This article by Gregor Gall was in Friday’s Morning Star
No2EU – Yes to Democracy has stirred up a fair amount of debate in the last few months.
Talk centred on whether seats, if won, should be taken up or not, whether No2EU was a proto-party in waiting and whether it had committed the cardinal sin of constituting so-called “left nationalism.”
The prediction I made to myself when No2EU was launched was that it would receive a pretty disappointing vote, but for entirely practical reasons that were far removed from the debates going on.
Gaining 153,000 votes (1 per cent) was not a bad attempt in some ways for a new organisation. But No2EU was still beaten by the Socialist Labour Party (with 173,000 or 1.1 per cent), even though that party is moribund.
More significantly, No2EU was easily beaten by the Greens (1.3 million) and the BNP (950,000), while other anti-EU parties such as the English Democrats and UKIP did well.
There are four reasons for the poor No2EU vote.
First, it was launched with less than three months before the election – and Euro polls do not exactly set hearts racing in Britain anyway.
Voter turnout was extremely low again, at just 34 per cent (down from 37 per cent in 2004). Two-thirds registered their views by not voting.
While the EU and its neoliberal project are important in determining workers’ living conditions in Britain, there is no mass understanding of this.
Efforts have to be made to educate people about the EU’s anti-democratic nature, but there are huge obstacles to overcome.
This meant that the task of getting anything like a decent vote was gargantuan, not to put too fine a point on it. No2EU was too little, too late.
Second, the EU is neither the source of neoliberalism or new Labour, which are the much more immediate and manifest causes of attacks on workers’ living standards. Amid the recession and the MPs’ expenses scandal, new Labour is far more the focus of workers’ anger – so No2EU was hitting the wrong target at the wrong time.
Third, No2EU did not arise from mass struggle against how the EU affects workers’ lives. This means that it was much more difficult for workers to relate to because they haven’t been politicised in a way that supports No2EU’s message.
The closest we’ve come to that was this year’s engineering construction workers’ strike over the Posted Workers Directive. Here, media coverage concentrated on the supposed demand of “British jobs for British workers,” which obscured the real issues.
By contrast, a number of continental European countries have had sharp struggles over the Lisbon Treaty and its predecessors because referendums were held there, which led to widespread polarisation of views.
Finally, the grouping’s slogan of “No2EU – Yes to Democracy” came across as too narrow and abstract.
The initiative was far wider than this, as a glance at its website or leaflets showed. But the danger was that most people would never see beyond the banner headline because they did not read the website or see a leaflet.
This meant that No2EU could be taken by some to be a version of UKIP. And if people wanted to vote for UKIP-type politics, UKIP was the better-known brand.
It would have been better to have called the slate “No to a Bosses’ EU – Yes to a Workers’ EU” to get the basic class message across.
Then there is the related aspect from the slate’s title that everybody is in favour of democracy. It’s a bit little being in favour of motherhood and apple pie.
So this did not differentiate from the actually anti-democratic parties. Here, it would have been better to talk about the outcomes of democracy, such as workers’ rights and decent living standards.
Given all this, there is a danger that, instead of advancing the struggle against new Labour and neoliberalism, No2EU actually sets it back.
A disappointing vote for a left-of-Labour project can dent the willingness of other forces to get involved in creating a united and progressive radical front because people’s confidence in the viability of such a project has been undermined.
Liam redux 
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