Category Archives: British Labour Party

The crisis in British politics (2) – the mess on the left

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Kier Starter, leader of the British Labour Party, flagging his alterrnative (Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Where does the current political crisis put the left?  I can’t remember a time when it has been so divided, not only over the causes of a crisis but what to do about it.  Brexit, Covid lockdowns and the Ukraine war have all contributed, as have years of printing money.  Yet many on the left have supported Brexit, demanded more severe lockdowns, supported war and western sanctions, and it even has its fair share of proponents of Modern Monetary Theory.

Even the minimum of policies raises division: against austerity includes opposition to energy price increases, which can be solved by ending support for war and removing sanctions. Opposition to the threats to workers living standards, and attacks on democratic rights opened up by the threats of removing EU laws, can be advanced by opposing Brexit.  This means giving focus to the awareness of the majority that Brexit has failed, by explaining the purpose of re-joining the EU.  

Photo: Morning Star

The Labour Party isn’t going to fight for these because it has, like some on the left, supported all the steps that got us here.  Some on the left have therefore said that it is better to face a weakened Tory government than a stronger Labour one committed to more or less the same agenda, so we shouldn’t call for a general election.

There are things wrong with this, although it has the merit of admitting that the left is chronically weak.  This should give it pause to recognise just how close, or rather how far away, it is to leading any revolutionary change, and to considering just what the preconditions for this would be.

Opposition to the call for a general election may reveal the belief that your alternative is weak but the weakness of your enemy will not make up for it.  Labour support for ‘balancing the books’, and therefore austerity, can easily permit their implementation by Sunak if he introduces the odd seemingly ‘fair’ implementation of pain, which would also prevent Labour from shouldering the blame. The effect of further Tory mistakes and division could either be to encourage opposition to austerity or usher in a Starmer government essentially wedded to the same project.

Calls for a general election to kick out the Tories should not be opposed but since we know that it’s not nearly enough the left should concentrate not on this but on what Marx would have called the momentary interests of the working class as well as its future.

This means supporting and generalising the strikes workers are taking to defend their living standards. It means politicising them, including with the demand to bring down the Tories with the purpose of also setting the expectations that will be placed on any alternative Government, including a Labour one.  It means organising in the trade unions to make them more democratic, which is easier to do when workers are engaged in union activity, and building the grounds for longer term rank and file activity.  It means similar activity in the Labour Party, and since this is mainly a defensive struggle against the leadership, it means defending existing rights and supporting the very few potential candidates who will get to stand in an election that support working class action.

If it is argued that the Labour Party is dead then such a view must be tested by the activity that can be organised within it; by the possibility of activating members and recruiting others through the strikes that are taking place, and some proof that the lessons of numerous attempts to organise a party outside it have been learnt.  It’s not enough to say that numerous battles have been lost if it is not clear to thousands of Labour members that the war inside it is over and definitively lost.  It’s not enough to propose some party that does not exist to something you claim is dead but will in some way have to be recognised as very much alive for millions who will vote for it.

Unity on the left is not enough.  There is no point blindfolding ourselves to Brexit, which cannot, like Starmer hopes, simply be parked, but has to be opposed.  Those who have supported it show no sign of recognising their mistake when it stares them in the face.  Likewise, what is the point of demanding protection from the enormous increase in energy prices while supporting war and the sanctions that make it inevitable?  The political struggle against these disastrous positions must continue.

The left, both in Britain and Ireland has put forward actions that the state must implement to address these problems: through nationalisation of energy companies, windfall taxes or price caps, increased state spending and taxation of the rich.  All of these rely on the state doing what the working class needs to do itself, and the state doesn’t exist for this purpose.  We have all just been given a huge lesson on who really controls society and what they are prepared to do even to a pro-capitalist Government that doesn’t play by its rules.

Nationalisation will not gain control over the supply of gas and oil so nationalising retail companies (known as suppliers in the industry) will not reduce prices; and you can’t nationalise companies in other countries.  This is also the case in Ireland, where much of the industry is already nationalised. You certainly can’t nationalise Russian gas, but you can pay a lower price for it, if you argue it’s generally good practice to buy from the cheapest supplier.

You can’t continue to increase workers income from state payments to make up for inflation when the financial markets won’t even support unfunded tax cuts for the rich.  While it’s an acceptable propaganda demand to increase taxation on the rich you won’t be able to make this the answer to the crisis. The underlying weakness of British capitalism is set to continue worsening, especially outside the EU, and redistribution of the tax burden isn’t going to change this.

The Tories have already overturned proposals to reverse corporation tax increases and there comes a point where significant increases would simply amount to a form of state capitalism, and one that is to the benefit of workers!  That’s not the society we live in, or one that could possibly exist.  Income taxes on the rich require a government to legislate it; require a capitalist class to accept it without shifting its incomes abroad, and a state willing to implement it.  The British tax authorities have proved time and time again their willingness to indulge tax avoidance and evasion by corporations and the rich. Tax incentives are as much a part of the code as levies and these always apply to the rich; workers don’t need an incentive to work since it’s the only way they can afford a tolerable or decent standard of living.

The recent crisis of the British state’s creditworthiness was caused not by proposed tax cuts for the rich but by increased debt caused by income payments during the pandemic, and early predictions of a £150 billion bill for energy supports to energy companies in lieu of consumers paying.  The idea that the financial markets will accept lending money to fill any gap left after screwing Britain’s rich, so that the incomes of the working class can be protected, ignores the political interests of the players involved in these markets. At the very least increased interest rates would be demanded if steps along this road were taken, which means they would get their pound of flesh one way or the other.

