In an interview last November Jeremey Corbyn was reported to have set out his “bottom lines”, without which he would vote against Article 50, which included access to the 500 million customers of the single market; no watering down of employee rights, currently guaranteed by EU law; consumer and environmental safeguards and pledges on the Government making up any shortfalls of EU investment.
However in January he said that “Britain can be better off after Brexit. “Only a Labour government, determined to reshape the economy so that it works for all, in every part of the country, can make Brexit work for Britain.”
As he went on to say: “as far as Labour is concerned, the referendum result delivered a clear message. First, that Britain must leave the EU and bring control of our democracy and our economy closer to home. Second, that people would get the resources they were promised to rebuild the NHS. Third, that people have had their fill of an economic system and an establishment that works only for the few, not for the many. And finally, that their concerns about immigration policy would be addressed.”
“Labour accepts those challenges that you, the voters, gave us. Unlike the Tories, Labour will insist on a Brexit that works not just for City interests but in the interests of us all.”
“We will push to maintain full access to the European single market to protect living standards and jobs.”
“Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle, but I don’t want that to be misinterpreted, nor do we rule it out.”
Meanwhile John McDonnell stated that Labour will help deliver a “sensible British compromise” over Brexit, but also said that Labour would not back a “kamikaze” departure from the EU which hit the economy.
Shadow Brexit minister Keir Starmer then claimed a partial victory for Labour in the aftermath of Theresa May’s big speech on Brexit saying that the government had “accepted” many of the Opposition’s proposals, was heading away from a “hard Brexit” and that May will “fall far short of the hard Brexit that many businesses and trade unions have feared”.
This is straight after May admitted the UK couldn’t remain inside the Single Market and limit freedom of movement at the same time, instead proposing uncertain ideas of staying inside some of the customs union and hinting at special deals for certain industries. Unfortunately the World Trade Organisation rules on such deals would mean that if the EU agreed them with the UK it would have to agree such deals with other countries as well. We are expected to believe that the UK will succeed in getting the EU to agree a deal not only to its benefit but potentially to the benefit of a host of other countries as well.
May’s speech came days after the chancellor Philip Hammond delivered a threat to EU nations that Britain could cut its corporate tax rates yet again as part of its post-Brexit restructuring. But as the Tories are doing this anyway we should be clear among all the confusion that Tory threats of a low-tax, low-regulation bargain-basement polity is not a policy consequent on failure to agree a good Brexit deal but will be a consequence of any Brexit deal.
Outside the EU lies tortuous negotiations with those paragons of all things fair, the Chinese State, and the consistently fair-minded, dispassionate and unprejudiced Donald Trump, who has promised to take personal charge of a trade deal with the UK. May’s grovelling to one Japanese car company; her swift retreat on second thoughts on buying a ridiculously expensive and unproven nuclear power plant partly from the Chinese; and her assault backwards up the alimentary canal of Donald Trump, even pre-empting the Irish in the process, all testify to what “taking back control’ means for the newly to-be-isolated British State. What both Trump and May now openly share are threats to the EU, even though Britain states its desire for its success.
So what are we to make of Jeremy Corbyn’s current position – that you can have a good Brexit that is good for workers?
As I posted a while ago – there isn’t a progressive Brexit, not on offer and not remotely possible. Only the national reformist conceptions of the old Labour Party Left can sustain illusions that there is. That, and the nonsense of some people who call themselves Marxist who supported and still support something called Lexit. These left organisations, which had the project of replacing New Labour with their very own version of Old Labour, have also adopted wholesale the nationalist illusions of this old left.
Supporters of Lexit will claim that Lexit is not Brexit; that they voted against the EU for other reasons and/or that what they voted for is not exactly what they wanted – they wanted not capitalist unity in the EU but workers’ unity outside it. But of course what they voted for was what was on offer – capitalist separation – because that was the only conceivable result of their vote being successful. Their reasons for voting for it are neither here nor there. If what they and the rest of us now face were sufficiently different from what they say they wanted then they would now be campaigning to stop Brexit, recanting their previous view and with an admission that they had made a mistake. But they’re not doing any of these things, so what we all face must be sufficiently close to what they consider they voted for them not to oppose it now.
In comparison Jeremy Corbyn stands on a more progressive platform since there is still some, albeit very unclear and very indefinite, claim that he will oppose a Brexit that is bad for workers at some time in the future if that is necessary, but not now. Or I think that’s his position.
