Back in the pre-Brexit days, most of the liberal left supported EU membership. The exceptions were the group of left-wing Lexiteers, like Jeremy Corbyn, and some trades union leaders, who were largely following in the tradition of Tony Benn: the EU is a capitalist club (true), globalism is not in the interests of working-class people (also arguably true), and so on. The general view of, say, the Guardian, was to pour scorn on these Lexiteers.
But now, it seems to me, the recent commentariat we see in the likes of Unherd, Spiked, etc: though they’d hate to be called Corbynites, in reality, on the EU, there doesn’t seem to be a fag paper’s difference between them. The EU is undemocratic, the EU/Germany was foolish to be reliant on Russian energy supplies (20/20 hindsight!). I’m talking about people like Wolfgang Munchau; he’s all over the New Statesman too, telling readers how rubbish the EU is. Helen Thompson is another one, spreading doom and gloom about the EU.
I don’t see that the basic arguments at the time about EU membership making life so much easier for British businesses have been overturned.Whatever the faults of the EU, I don’t see how we are better placed now outside of it than we were in it. But the point I’m making is that anti-EU sentiment, once considered to be the preserve of an unimportant minority, now seems in fact to be the view of many commentators these days. And all this at time when the US is proving to be an unreliable ally, to put it mildly! What do MN posters think?