A New Approach to Brexit for Labour
Like someone learning to live with an incurable but not terminal condition Britain is slowly remorselessly adjusting to Brexit.
In the Financial Times Jeffrey Sprecher one of the world’s biggest financial traders, said that the UK “has lost value as a trading centre” and “made it hard to invest in the UK”. His firm, the International Continental Exchange controls the New York Stock Exchange.
The reason he gives is Brexit which the Economics Nobel Laureate, Joe Stiglitz, says is the first time in economic history a nation has “declared a trade war on itself.”
Naturally, our ardent pro-Brexit press will ignore this statement but might the time have come for the BBC to examine its policy of omertá on reporting the evidence of the increasing negative outcome of the Brexit adventure which according to many economists has so far led to a reduction of 4-5 per cent of GDP?
The Conservatives of course cannot let go of their proudest 21st century creation. But must Labour and the LibDems still pretend that Brexit is not much of a problem? It took the US sixteen years from Congress legislating Prohibition in 1917 until Roosevelt said in 1933 it was nonsense and dropped that absurd wrong-turning for America. How long must Britain wait until it has the leadership to say the Brexit emperor is naked?
The excitement of the People’s Vote campaign when Sir Keir Starmer and Tom Baldwin, now his biographer, led the charge for a second referendum only to fall on the rocks of voters’ rejection of Labour in the Corbyn era and the massive campaign by the press aided financially by Vladimir Putin to install Boris Johnson as prime minister five years ago now seem to belong to another age.
This is evident both in the policy choices of Rishi Sunak who still proclaims his belief in Brexit while quietly nudging the government to a more realistic position of finding areas of cooperation with the EU on northern Ireland via the so-called Windsor agreement which terminally buried the Protestant supremacist DUP’s stranglehold on EU policy since Theresa May became prime minister.
There is also a half reintegration into the Horizon program of scientific research that is a flagship common EU policy as well as cooperation with parts of the EU’s immigration control apparatus from data exchange with Fontex to paying for French patrols including drone surveillance on the coastline between Calais and Dieppe.
The irony is that Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Ed Davey were strongly pro-European but have decided they don’t want to reignite the Brexit political storm that between 2015 and the arrival of Rishi Sunak took up a huge amount of political energy with zero reward for pro-Europeans .
As Mrs Beaton famously said ‘First catch your hare’ so for Starmer the priority is first get elected with a big majority. Given the state of the Lib Dems in the polls if Labour wins by a much more narrow majority than the polls indicate the Lib Dems may indeed come into play but at the moment they are unlikely to make any alliance with any other party in the next Parliament and will simply have to wait and see whether there is any future for this historic and important party to come back after its disastrous wrong turning between 2010 to 2015.
However the opinion polls flatter to deceive. Today they show a big majority saying Brexit was a mistake and the smaller majority say people would vote to rejoin. But dig deeper into anti-Brexit majority and it is based on 70/80/90% votes to rejoin in the 18 to 25 year old cohort. The problem is this generation of voters does not much bother with voting so and so pro-Europeans should be cautious. The assumption that a big opinion poll thumbs down to the hard Brexit Boris Johnon inflicted on Britain equals an easy referendum majority to rejoin is far from proven.
Sadiq Khan recently issued calls for a youth mobility scheme for Londoners to visit, study, work, play musical play instruments if they are musicians, without having to seek work permits and so forth on the continent.
I am sorry Sadiq but the EU Commission does not negotiate with cities or city mayors even one of your sterling qualities. Any new rights for young (or old Brits) there has to cover all EU member states and be fully reciprocal.
One of the first injunctions Michel Barnier laid down as he began negotiating Brexit on behalf of 27 sovereign nation national government was there would be no cherry picking and it is not clear that Labour has fully internalised the fact that an agreeable meeting in Paris or Berlin or Madrid or attending gatherings of Labour Party sister parties in the Party of European Socialist does not guarantee unanimity to ensure any big change in favour of Britain.
Moreover the Labour Party like all British political institutions never fully understood that the EU is a treaty based organisation - that is it is based on international treaty law with its clauses and subclauses and very specific wording which is what determines the chances of a fractious Britain, its poisonous identity politics being able to make a serious rapprochement with the rest of Europe.
