Europe in terms of immigration, and exploiting the arrival of migrants from Central and Eastern Europe since the EU expanded eastwards in 2004. The inroads that UKIP has made into the electoral bases of both major parties have pulled the debate on immigration rightwards, but it has also galvanised the Tories into trying to recapture control of the European agenda.

How has this played out in the referendum campaign itself? Under constant barrage from capital’s heavy artillery about the economically damaging effects of Brexit, the Tory leaders of the Leave campaign moved more and more onto the terrain of UKIP, promising that leaving the EU would allow Britain to “regain control of its borders”.

This is another ideological fantasy: it is the dependence of contemporary capitalism on immigrant workers that is driving demographic change in Britain, as elsewhere, not the EU principle of the free movement of labour. But racism is probably not the most powerful factor driving people into the Leave camp.

UKIP already benefitted from ordinary voters’ revulsion against the entire political and economic elite. Here the referendum campaign has sent out contradictory signals. On the one hand, the mainstream debate has come down to Tory posh boys in suits shouting at each other – hardly a recipe for overcoming voter alienation. On the other hand, the very unanimity of establishment opposition to Brexit is likely to have goaded many people into the Leave camp simply as an act of defiance. A YouGov poll lists big business (36 percent), bankers and politicians (both 32 percent) as the three main beneficiaries of the EU, while the losers were small business (26 percent), people on low incomes (25 percent), and pensioners (14 percent). [24]

There is another very important thing about popular attitudes. All the polls show that the poorer you are the more likely you are to vote Leave. [25] This means that millions of working class voters have gone unrepresented by the mainstream of the labour movement. As in the case of the Syria vote in December, the Labour front bench has in this shown its profound commitment to Blairism. Disgracefully, the trade union leaders, after cutting a deal with the government that mildly watered down the anti-union bill, have thrown themselves vigorously into the Remain camp (though three smaller left-led unions, ASLEF, BFAWU and the RMT, constitute an honourable exception [26]). Like the marginally more left-wing “Another Europe is Possible” campaign, union officials concentrate on telling fairy stories about the EU as initiator and guarantor of progressive social reforms. Not only does this whitewash an EU currently mounting a massive assault on the European social model, but it effectively dismisses the role of social movements in winning reforms through struggles from below.

At worst, this has involved replicating in the Remain camp the kind of popular front politics that, at the start of the campaign, saw George Galloway speaking alongside Farage. Thus Sadiq Khan, newly elected Labour mayor of London, shared a platform with Cameron, while Green MP Caroline Lucas sits on the board of the Tory-dominated Britain Stronger in Europe campaign and cheered on Major – who as prime minister shut down the mines, privatised the railways and started the marketisation of the NHS – when he laid into Johnson.

By comparison with this farrago of pro-EU apologetics and class collaboration, Jeremy Corbyn has played a cleverer game. Forced by the Blairites in the shadow cabinet to come out in favour of continuing EU membership at the start of his leadership, he has been a remarkably unenthusiastic Remain campaigner. Like McDonnell, Corbyn refuses to share platforms with Tories, and in what was meant to be a pro-EU speech in early June he concentrated his fire on the Tory Remain campaign and the EU itself. As the New Statesman grudgingly acknowledged:

he made enough pro-EU noises to make grumbling from Labour’s more committed pro-Europeans look insurrectionist rather than constructive. He chucked a bit of red meat at his core supporters, bashing TTIP – a treaty that now looks to be dead on arrival in any case – and re-announcing that a Labour government would renationalise the railways. And, crucially, he did just enough to hint to those few Labour MPs and activists who are anti-European that he might just possibly remain on their side, really. [27]

Corbyn probably calculates that the referendum is the Tories’ problem, and that Labour can benefit from letting them tear themselves apart. The problem with boxing clever like this is that it may send coded signals to the millions of traditional Labour voters backing Leave, but it doesn’t offer them a clear political lead. If Corbyn had come out linking rejection of the EU and opposition to austerity he could have consolidated the broader coalition that emerged in his election as Labour leader last September. As Freddie Sayers of YouGov puts it:

