The leftwing case for Brexit is strategic and clear. The EU is not - and cannot become - a democracy. Instead, it provides the most hospitable ecosystem in the developed world for rentier monopoly corporations, tax-dodging elites and organised crime. It has an executive so powerful it could crush the leftwing government of Greece; a legislature so weak that it cannot effectively determine laws or control its own civil service. A judiciary that, in the Laval and Viking judgments, subordinated workers' right to strike to an employer's right do business freely.

Its central bank is committed, by treaty, to favour deflation and stagnation over growth. State aid to stricken industries is prohibited. The austerity we deride in Britain as a political choice is, in fact, written into the EU treaty as a non-negotiable obligation. So are the economic principles of the Thatcher era. A Corbyn-led Labour government would have to implement its manifesto in defiance of EU law.
A closer look at the leftwing case for Brexit
Letters: A truly leftwing agenda would be one based on cross-national cooperation and solidarity
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And the situation is getting worse. Europe's leaders still do not know whether they will let Greece go bankrupt in June; they still have no workable plan to distribute the refugees Germany accepted last summer, and having signed a morally bankrupt deal with Turkey to return the refugees, there is now the prospect of that deal's collapse. That means, if thereported demand by an unnamed Belgian minister to "push back or sink" migrant boats in the Aegean is activated, the hands of every citizen of the EU will be metaphorically on the tiller of the ship that does it. You may argue that Britain treats migrants just as badly. The difference is that in Britain I can replace the government, whereas in the EU, I cannot.

That's the principled leftwing case for Brexit.

Now here's the practical reason to ignore it. In two words: Boris Johnson.

He neatly summarizes all of my reservations about how the European project has evolved from a social europe into a Thatcherite one. But his idea that, one day, when Britain reliably vote in leftish governments, we can leave to create a socialist utopia of our own, is simply the warmed over fantasies of Tony Benn from the 70s.

The world is too inter-connected now, for good and ill. Longing for isolationism is, to use Mason's slur late in the article, politically immature. I would rather fix the world we have and we'd best do it togeher

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