With May revealing that her “plan” is to stick to her own personal goals of clamping down on migration and getting out of the ECJ — announcements that are absolutely unsurprising given her record in the Home Office — it is now certain that we are heading for a “hard Brexit” scenario.
People have been calling on Labour to “stand up” against this. It’s not that easy, of course. The Lib Dems, being at the bottom of their political curve, can afford to carve out a niche as the “anti-Brexit” party. Regional parties like the SNP which benefit from a local anti-Brexit sentiment can do so too. Labour is in a trickier spot. With England being so divided on the matter, there is no hard-and-fast position that will not result in displeasing some people greatly. A majority of Labour voters voted in. A majority of people Labour wants to win at the next election voted out.
So far there has been an attempt to try to plot the narrow course between those two rocks. Respect the narrow wishes of the electorate by accepting the referendum results, while setting out the Labour stall for a form of Brexit that will do the least possible damage. It has attracted criticism from hard-liners on both sides, but once you get past the shouting it hasn’t until now been a ridiculous position, an attempt to play to those who wanted to “send a message” but didn’t want to turn the UK into a backwater tax haven off the coast of Europe or create a de-facto united Ireland and all the headaches that will bring, as well as those remain voters who just want this to be over so they can work out what to do next.
After today, though, I am not sure it still has legs.
There is no chance May is going to look past her own personal ideological blinkers and deliver a Brexit that won’t put us slap bang into a recession. Yes she has a “vision” of a glorious return to the days of empire, Rule Britannia, plucky Britain standing up for itself, facing down enemies who’ll turn tail and flee once they get a taste of our grit. It has about as much basis in reality as if she’d described a dream in which Brexit was a big cake that granted her the power of flight. It’s not even slightly in Europe’s interests to grant Britain its one-sided wishlist of demands, and while she has threatened to “walk away” if Europe don’t give us her magical unicorn version of Brexit, that’s a laughable threat because we have nowhere to walk to. As demonstrated by May’s spanking in India last year, most of our former colonies are in no mood to play vassal in the 21st century. A freshly rebirthed “independent” UK will find that its own self-image of imperial greatness may not in fact spend as well in the market of international trade as it thinks.
Also, to be brutally honest, many of our industries have complex, pan-European supply chains. Losing access to the customs union would jeopardise all of that. It’s not as if BMW is going to move its factories in Germany and the Czech Republic to New Zealand, is it?
It’s not apocalyptic. But it is contractionary, when we haven’t even recovered from the body blow of the 2007 crash yet. It’s not good. Best case is we negotiate some transitional deal and that stays in place as a “permanent temporary” patch. In other words, doing business out of a portacabin because we still can’t agree on where to build the office. Worst case is 10+ years of struggle, after the previous 10 years of struggle, meaning a whole generation will hit its mid-30s to 40s without ever experiencing what a British economy that wasn’t fatally wounded by government mismanagement looked like. What a prospect.
Labour has to come up with its own “red lines” on Brexit, and promise that they will not vote through any Brexit Act that does not meet them. That’s a de facto “we’ll vote no” because there’s no way May is going to deliver on anything non-awful. It will still trigger deafening howls of “denying democracy” from the Telegraph to Dave down the pub, but at least it gives Labour people something to say on the doorstep. “We haven’t said we won’t vote for Brexit, we’ve said we won’t vote for a Brexit that will make you worse off. Yes, if Theresa May comes back with her plan to turn us into an offshore tax haven with an economy based on the whole world suddenly developing an insatiable addiction to preserved fruit, we’ll vote no. But you wouldn’t want us to vote for that anyway, would you?”
Will that work? Who the hell knows. It will require Labour to take a hell of a gamble that there are more people who voted UKIP because they were sick of the status quo and of being ignored than because they really fucking hate the forrins. It will require them to admit, both to itself and to everyone else, that they’re not actively courting the “immigrants are the problem” single-issue voter. It’s an electoral gamble, but then so is trying to play UKIP-lite. They already tried that to no avail, and to be fair there’s just no damn room there. Between UKIP and the Tories, how do they even carve out a niche in the crowded “let’s be brutal to foreigners because of lies about your wages” marketplace anyway?
It’s a genuine bastard of a position. Damned whichever way they turn, locked into having to pick between unpalatable options because apparently democracy means never having to say you’re sorry. I don’t envy anyone having to plot a course through this. But the strait is too narrow now. It’s not that Brexit could not possibly have been delivered in a relatively painless way. It’s that we now know that the Government has neither the intention nor the capability of doing such a thing. Given the choice to put her own obsessions aside or drive the country into the sea, we know for a certainty which way May and her cabinet of delusional incompetents will go.
Also, let’s be clear. We saw what Burnham came out with last month. Labour under him or any of the other alternatives would not be pursuing anything other than a UKIP-lite strategy and more immigration mugs than you could count. Corbyn, despite it being pretty much the reason people went for him, is teetering on the edge of it. The temptation for Labour to fall back into old habits is clearly deeply ingrained in the party. Saying it’s Corbyn’s fault that Labour haven’t come out as a staunchly cosmopolitan pro-EU anti-Brexit party is vacuous analysis. As with everything, we can have a reasonable discussion about whether he’s the best architect for the rebuilding process, but he didn’t burn down the building.
Labour has to come out with a bunch of clear commitments it wants the government to meet, and promise a No vote unless they are met. This may not stop Brexit, and it may not win Labour the next GE. But if they give the public a chance to veer back from this cliff edge, they might just take it.
Update: I had a think about what some of these red lines should be. My list is here.
