My piece earlier said Labour should draw up some red lines over Brexit before they would vote to trigger A50. This is a brief (possibly also incomplete) list of what I think at least the major ones should be.
Update: I’ve added some things based on contributions from followers. Feel free to contribute other suggestions.
1. Maintain access to the customs union.
“Fifty years ago we did alright out of the EU!” True, but times have changed. Modern industry is now a transnational affair, with intermediate products crossing borders many times. This is aided immensely in the EU by the customs union, and the downside risk of leaving to British industry is far worse than the downside risk to the EU27.
2. Enshrine an equivalent or improved version of all workers rights currently reliant on EU legislation on the UK statute books, and establish a system of redress to replace workers’ lost capacity to appeal to Europe.
This includes regulations on working hours and part time working. People voted to improve their lives, not to enable unscrupulous employers to pay them less for longer hours.
3. Maintain research and educational links across Europe, including the rights of academics and students to travel.
If industry is connected, science is even more so. The advantages of sharing scientific knowledge across the broadest spectrum of scientists can’t be overstated. Science does not stop at national borders, physics is the same in Germany as it is in Poland. Isolating ourselves from the European research and educational community will have deeply damaging effects on Britain’s top research institutions, and therefore on its long-term economic prospects.
4. Maintain or improve environmental protections.
The environment is where we all live; nobody wants Brexit to be an excuse to ruin our home. From clean beaches to investment in new renewable forms of energy, Britain cannot afford to pretend that the planet is an infinite resource that does not require stewardship to keep it habitable for our children.
5. Maintain or improve consumer goods protections
Consumer protection is a vital right in a marketplace, especially on key goods such as food and medicines. Especially with Trump in place in the USA, there will be pressure on us to lower our standards so that low quality imports can get access. We need to ensure that we do not drop the requirements for goods sold on our shelves to meet the basic quality standards that the British people expect.
6. Maintain access to rights that British people rely on in Europe, especially health care passporting and access to legal aid.
There are a great many small advantages British citizens have in Europe that range from merely making life more pleasant to being vital for international entrepreneurs. We should seek to ensure not just that those British people who have already moved to the continent will be maintained, but also that those who travel in the future will not find the process a more expensive and difficult one. Particular attention should be paid to the healthcare aspect, as becoming ill is something outside of our control and medical bills incurred abroad can be crippling. The British people did not vote for expensive medical bills or a return of international roaming charges.
7. Ensure the rights of EU nationals currently living in the UK, and maintain recruitment pathways in key skill areas.
As with education and research, businesses are joined up, international ventures now — even smaller ones. Hundreds of thousands of EU nationals live and work in the UK, just as hundreds of thousands of UK nationals live in EU countries. We were promised that this was not a xenophobic strategy to “kick people out,” so the government should ensure that it sticks to this. Likewise, even if we decided that it was beneficial to train, for example, more doctors to reduce the need for migrant workers in the NHS, we should recognise that we cannot simply make a doctor in a factory — they take years to decades of training, a process that cannot be accellerated. We must therefore ensure that recruitment from both inside and outside the EU is not impeded in a way that would exacerbate skills shortages.
I am sure that there could be more, but these are the ones I think make the most sense. I have no delusions that Theresa May will come anywhere near them, but they are not merely obstinate roadblocks picked to be difficult. There are few people who voted Brexit for the sake of Brexit, or Brexit at any cost. People voted to “take back control” and improve their lives, not to cede control and impoverish themselves. If May cannot negotiate Brexit terms which achieve these goals of improving the welfare of British citizens, then it is ludicrous to carry on regardless, as if even Leave voters thought shuttering factories and poisoned beaches was a reasonable price to pay.
I would welcome people’s thoughts on this list.