Clearly this issue is salient at the moment and is sensibly being downplayed by Sir Keir and Sir Ed in the run-up to the election battle but it will resurface as soon as the election is over and British business realises that Labour is in charge of European Policy not their friends in the Conservative party
I have taken part in three major rejoin marches in the last 12 months. There were big speeches from Alistair Campbell, the exotics Steve Bray was there with his EU brolly and Blue and Yellow top hat, Gay Verhofstadt came over from Brussels to tell us that we would be welcome back (even if he is no longer much welcome in Belgian politics) and different speakers condemned the folly and futility of Brexit.
Naturally I agreed with all of them but I noticed that at each Rejoin demonstration the participants were going down and down and down. In the last one the Metropolitan Police did not even both to stop traffic going round Parliament Square as there were not many people there.
An opinion poll last October showed just 16% of voters considered Brexit to be a priority. So I wonder if the time has come to draw a line under 2016 and our righteous anger at the dishonesty of the 25 year long campaign to isolate Britain from its natural partners and very rich neighbourhood.
In any political journey it is important moment when a party or a movement or cause does a stock-take and sets out to find new ways to convince voters that there will no successful future of Britain isolated from Europe. We – the anti-isolationists in Britain – have yet to undertake a serious examination of how to move forward.
Yet some urgency is needed. Sir Keir and Sir Ed have dropped the word “Rejoin” yet with every passing week the situation is more serious.
According to most serious economic analyses including the government’s own OBR Britain’s economy has shrunk between 4% and 5% in the years since Brexit.
This is an extraordinary economic historical development. Normally it requires a major war or collapse of a government or foreign takeover of the economic capital of the nation to see in such a short period such a dramatic decline in the wealth of a nation. This osmotic change works precisely because nobody notices it is happening until it is too late.
Two years ago Bloomberg reported that Paris had overtaken London in combined market capitalisation of primary listings. Today the City’s
Quoted Companies Alliance reports that 15 financial firms are quitting the City every month relocating to Paris, Dublin, Amsterdam or Frankfurt where they don’t face obstacles Britain has created thanks to Brexit.
The latest possible exit from the London Stock Exchange is Glencore the giant historic commodity trader. It is Swiss-Australian owned and it being advised to quit London and raise money on the Sydney bourse. This is not Brexit related but a confirmation that the executives of world business no longer see Brexit Britain as central to their future money-making plans.
Britain’s wealth has never been based exclusively on our limited natural resources, poor agriculture, empire, shopping or trading paper money. What turned a small off-shore European island into a world power which even today is one of the world’s richest countries able to offer its people a high standard of living including has always been trade.
British trade has declined each year since 2020 as Brexit puts so many barriers to trade in the way of British business.
Above all Brexit was meant to reduce immigration yet Rishi Sunak invited in nearly 1 million immigrants last year from Pakistan, Nigeria and India to replace workers from Poland, Portugal and other EU member states. This is putting great strain on housing, health and social services.
European workers are aware of their rights under EU social legislation. Workers from Africa and Asia accept lower wages and often have little knowledge of their social rights and thus are easily exploited by bosses leading many young British citizens despairing of ever finding a fair pay wage in today’s Brexit labour market in Britain where employers have the whip hand.
Alas listing these and the many other negatives of Brexit reported weekly in the Financial Times by Peter Foster as well as other writers and analysts has not coalesced into any rethinking of the worth of Brexit given how Labour and Liberal Democrats just go along with the Tory government line that it is now a breach of the UK’s unwritten constitution to question Brexit, let alone say it has been bad for Britain and will get worse.
The task for those worried about this gradual decline of Britain seems to me is to think about how to change the arguments we make, the appeals we launch, the campaigns we mobilise, and the engagement we seek from the future generations of British citizens.
Their parents and grandparents were indeed badly let down by my generation which let the Labour Party from 1970 until 1990 become dominated by anti-European emotionalism.
Friends in the Conservative party did not appreciate that the arrival of UKIP and the concentration of media power in the hands of offshore proprietors or a BBC that after 2010 turned its flagship card affairs programs like Question Time and Today into an echo chamber for the xenophobic and nationalist nostrums of Nigel Farage, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph had mainstreamed political and trade isolationism as an acceptable part of political, business and government discourse in Britain.
I discuss aspects of Tory and Labour anti-Europeanism in my new book Labour Takes Power – my dairies for 1997-2001 published by Biteback.
So what happens now?
