The Full Brexit is a recently-launched network of activists, academics, journalists and policy experts and you can find us at thefullbrexit.com. We are called The Full Brexit because we want a clean break with the EU, Single Market and Customs Union. But The Full Brexit is much more than that. Leaving the EU creates the political space for radical change in Britain. We hope in particular to change the Brexit debate on the left by injecting some new life into the tradition of left-wing euroscepticism articulated by E.P. Thompson and other radical thinkers of the past. The Full Brexit not a political party. We don’t agree about every policy. But we do agree that The Full Brexit includes the revival of democratic politics in the UK, the transformation of Britain’s economic model and the forging of a true internationalism to replace the EU’s thin cosmopolitan supra-nationalism. Democratic politics in Britain has been dying in the UK since the 1990s, over the same period that Britain has been signed up to the Maastricht project of European integration. The two are connected. Of course we still have elections and political parties. But there is very little disagreement between those parties, except on the question of how much the government should tax and spend. The main parties have ceased to represent their constituencies. The interests of wage-earners are not represented by a Labour Party that is enslaved to market imperatives; the values of provincial conservatives are no longer represented by a ‘modernised’ Tory party. The role of the European Union is to convert this democratic deficit into a form of government. Eurosceptics like to imagine the EU as a Brussels-based ‘superstate’ whose unelected bureaucrats and courts lord it over Britain. But the EU is really an inter-governmental system in which centrist politicians and technocrats from the member states (including Britain) make policy together in remote European forums, removed from the attentions of their disgruntled electorates. Member state governments return from their deliberations to announce that ‘Europe’ has decided on some policy that is now European law and has to be implemented. Sometimes a particular policy is mandated by the European Court of Justice’s interpretation of the EU Treaties. Eurosceptics take this appearance of a European overlord at face value. But the EU is really a system in which depoliticised political elites rule their own countries while evading political accountability for their decisions. Leaving the EU makes it more difficult for the British political class to avoid reckoning with the interests and views of its electors. That’s why it is an essential component of achieving true democratic government. Nowhere has Britain’s democratic deficit been more damaging than in the lack of political debate over its economy. Our low-wage, low-productivity, service-dominated economy has relied for its labour needs on importing millions of workers from other EU countries. In the absence of compliant labour unions able to keep workers’ demands in check (as we have seen in Germany), EU migration into the UK has been the main mechanism with which British business has ensured wage moderation on the part of its low-skilled workforce. This strategy has also absolved British business of the need to train British workers in a way that might help them transition from low to medium and high skilled jobs. In this way, British workers have been locked out of the benefits of the little economic growth there has been since the 2008 crash. Millions of citizens are rightly unwilling to tolerate the permanent recession that grips their communities. Remaining in the Single Market would mean a return to business as usual in economic policy. But changing economic policy requires us not only to Leave but to start thinking about more than trade, European or global. It requires us to work out how to increase productivity and real wages. International trade will not do that on its own. If we do not change economic direction, the political consequences for what remains of our democracy are incalculable. For left-leaning Remainers, staying in the EU is an essential aspect of what they think of as anti-racism and internationalism. The EU certainly integrates European markets, makes available a superficially cosmopolitan lifestyle for some, and provides opportunities for working in an international public sphere of intergovernmental organisations and NGOs. But these do not amount to internationalism. True internationalism is the building of solidarity between the peoples of different nations. Everything about the EU indicates that it is the opposite of an internationalist project. It has pursued policies that have pitted the peoples of Europe’s southern periphery against those of its northern economic core. It is a European Union that systematically locks out African and Asian migrants, and is openly complicit in the kidnap and detention of migrants in North Africa. And for many migrants within the EU, it is a system that allows them to work abroad as compensation for the weak and stagnant economy they endure at home. These are not accidents of particular policies. These policies are to be expected from an institution that is organised so as to allow governments to evade taking political responsibility for their decisions. The Full Brexit is not simply in favour of Britain leaving the EU. It is for rethinking the entire project of international cooperation. It is for reviving democracy and economic growth across the continent in a way that can deliver a real international solidarity. At The Full Brexit, we do not pretend these challenges will be easy to solve. But we do think that anyone who seriously wants to address them should not pretend that they can be solved within the European Union.