Labour’s new referendum opportunity

Paul Cotterill
Nov 7 · 4 min read

Labour’s move towards clarity on Freedom of Movement — which I said 20 months or so ago would happen — is welcome; we’ve moved from the hypothesis of creative ambiguity, through its anithesis, plausible deniability, and arrived at the synthesis of “our commitment was never really in doubt”.

I wish it had been a quicker journey, but we are where we are, and the new explicit commitment does really open up a new political route on Brexit, which I’ve mentioned before but now merits a bit more exploration.

Explicit commitment to continued Freedom of Movement on current terms, presumably replicating bilaterally the terms already brought together multilaterally under EC/2004/38 (which actually focuses on what restrictions are available to states), removes the political obstacle to total alignment with the Single Market. For alignment, we can reading ‘effectively remaining in the Single Market’. Such an arrangement meets head on Starmer’s second test.

So what we have, along with whatever additional ‘clarity’ Labour can get on State Aid provision, is a likely Labour Deal (techncially a changed Political Declaration) on the lines of what we used to call Brexit In Name Only (BINO). It may be that Labour’s Deal would have to revert to May’s Withdrawal Agreement, inclusive of backstop, but that would become irrelevant as soon as the Single Market alignment bilateral treaty were ratified.

The obvious question then is why Labour would want to offer, in a second referendum, the choice between ‘Remain’ and ‘As Good As Remain’.

The answer, and Labour’s new political opportunity, should be as follows.

Labour is not (unlike the Liberal Democrats in its current position) proposing a choice between the economic sense of remaining in the EU and the economic damage of Brexit, because that choice is not a sensible one to put to the people in a referendum; the economic argument, including that for Freedom of Movement gas, as a matter of facts, been won in favour of a continued seamless alignment with the economy and people of the EU, and a second referendum on facts simply creates the grounds for a deepening post-truth culture war.

Instead, Labour wants to offer people the choice of how, as a nation, we recover from the wholly destructive attack on our democratic instiutions unleashed in 2015 by the Eton playing field arrogant foolhardiness of Cameron and Osborne, later pursued by Johnson to the point of constitutional crisis.

The refrendum will therefore ask for a choice between two different, but both postive and optimistic, ways forward, where the substantive question might be set out as:

Do we, as a nation, want to remain in the EU and carry on as before, writing the 2016–2020 period off as an aberration brought about by tactical Cameron’s recklessness, but finally seen off by our democratic institutions, which proved to be robust enough for the task?

or

Do we, as a nation, want to take a break from EU membership, on terms which do not materially impact upon our economy or way of life, because our near-miss has caused our EU27 neighbours to lose respect for and trust in us, and because we need to go through a period in which we revamp our democratic institutions and norms, in a way which will help us to be a more constructive member state in the climate catastrophic years to come, when transnational cooperation will be vital, in the event of a successful application to rejoin in five to ten years?

Recasting Labour’s referendum promise in this way allows Labour to present a mature case to the electorate (compared with the LibDems’ short-termism), with the campaign centred on the fact that the Tories brought us to the brink of the abyss, and that we must strengthen and adapt our democratic institutions to ensure this can never happen again, both by codifying our constitution and, more importantly, by creating more and better opportunities for citizens to engage in our democracy, should they wish. [1]

By the latter, I mean not simply further devolution, proportional representation or even some of the more radical thinking on political funding proposed independent of each other by Paul Evans and Julia Cagé, but the more complex challenge of developing the appropriate level of engagement with citizens in their everyday lives, where the right, only really won post-war, to be left alone is matched by the fostering of a culture in which

community instead becomes increasingly personal and voluntary, based on genuine affection rather than proximity and need (Jon Lawrence, 2019).

This puts Labour’s existing promise (for the last two elections) of a constitutional convention at the forefront of the election campaign, but in the context of sensible economic policy, namely that we get a continued relationship with Europe whichever way a referendum goes, and do not propose, as the LibDems do, to gamble it all once again on how good something or someone looks on the side of a bus.

Notes

[1] See also https://medium.com/@Bickerrecord/recasting-labours-brexit-recasting-labour-bac26c5ff646, especially note 4 for a further exploration

Paul Cotterill

Written by

Secretary General, Habermasian Labour (UK). Indefatigably focused on the promotion of ethical discourse in the public sphere, except when there's cricket.

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