There is some inconsequential briefing in papers about Labour’s Europe policy. Names like that of Sir Oliver “Olly’ Robins who was the main civil servant handling Brexit 2016-19 keep popping up. But to do what?
This is never explained in press accounts of Labour’s presumed efforts to shape a post-Brexit Europe policy. In a speech to the Centre for Europe Reform in July 2022 at the Irish Embassy Sir Keir Starmer insisted there would be no question of Labour supporting rejoining the EU Single Market, the Customs Union, or permitting free movement of professionals, students, skilled craft workers or just manual workers so absent in Britain to do work helping farmers, care home professionals, restaurant, bar and café owners or as drivers of lorries and van delivering goods or food ordered online.
Even au pairs, the lifeline of many a working mother, to have a job and bring future citizens into the world, are a vanishing group as hard Brexit rules designed to keep Europeans out of the UK Labour market make offering a home to an au pair and a chance to learn English in exchange for some help with looking after babies and toddlers something Tories have all but abolished.
UK supermarkets have been plagued by empty shelves as with Brexit customs controls and paperwork have made just-in-time food delivery from Europe impossible to guarantee to a nation that important 46 per cent of what it eats.
In fact, there is a weekly litany of well documented barriers to trade that Boris Johnson‘s hard Brexit has imposed on the UK. They are reported in serious papers if not the Brexit booster papers like the Daily Express and Mail. Industry, trade and services sector federations regularly protest about the damage Brexit is causing British business.
Yet there is complete Labour omertà on drawing attention to these failures of government policy.
During the US prohibition era 1917-1933 when alcohol consumption was banned political leaders spoke up denouncing it as counter-productive economic folly. But when shadow cabinet members are asked about the damage caused by Brexit and what might be Labour’s solutions they either avoid making speeches or writing articles on the UK’s trade war against itself or just change the subject.
They are helped by most mainstream economic correspondents on the BBC, and other broadcasters who prefer to avoid analysing Britain’s trade war on itself.
Some point to the possibility of cooperation with the EU on defence matters especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That already happens in the framework of Nato or bi-lateral agreements with Germany and France.
Labour Britain could take a lead in seeking collaboration with like-minded EU member states to produce common weapons carried and used by soldiers, armoured vehicles, infantry missiles, a single tank, or helicopter, naval vessels. The main obstacle to this happening is not on Brexit grounds but the cottage industry nature of British and other European arms firms, national politicians and trade unions who want the high pay, skilled work of arms production to be reserved for nationals of countries making the weapons, and politicians of all colours who think that purely national weapons systems make their country stronger.
To be fair there is not a uniform EU policy on modernising weapon systems or a common programme for producing the munitions Kyiv keeps calling for to defend Europe against Putin’s attack on Ukraine for daring to suggest it preferred to have a future in the EU rather than obeying orders from Moscow on what its defence and foreign policy should be.
Another call from Labour is a common food and animal safety inspection regime. This makes sense and the Swiss have sensibly adopted the EU veterinary rules which the UK followed prior to Brexit. It is open to Britain to copy the Swiss agreement but this entails obeying decisions taken in Brussels. The Swiss can sit on negotiations between the 27 prior to new directives being issued or existing ones amended. But without a vote.
The point of Brexit according to its ideological supporters was to free the UK from any obligation to follow any EU rules. Now those suggesting Labour should seek a veterinary agreement are doing so to help farmers on the basis of rules which existed prior to the Withdrawal Treaty.
Some place hope in the review clause of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement Treaty which allow for an examination of the Treaty beginning in May 2026. But this would only be a talking shop with EU and UK representatives including British parliamentarians and elected representatives of 27 EU nations raising whatever points they wish.
This review process has no power to change any of the current clauses in the and M Treaty which damage UK trade or the rights of British citizens to live or work in the EU.
It would need a Treaty change and that requires signoff by 27 other national governments which slowly but surely Britain is losing contact with. It is not just the Council of Ministers from which the UK is absent. British politicians have lost contact with fellow elected political leaders and influencers across the Channel. There are 27 national parliaments of cantankerous elected men and women disinclined to help their UK colleagues after the scorn and contempt poured on Europe by the mono-lingual English media and political establishment.
There are no British officials sitting in any EU regulatory body high or low. There are no elected British MEPs networking in Brussels or Strasbourg.
UK embassy diplomats do not have the skill set or resources to stay on top of European as well as national politics in the capitals where they work.
