LONG queues of coaches and cars trying to get onto Dover ferries and television pictures of empty shelves in British supermarkets have prompted renewed calls for Britain to rejoin the European Union. 

Social media has been full of messages from enraged consumers blaming Brexit for their inability to buy tomatoes and cucumbers that are usually readily available all year round and heaping ridicule on the hapless Secretary of State for Environment, Therese Coffey for suggesting that they eat turnips instead. 

Turnips aside, the claim that Brexit is responsible for the shortages is difficult to sustain. As stated in a previous issue of the Star, the principal reason for the paucity of fresh produce is British farmers’ understandable reluctance to grow crops at a loss, because of soaring energy bills combined with the supermarkets’ refusal to buy from them at a price that would at least cover their costs. 

It is undeniable that, post-Brexit, the same farmers face an uncertain future because of the removal of  €3.5 billion in EU Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) subsidies that will not be matched by the government in London, thus illustrating that the problem was and is not the decision to leave the EU but what has happened since. 

A rational government that had the interests of both producers and consumers at heart would have used Brexit to transform British farming into becoming a sustainable and vibrant part of a renewed rural economy that guaranteed a decent income for those living and working on the land, in return for a commitment to minimum standards in animal husbandry and crop management for the benefit of human health and the environment. 

In order to maintain those standards, restrictions would have to be placed on the import of foodstuffs that did not match them. 

That would include agricultural products from the EU that benefit from the aforementioned CAP, a model that has distorted the real cost of production to the detriment of producers outside Europe and precipitated the destruction of small farming communities within Europe, in favour of giant agribusiness corporations. 

Most of the arguments put forward by those wishing that Britain would return to the EU fold echo the complaints of British capital in bemoaning the fact that “freedom of movement” has been curtailed. 

There is, however, a qualitative difference between the desire of British travellers to move freely to and between EU member states and the desire of British employers to have a ready supply of cheap labour from eastern Europe to pick fruit and work on construction sites. 

Had the Westminster government so wished, it could have negotiated a post-Brexit agreement allowing for relatively free movement across borders and avoided all the ongoing difficulties at Dover, though to avoid unscrupulous employers taking advantage of it would have had to also significantly increase the scope and power of the labour inspectorate and ideally introduce a national framework of sectoral bargaining, something it was not even prepared to countenance when it was still inside the EU. 

To many liberal British observers, the EU is a benign organisation that has brought European nations together and helped avoid conflicts between member states. 

People who voted for Brexit are viewed at best as little Englanders and at worst ignorant racists. From the standpoint of transnational corporations with activities on both sides of the channel and British companies taking advantage of the single market, Brexit was indeed a backward step and one can understand their bewilderment in seeing a Conservative prime minister allowing it to happen, especially as the neoliberal orientation of the EU was fundamentally in alignment with that of Britain. 

In essence, the EU is a coalition of member states, dominated by Germany and to a lesser extent other north European countries, to promote the interests of its corporations both at home and around the world. 

Its aggressive free trade policy, underpinned by the inclusion of investor-state dispute settlement clauses allowing corporations to sue the elected governments of their trade “partners,” are designed to ensure the continued flow of commodities and goods from the global South and the penetration of foreign markets to the benefit of European capital and its shareholders. 

At home, the EU’s four freedoms guarantee the movement of goods, capital, people and services that are the cornerstones of a single market for the benefit of big business and to the detriment of working people, especially in the accession states of eastern Europe. 

Dominated by its unelected commission, the EU is fundamentally undemocratic. The shortcomings of representative democracy as expressed in national parliaments are magnified in the European Parliament, a body that it little more than a hugely expensive rubber stamp for decisions taken elsewhere. 

Before Brexit, EU elections in Britain attracted a lower turnout than local council elections and surveys have shown that most people did not even know who their MEP was. 

In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the EU is plagued by corruption scandals arising from the vast amounts of money being spent by the army of lobbyists buying influence and favours around the halls of power in Brussels. 

EU foreign affairs are dominated by its “Fortress Europe” policy designed to keep out unwanted migrants from Africa and beyond, a policy that has been responsible for the loss of thousands of lives in the Mediterranean. 

Those who do make it to Europe can often be found working in appalling conditions, producing fruit and vegetables on the plantations and farms of Italy and Spain, many of which are still exported to Britain. 

Over a period of many years the EU has failed to develop a coherent and mutually supportive trading relationship with Russia, preferring instead to pursue a belligerent pro-Nato approach towards its giant neighbour, egged on by the US’s junior partner, Britain, both before and after Brexit, with calamitous results.  

In spite of all this, there are still some prominent trade unionists who subscribe to the notion that Britain should not have left the EU and should have instead stayed inside and campaigned to make it more democratic and accountable to the Euro-voters it purports to represent. 

Their argument fails to take into account that even if the EU were capable of being reformed in that manner, the Westminster government had not the slightest interest in encouraging real change and when still represented in Brussels was a supporter of many of the EU’s most retrograde policies. 

Nevertheless, none of this should prevent British and EU trade unions from continuing to work together in the fight against the worst excesses of neoliberalism on both sides of the Channel in the true spirit of internationalism — a spirit that has got nothing to do with the EU.