Corbynmania was a youth movement and a social media movement, but it was also a working class movement. As a group, the Labour “selectorate” that voted in the leadership election were more educated and well-to-do than the population at large, but within that the most “normal” group were actually Corbyn supporters. Only 26 percent of Corbyn supporters had a household income of more than £40,000, slightly less than the national figure of 27 percent. (Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall supporters were progressively better off at 29 percent, 32 percent and 44 percent respectively.) So Corbyn got the cool kids and the working class left wing. [28]

But Corbyn’s equivocation effectively pushed working class people who want to vote Leave towards Farage and Johnson. This does not support the apocalyptic scenarios confected by the left Remain camp that a Leave victory will hand power to the racist right. Let’s return then to the second question: can Humpty Dumpty be put back together after the referendum? If Johnson’s dream is realised – Leave wins, Cameron goes, and he inherits the premiership, it will soon turn into a nightmare. He will have to engage in what all the experts predict will be difficult and protracted negotiations with Brussels over Britain’s departure from the EU, while trying to manage a House of Commons where the government has at the best of times a small majority and most MPs oppose Brexit.

The problems won’t go away if Remain wins or if a compromise candidate such as Theresa May (who has been suspiciously quiet during the referendum campaign) beats Johnson for the Tory leadership after a Leave victory. Virtually since the general election, the government has made retreat after retreat, often on policies pushed by Osborne – tax credits, disability benefits, Sunday trading, pension tax relief, forced academisation, child refugees. Behind these U-turns has been a small group of Tory backbenchers, mostly from the extreme right of the party, who are hostile to Cameron and Osborne and have been exploiting the government’s small majority. If Remain wins they will be angry and bitter at what they regard as a stolen victory. If Leave wins, they will press a weakened government for a rapid break with the EU, while the main echelons of the ruling class redeploy to reverse or water down Brexit.

So either way the Tories face stormy waters ahead – and all this as the economic horizons darken (bad job figures have just forced the US Federal Reserve Board to postpone its plan to “normalise” the US economy after the crisis by raising interest rates [29]). Moreover, all is not quiet on the social front. Counterpointed to the TUC’s abject failure to mount any serious resistance to the anti-union legislation (see Ralph Darlington’s article elsewhere in this issue) is the astonishingly protracted and militant struggle of the junior doctors. Perhaps precisely as a once conservative “professional” group that is not influenced by trade union traditions that can hold back struggle, they have been willing to go further than any other group of health workers, striking without emergency cover. Although whether the junior doctors will accept the bad deal negotiated by the British Medical Association is another unknown at the time of writing, they have certainly won the battle of public opinion against a widely despised Tory health secretary. The government’s austerity offensive is reaching deep into British society, galvanising new sectors into struggle.

Racism remains the most dangerous issue. But it can’t be emphasised enough that the Tories, UKIP and the Nazis aren’t having it all their own way. The huge wave of solidarity with refugees that swept through Europe in the early autumn of 2015 has not dispersed. On the contrary, a dense network of local initiatives to offer material and spiritual support to refugees from Calais to Lesbos has crystallised across Britain. Already last September 31 percent of the British population were estimated to have given some form of support to refugees. [30] The odd speech by Corbyn and his allies aside, this remarkable self-organised movement is without mainstream political representation. For all that it exists, and it is a powerful counterweight to the racists. The drubbing that Zac Goldsmith’s dreadful Islamophobic campaign received in the London mayor elections revealed another barrier to the racist offensive – the habits of everyday tolerance that have grown up out of the diverse, interwoven lives of people in the big cities.

These deep anti-racist currents need to be organised. This is beginning to happen on a broad basis with the formation of Stand Up to Racism, the driving force behind the anti-racist day of action on 19 March and co-sponsor of the Convoy to Calais on 18 June. But a harder socialist edge is needed as well to link anti-racism on a class basis to the broader struggle against austerity. The emergence of the Lexit Campaign, advocating a left, internationalist opposition to the EU, has been one of the successes of the referendum. Not because it has swung a massive number of votes, but because it brought together a significant spectrum of forces on the radical left to campaign for a Leave vote on an anticapitalist and anti-racist basis that (unlike some earlier left anti-EU campaigns) had no truck with migrant-bashing.

