A closer look at the leftwing case for Brexit | Letters

Paul Mason's "leftwing case" for Brexit is depressingly familiar (There is a leftwing case for Brexit - but we can't let Boris Johnson turn Britain into a neoliberal fantasy island, G2, 17 May). It is no more nor less than the argument the British left has always made, namely that if only it could get its hands on the powers of the nation state, all would be well. Mason simply brackets off the international order as a market conspiracy and so tells us nothing about how the utopian left British state would function in either the European or the global economy.

But the greater irony is that his manifesto is the mirror image of that of the Gove-Johnson project. Left and right sovereigntists share the same assumptions that British self-government is the means, while they differ as to the ends of how this power might be used. A truly leftwing agenda would be one based on cross-national cooperation and solidarity. But the difficulty is, and always has been, that in both national and European elections, voters have not consistently supported parties of the left. Working out how to change that is the challenge for the left across Europe. All Mason offers us is a dismal choice between old Labour Brexitism or pragmatic remainism.
Kenneth Armstrong
Professor of European law, University of Cambridge