A Labour government might consider offering to political parties a version of Short money used for party policy work to make contacts with EU politicians or setting up a small European policy institution to fund networking and contact making in EU capitals open to all parties in the Commons.
Year by year Britain is losing touch with decision making in Europe and a Labour government should take action before UK loses all political contacts between British democratic parties and Parliaments across Europe.
There are hardly any MPs who have worked in Europe or can use a European language above the level of school examinations.
Parties cannot think about new policy for Europe if they are not intellectually equipped with the details of new arrangements with the EU not just windy aspirations about better cooperation.
To become again a player and a power in Europe British politics will have to lower the adversarial and confrontational tone on Europe and see being back in Europe not returning to an imagined better world that never existed but just a sensible, pragmatic move to make Britain a bit stronger, richer, and to win back some of the global influence that we have undoubtedly lost because of Brexit.
Posturing by Scottish nationalists who take a UKIP approach to busting apart a working European union of 4 European nations is dead-end politics.
The Labour unwillingness even to discuss the many clear negatives of Brexit leave us in a cul de sac if Labour does win power.
Sir Keir Starmer will no longer be able to blame Johnson or May, or Truss or Farage and Sunak for the damage done by Brexit.
He will be Prime Minister and every citizen and journalist will ask “OK, Sir Keir, why are you continuing with policies that weaken the economy and remove the sovereign rights of British citizens or British economic and cultural actors to enjoy the same rights as fellow Europeans to make money, travel, live or retire?”
There are many business leaders who have kept quiet and not attacked the Tory government on Britain’s neo-isolationism out of a general business view that Tory ministers are their friends.
That courtesy will not be extended to Labour ministers and Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves and Pat McFadden will soon have to provide answers to the question: “Why is a Labour government continuing to support a policy that reduces British GDP and removes the sovereign right of young and old alike to share in the summer sunshine Europe to travel, study and retire in our common part of the world.”
The support Labour currently enjoys and which appears to herald a Labour government to repair the damage of the Brexit era Tories will disappear fast if by year 2 or 3 of a Labour government it is unable to restore some if not all of the sovereign rights and econonomic possibilities we enjoyed as European citizens in addition to our proud British citizenship.
There is another major question which too many gloss over: Does Europe want us back? Five years ago the European Council on Foreign Relations predicted that the far right would sweep the board in the European Parliament elections. Academics from the hard right like Matthew Goodwin or from the liberal left like Cas Mudde have been assuring us for more than a decade now that the extreme populist anti-immigrant right were poised to take over Europe.
Professor Goodwin wrote endless comment piece for the Times and Financial Times in 2015 stating that UKIP would win seats in the UK general election and become a political power in the land.
In fact the opposite happened and Nigel Farage holds no elected position.
In Europe the nationalist anti-European right has been defeated in two major elections in the last12 months in Poland and in Spain. Far-right leaders who were said to be taking over Europea like Matteo Salvini in Italy or Geert Wilders in the Netherlands have flopped.
Marine Le Pen and Georgia Meloni, the Mussolini heritage prime minister of Italy, have seen how Brexit has been an economic failure for Britain and only caused political damage to the pro-Brexit Tory Party. In consequence they have dropped demands for an In-Out referendum to arrive at a Frexit or an Italexit as has Germany’s xenopophobe anti-Brussels Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
They instead campaign to get more MEPs elected, more access to EU funds for national politics, or in the case of Viktor Orban, dropping opposition to Sweden joining Nato once he was threatened with an EU Article 7 procedure which could have led to Hungary being sidelined out of the EU.
Only in Britain where just 37 per cent of the registered electorate believed the lies of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in 2016, has a nation walked out of Europe.
Yet if polls are to be believed Britain will as in Poland and Spain, soon choose a government that resiles from nationalist identity, or immigrant-baiting politics and supports many progressive policies identified with the mainstream European politics of centre-right and centre-left.
We need I think to localise the campaign against Brexit.
I admire and support the work of the indefatigable European Movement.
But its general appeals to learn – again - to love Europe are falling largely on deaf ears.
We need a much more focused approach town by town, city by city on the damage Brexit is doing to the local store-keeper, delicatessen, the local school and college students or young musicians who are denied the right to participate in the hundreds of European summer festivals.
A leaflet through the letter-box of where you live telling a narrative of how Britain’s isolation from Europe has hit your village, town, firm, schools, field of work will have much more impact than grandiose appeals to just rejoin.