So, Labour’s non-policy on Brexit is their way forward. For now. But anyone can see that it’s a wholly unworkable position and that, fundamentally, it stands on a foundation of political cowardice. It is not leadership.
How sad, that when effective and decisive opposition is needed, Corbyn fails totally. What is required now more than ever is for a candid appraisal of the issues.
It would have to start from the anchoring premise that we held a referendum and Remain didn’t win it. That is a political artefact, set in biblical tablets of stone that isn’t going away however much certain people may wish it would.
Through various parlour tricks it is conceivable that the referendum result could be overturned by a mendacious Parliament, but they still wouldn’t have a mandate for our continued membership and certainly not consent for the ultimate destination of the EU project; a Federal Europe. The true democrat and the pragmatist recognise that Britain’s future must take a path other than EU membership.
True leadership in Labour would face down the petulant metropolitan remain camp and stand up for the fundamental principle that the majority verdict of the British people must be respected. All the equivocation and second guessing and “peoples vote” in the world does not change the fact that those who voted to leave expect and demand that we do leave.
But then the leave side needs a few home truths too. Namely that British trade has ballooned inside the single market (over the last three decades especially) and leaving the most sophisticated market governance system ever devised without a plan and without a negotiated replacement agreement (that would have to be renegotiated from a position of weakness if we leave with no deal anyway) is quite simply crass. We stand to do long term, possibly irreparable damage to our economy for no discernible gain.
What we’re going to find by leaving without a deal is that the UK is excluded from a number of lucrative markets by way of being detached from the European regulatory ecosystem. It needn’t have been that way by adopting EFTA/EEA membership, but Theresa May excluded that erroneously early on in her attempt to please all by pleasing none at all.
But there is no chance of leadership from Corbyn or indeed anyone in Labour for one simple reason. You need credibility to lead and to lead you need to have the fullest possible understanding of the issues which Labour demonstrably does not. Despite three years of debate with ample opportunity to become issue literate, Labour politicians are still paddling in the shallow end, believing we can be in a customs union (for whatever use that might be) where the UK has a say in EU trade deals. Yet they still have no clue about the difference between a Customs Union and The Single Market. This is irrecoverable issue illiteracy of the highest order.
Furthermore, were Labour in office they would face the same dilemmas and the same constraints May and now Johnson face, where any flights of fancy they may have would be shunted into the cold hard light of political reality. Labour hasn’t managed to grasp even the basics of Article 50 sequencing, failing to realise the distinction between the withdrawal instrument and the future relationship. Much like the Tories the Labour party has suffered from a dangerous intellectual atrophy.
There are several other holes I can pick in the Labour position, but it ultimately comes down to Labour trying to ride two horses, both of whom are going in different directions, unable to reconcile the irreconcilable. Falling back on lazy stereotypes; there’s the leave voting northern working-class base and the London metropolitan remain bubble of Blairites and “toytown revolutionaries”. Where Brexit is concerned, and indeed much else, there is no way to marry the two disparate factions. One side must lose. Corbyn would rather make no decision at all than risk alienating one of the factions.
But this is hardly cutting-edge observation. We could have said this of Labour at any point in the last four years. Labour has evolved into a paternalistic entity comprised of privately educated, wealthy “progressives” who seem to think the working class need them as their white knight protectors – even to the extent of protecting them from themselves and their under-informed voting habits. All it needs to survive is the bovine passivity of the traditional base which they have long taken for granted. The leave vote upset that apple cart and is sure to be turned upside down by the Farage party if Labour come out in favour of remaining or having another referendum.
Leadership would require a coherent position but more importantly, a decisive one. Presently Labour is leaving Brexit an open question whereby they would overturn the 2016 referendum to negotiate an imaginary deal that no self-respecting leaver could ever vote for, or remain – which is ultimately stacking the deck – ensuring enough people lose faith in the vote to ensure remain wins. It’s both lazy and cynical. Courageous it is not. Leadership it is not.
If Corbyn really were intent of speaking for the many rather than the few, he would speak for those who voted to leave and those ordinary remain voters who accept that leave won the vote. The clear majority here are those who think the referendum must be delivered and we should have a close trade relationship with the EU. But they don’t seem to have a dog in the fight. Westminster parties of every ilk speak only for the dogmatists and radicals on both sides while Labour dare not put its head above the parapet.
By now, anyone who has given the issue any serious consideration has concluded that the EEA/EFTA path is the only sensible foundation for a way forward and one that moderates on either side of the debate could live with. I think even I could hold my nose and vote Labour were they to speak for the unrepresented majority (though I might need to take a shower afterwards and burn all my clothes).
To credibly argue the EEA/EFTA case though, you need to really understand the nuances of how the system works in order to defeat the critics and the propagandists. This is where Labour would again fall over simply because our politicians of every hue don’t do detail. Information is transmitted orally; they rely on the legacy mainstream media to inform them and editorial standards at that level have collapsed to the point where the mythology is impossible to dislodge. It would take a herculean intellectual investment by Labour to carve through the noise and lead the way.
But that’s just not going to happen is it? Because let’s face it; the collective IQ of the Labour front bench would not rival that of a potato and there isn’t a scintilla of integrity among them. Labour much the same as the Tories are a write off as a party that can no longer offer anything of value. All it has is foaming antisemitism and the usual leftist politics of envy. It is an empty husk, eaten alive by political termites. That is Corbyn’s legacy.
At a time when Britain most needed a coherent, decisive and intellectually robust opposition with decisive leadership, Labour went AWOL and into self-destruct mode. Corbyn’s negligence and cowardice may very well earn him the title as the worst politician in British history, even worse than Boris Johnson and that is saying something.
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