It isn’t very clear what it is, or what could possibly take precedence and transcend his support for triggering Article 50 on the grounds that the “will of the people” should not be obstructed. Under what circumstances will the Labour Party oppose the disaster for workers that is Brexit and with what arguments that don’t apply just as forcibly now?
Of course it has been the case that the choice between British capitalism seeking an isolated role in the world or as part of the EU is not one socialists would seek. But we have enough accumulated knowledge of how to progress the interest of the working class and socialism not to get the answer wrong.
The second problem however is that we were defeated and defeat always imposes a cost. We should of course seek to minimise this cost but more importantly we should seek to continue the struggle on the new, unfortunately more unfavourable, terrain. For the Labour Party the problem is posed to them by the fact that an estimated 65% of Labour voters backed remaining in the EU while roughly two-thirds of the constituencies with Labour MPs in place voted to leave. For a Party wedded to electoralism this creates an obvious dilemma while for socialists the need to take a longer-term view means the opportunist and unprincipled, even blinkered, approach that appears to be determined by purely short-term electoral considerations must be rejected.
The third problem was aptly posed on this blog – the defeat has been a long time coming and rests on long standing weaknesses that exist because of the incapacity and unwillingness of the labour movement to oppose British nationalism. For Labour this has led to collapse in Scotland as a different nationalism has fed off the ideas that British nationalism and all nationalisms take for granted and usurped its leading role. In England and Wales British/English nationalism also hurt the Labour Party where it had not had to confront it before, including the failure to tackle the worst excesses of this nationalism in the form of anti-immigrant prejudice and racism.
The media reports that despite the obvious confused incompetence of the Tories they are far ahead in the polls and that many Remainers have reluctantly become reconciled to Brexit. Some strong Remainers believe there is no case for fighting Brexit and that for the Labour Party to try to do so would be utterly disastrous. But this is a mistake and one that will have greater consequences the longer we refuse to take up a fight that should have been taken up long ago. In some ways Brexit provides better ground to take up this fight against nationalism and racism than before. Why give up when it hasn’t happened yet?
Forward to part 2
Sráid Marx 
The capitalist world is rich in irony. One of President Trump’s first meetings is to meet with the representatives of American Labour and they leave with a smile on their face, to quote Sean McGarvey President of North America’s Building Trade Unions ‘ It is by far the best meeting I have had in Washington.’ Are the representatives of American Labour deluded or in a objective state of betrayal of the workers of the world? I can only recall that before the Political Right began to act against aspects of globalisation this had been the common banner of the International Left. Remember all of those anti-globalisation rallies and meetings from the Battle in Seattle to Porto Alegre, the pamphlets and the books directed at criticism of the free movement of commodities and capital. The Political Right is acting on some of the proposals championed by the Political Left and the workers are of course now confused by it.
At the heart of Left unhappiness seems to be that the Ideological Right is nationalist because it is very much opposed to the free movement of Labour and the Political Left ( opposed only to the free movement of capital and commodities) is as a matter of ‘principle’ in favour of the free movement of Labour and especially in favour of the free movement of all economic migrants and refugees from all the corners of the globe and is therefore free of nationalism. So the political rhetoric of the Political Left( 10 years of the anti-globalisation movement) laid down most of the persuasion to make a success for the Political Right. The mitigation plea being the Ideological Left has been constant in maintaining its support for the free movement of Labour.
Who was it that said that dialectics is misunderstood as a higher form of logic, admitting the existence of contradiction, and instead called it a study in irony, irony being richer than contradiction, I think it may have been me.
Its only the Stalinoid “Left”, still in thrall to ideas of national socialism and socialism in once country that opposed the free movement of capital and commodities. Marx certainly never supported any such limitations, and saw it as one of the great revolutionary innovations that capitalism brought with it, alongside the free movement of people, which broke down the old feudal monopolies and restrictions.
Lenin certainly never supported such notions of limitations on free movement, or ideas about building national socialism, and nor did Trotsky.
Demonstrating against the consequences of globalisation is not the same thing as opposing globalisation per se, or the free movement of capital, commodities and labour. I can oppose and demonstrate against the exploitation of workers resulting from capitalism, without necessarily arguing against the development of capitalism; I can oppose and demonstrate against the consequences of technology replacing labour, and demand that the response be reduced working hours and labour sharing etc., rather than demanding that such technologies never be introduced.
I can argue that globalisation and other forms of division of labour act to massively increase social productivity, and thereby reduce the value of labour-power, and raise living standards, whilst arguing that in specific instances, and in order to obtain those benefits, workers have to impose themselves upon the process.