Michel Barnier has dusted off his familiar gray suit and taken to the airwaves once again to wag his finger at the British political establishment. Speaking to the state broadcaster, the European Union’s eternal bureaucrat reminded Westminster that it cannot simply cherry-pick its way through the sacred architecture of the single market. To listen to Barnier and the gaggle of commentators clutching their pearls in response, one would think the single market was handed down on stone tablets from Mount Sinai, rather than hammered out in backrooms to ensure European capital could roam unhindered across borders while workers took the hindmost.
Down on the shop floor, nobody is losing sleep over whether Britain gets an a la carte trading regime or the fixed-price menu. Go talk to the lads on the night shift at a distribution depot outside Leeds or the women clocking in at a food processing plant in Norfolk. They are not asking whether our export documentation aligns with European regulatory benchmarks. They are asking why their real wages have been flatlined for nearly two decades, why the gaffer is threatening to replace permanent contracts with agency scrap, and why heating a drafty two-up two-down costs half a week's pay packet.
Antonio Gramsci wrote from a fascist jail cell that the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Barnier’s haughty defense of EU institutional dogma is precisely such a symptom. The European project, strangled by its own fiscal straitjackets and obsession with competition law, is stagnating. Yet its priesthood remains utterly convinced that the only acceptable state of being is complete fealty to the uninhibited flow of goods, services, and capital. They treat the free market as a natural law, while treating the human beings who generate the wealth as mere input costs to be managed and minimized.
What is rich about Barnier’s sanctimony is the blatant hypocrisy at its heart. The ruling classes across Europe cherry-pick whenever it suits their balance sheets. When the private banking sector imploded under the weight of its own greed in 2008, the holy commandments against state aid were quietly tossed into the shredder so public coffers could bail out private financiers. When multinational corporations park their profits in tax havens within the bloc's own borders, Brussels finds endless patience for technical adjustments. But the moment a trade union suggests state subsidies for domestic manufacturing, or a socialist government proposes nationalizing essential infrastructure to stop predatory price gouging, the Eurocrats suddenly remember their sacred texts.
On this side of the Channel, the spectacle is equally pathetic. The current occupants of Westminster, whether sporting blue rosettes or red ones, possess no coherent vision for the working class. They spend their days begging the Continental bosses for minor carve-outs for the City of London while promising British workers nothing more than managed decline and fiscal discipline. The Labour leadership quakes in its boots at the thought of challenging the basic tenets of capital, whether foreign or domestic. They want frictionless commerce for corporate boardrooms, but they offer zero frictionless relief for the families queuing at food banks outside community centers.
The entire post-Brexit saga has been a dispute between two distinct factions of the ruling class. On one side stands the British nationalist bourgeoisie, peddling deregulatory fantasies and xenophobia while selling off the family silver to foreign private equity sharks. On the other stands the Continental technocracy, wedded to legalistic neoliberalism and continental-scale austerity. Neither faction has ever cared about the foundry worker in Sheffield or the dock hand in Rotterdam. Both systems are designed from the ground up to strip organized labor of its leverage and pit worker against worker in an endless race to the bottom.
We do not need to choose between the insular, anti-worker deregulation of the Tory-lite consensus in London and the rigid, capital-first theology spouted by Michel Barnier. True economic sovereignty will never be found in the drafting rooms of the European Commission, nor will it be delivered by politicians who think national liberation means handing water utilities and railways over to hedge funds. Real power is built at the point of production, where working people organize, withhold their labor, and demand that the wealth of society be directed toward human need rather than corporate returns. Until we grasp that simple truth, the suits in Brussels and London will keep bickering over the rules of the casino, and the working class will continue to get cleaned out.