You're listening to an upstream sneak peek with Joseph Chunara,

member of the Socialist Workers Party and the spokesperson for Lexit,

the Left Leave campaign for Brexit. For us it's an argument that goes back a long time in British politics, really if you take the last referendum in the 1970s on membership of one of the

European Union's predecessor bodies most of the the radical left were opposed to membership on the basis that what we were being

asked to join at that time was a essentially a large capitalist organization that would be involved in driving for attacks on working class people.

What's happened since then has, if anything, reinforced that impression of the European Union you see. has if you

anything reinforced that impression of the European Union you see if you look at the most recent phase

and in particular if you look at Greece the European Union has been the key body driving for austerity in Greek society with an incredibly detrimental impact on people in France at the moment where there's a huge battle going on between government and labor unions,

students and so on over the implementation of a new labor law, the European Union doesn't simply

support the government by

Vazwa Hollande. It recommended many of the attacks that

Holland is currently trying to force through. In instance after instance you can see the European Union acting as a manager

often a quite dysfunctional manager of neoliberal capitalism and it plays this role

not just in Europe but on a global scale underneath the ultimate

authority of the US, the European Union is sort of like a second partner to the US trying

to manage global capitalism.

So for all these reasons, we thought that it was important that there was a left critique of the

European Union within the campaign.

Part of the difficulty is that much of the more mainstream left, the social democratic

left, the trade unions and so on, moved to a much more favourable estimation of the European Union in the 1980s. The reasons for that were largely to do with the rise of

Thatcherism in Britain, Reagan and America played a similar role in which unions and the Labour party came to see the European Union as a sort of barrier against that neoliberal offensive.

What I think that misses is the extent to which neoliberalism has become embedded. that Union now reflects that Thatcherite Reaganite drive across the whole of Europe.

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