Lexit offered a political voice, albeit a small one, to working class people who wanted to reject the EU on a class basis. It therefore offered an alternative to the slide into class collaboration by leaders of “Another Europe is Possible”. Moreover, given the dreadful fragmentation and involution of the British far-left in recent years, the successful collaboration of different organisations and traditions was an important step forward. One of the challenges ahead, in a situation that will probably offer socialists more opportunities to begin to shape events, will be to build on this good precedent.

Alex Callinicos is Professor of European Studies at King’s College London and editor of International Socialism.

* * *

Notes

1. Parker and Barker, 2016.

2. Ross, 2016.

3. Rawnsley, 2016.

4. Lucas, McDonnell, and Varoufakis, 2016.

5. For discussion of these earlier divisions in the British ruling class and the Tory party, see Callinicos, 1997.

6. Parker and Barker, 2016.

7. Simms, 2016.

8. Quoted in Arrighi, 2007, p. 136.

9. Hastings, 2008, pp. 8–9. See the summary of India’s economic importance to British imperialism in Callinicos, 2009, pp. 153–156.

10. Quoted in Young, 1998, pp. 13.

11. Darwin, 2009, chapters 12 and 13.

12. Quoted in Young, 1998, p. 190.

13. Young, 1998, p. 225.

14. Giles, 2016.

15. Callinicos, 2015.

16. Norfield, 2016, Kindle loc. 3374.

17. Norfield, 2016, Kindle loc. 134.

18. Norfield, 2016, Kindle loc. 2055.

19. Simms, 2016, Kindle loc. 4339.

20. Norfield, 2016, Kindle loc. 1229.

21. Simms, 2016, chapter 8.

22. Agnew, 2015.

23. Brundsen, 2016.

24. Moore, 2016.

25. See for example Parker and Cocco, 2016.

26. Go to Joint Union Statement Supporting a Leave Vote.

27. Bush, 2016.

28. Sayers, 2016.

29. Roberts, 2016.

30. Travis, 2015.

* * *

References

Agnew, Harriet, 2015, If Britain Goes: City Divided on UK Relationship with EU, Financial Times (8 February). (behind a paywall)

Arrighi, Giovanni, 2007, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century (Verso).

Brundsen, Jim, 2016, Brussels Looks at Barriers to UK Hedge Funds Finding EU Investors, Financial Times (2 June).

Bush, Stephen, 2016, Jeremy Corbyn’s Speech on Europe Was Cleverer Than You Think, New Statesman (2 June).

Callinicos, Alex, 1997, Europe: The Mounting Crisis, International Socialism 75 (summer).

Callinicos, Alex, 2009, Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Polity).

Callinicos, Alex, 2015, The Internationalist Case against the European Union, International Socialism 148 (autumn).

Darwin, John, 2009, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830–1970 (Cambridge University Press).

Giles, Chris, 2016, How a Eurosceptic Treasury became Remain’s anti-Brexit Champion, Financial Times (31 May).

Hastings, Max, 2008, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45 (Harper Perennial).

Lucas, Caroline, John McDonnell, and Yanis Varoufakis, 2016, The London Declaration: Vote In to Change Europe (28 May).

Moore, Peter, 2016, Big Business, Banks and Politicians Seen as Main Winners from EU (3 June).

Norfield, Tony, 2016, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance (Verso).

Parker, George, and Alex Barker, 2016, David Cameron’s Adventures in Europe, FT Magazine (22 January).

Parker, George, and Federica Cocco, 2016, How Battle over Brexit Crosses Traditional Party Lines, Financial Times (2 June).

Rawnsley, Andrew, 2016, This Isn’t A Tory Game of Thrones, the Stakes are High for Everyone, Observer (5 June).

Roberts, Michael, 2016, Janet Yellen and the US Economy, The Next Recession Blog (6 June).

Ross, Tim, 2016, Senior Tory MP Andrew Bridgen says David Cameron is ‘Finished’ as Party Leader, Telegraph (29 May).

Sayers, Freddie, 2016, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Their New Coalitions on the Left, Guardian (15 February).

Simms, Brendan, 2016, Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation (Penguin).

Travis, Alan, 2015, One Third of Britons Have Helped Refugees in Some Way, Guardian (24 September).

Young, Hugo, 1998, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Macmillan).


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