You're listening to an upstream sneak peek with writer and activist Richard Seymour. First of all there's always been a chunk of both the left and the right that has been

highly hostile to the European Union for obvious reasons

it's a centrist neoliberal sort of pro-business block and the right and left would have different reasons

to oppose it the right on sort of sovereignty grounds, grounds of controlling

migration, racial grounds, all those sorts of things, but also in part, and of course it depends

what social class you're looking at but on the right

there are those who believe that the European Union holds back British

strength and power in the world they believe that it holds back the pound and

that it holds back the city's dynamism and that if Britain only oriented in a

hyper-Atlanticist way toward the United States and towards more global centers of profit and

accumulation Britain would be a lot more powerful. That's their belief and

you've got people from UKIP and others who've said if we were not part of the European Union

we could have joined NAFTA we could have signed up to something like TTIP long ago.

So it's not just a kind of isolationist thing, although there are elements of

isolationism and Little England patriotism, but it's also part of a very, very free market ideology.

They believe the European Union is, if anything, not neoliberal enough,

to social democratic.

So that's part of it.

And the left, by and large since the 80s has lined up behind the European Union.

Not all of it, the radical left has always had a critique of the European Union,

but the majority of the institutions of the

Labour movement and of the Labour Party have rallied behind the European Union as the last

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