It makes no sense to offer alternatives that depend on actions by the state when you also argue any possible government won’t introduce them.  To paraphrase Marx again, the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself.  So must the fight against austerity, the defence of living standards and against war.

Under capitalism the place of the working class is determined by its absence of property ownership – the means of producing goods and services.  If you create these by your labour but don’t own them, you can’t expect to receive the revenue arising from them, and especially from a state that is there to defend existing property rights.

This means that the income of the working class comes overwhelmingly from wages and if these are being reduced through inflation the correct response is to increase them, including through strikes.  The working class in many countries is now in the fortunate position of being in a period of low unemployment where it can take advantage of its position in the labour market to organise, demand wage increases and fight for them.  The longer term perspective is to take ownership of the means of production, and thus of the goods and services produced, so it can determine the distribution of the incomes derived from their use and sale.  In this it will obviously come up against the state determined to defend the rights of existing ownership.

It should be axiomatic for the left that the benevolence of the state is not the answer.  It takes the workers’ own money and then decides how much of it to give back, to whom and for what purpose.  It also borrows, then taxes workers to repay the borrowing.  In all this it buys the goodwill of workers with their own money, pretending it is that of the government.  The problem of lack of income then becomes one of demanding that the state gives you more, in the form of lower taxes, higher welfare and pensions, payments for not working (as in Covid) or subsidies to pay energy bills.

This analysis derives from very basic understandings derived from Marxism that many of its adherents accept in theory only to forget in practice.  The failure produces a phenomenon not unknown to Marx.

It produces an inverted reality in which workers seek salvation in actions by the instrument of their subordination.  It illustrates the grain of truth in accusations of the right that welfare dependency creates a culture of dependency, of which the politics of much of the left is a demonstration.  It is indeed ironic that the right often betrays a better appreciation of the role of the state than many self-described socialists.

This state-centred socialism has resulted in support for Brexit because it is believed that somehow the British state can be relied upon to be more progressive than any European one, and can become the vehicle to introduce socialism.

It fuelled demands for more stringent lockdowns during the pandemic because the state can miraculously give people money to buy goods and services it then prevents them from making and providing.

The Left’s “zero-COVID” strategy in operation in China (Chinatopix Via AP)

It now results in support for a notoriously corrupt capitalist state and its armed forces because it supposedly embodies the interests of Ukrainian workers; indeed the workers of the world, even while it acts on behalf of the most powerful states, together forming what is customarily called imperialism.

The Left joins supporters of the Ukrainian state who just happen to be fascists https://theintercept.com/2022/06/30/ukraine-azov-neo-nazi-foreign-fighter/ Photo:NurPhoto via Getty Images: veterans of the Azov volunteer battalion attend a rally in Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 14, 2020

From all this we can see that the task of the left in assisting the British working class in the current political crisis needs some work itself.  A lot of work.

Back to part 1

‘Moving on’ from Brexit

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Within minutes of the announcement that the negotiations between the EU Commission and Britain would continue the Labour Party put out a statement calling for Brexit to get done, plus supporting a deal so that we could all ‘move on’.  There was no sign of Starmer’s six tests for a Brexit that Labour could support because this would mean not supporting any deal.

So, the statement was one part opportunism and one part aping Boris Johnson’s “get Brexit done”.  The most stupid however was the idea that once there is a deal, any deal, we can all “move on”.

In 1957 the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sought to pre-empt creation of the European Economic Community by proposing a wider free trade area that would encompass the six would-be members of the EEC.  The six however had already committed while the British appeared to want to have their cake and eat it: gain a free trade area for its industrial goods in the rest of Europe while continuing its current arrangements with its old Empire, especially in relation to food.  For the prospective members of the EEC the British proposal appeared to threaten political ambitions for the new European organisation while France in particular saw it as a British attempt to take leadership.

When this British attempt failed it went ahead with creation of a separate European Free Trade Association (EFTA) that included Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland, setting its launch date for May 1960.  When the EEC members accelerated plans for cutting tariffs in the same month EFTA, in an effort to keep up, followed suit with its own programme of cuts the following February.  An earlier example of the exercise of sovereignty and the ‘ratchet effect’ so objectionable to the British now.

Just over a year later Britain demonstrated its commitment to its new EFTA allies and announced it was applying to join the EEC.  It did this for many reasons, including that EFTA was too small, that the countries of the dying Empire were going to go their own way, and that the US supported West European unity, meaning that EFTA could never rival the EEC.

Joining it, according to Macmillan in 1961, was necessary not only to boost relatively poor economic performance but “to preserve the power and strength of Britain in the world.”  Showing its continuing devotion to its EFTA allies it unilaterally imposed a 15% surcharge on imports from EFTA members in 1964, making them in some ways worse off than the US.

Today Britain is on its own.  It will not be putting together an alliance of several other European states to rival the EU when it doesn’t even have the weight to compel direct negotiations with the two largest EU states, Germany and France.  Instead of such a coalition it trumpets an exit on “Australian” terms, which is a euphemism for no deal but has the merit of showing how isolated it is.

So, Britain sought EEC membership again and applied to join in May 1967.  Six months later France vetoed the application.    In June 1970 the EEC opened negotiations and in January 1973 the UK was admitted to membership.  There was no position for Britain outside it that remotely cohered with its view of its role in the world.

This is even more the case now when its relative power has continued to wane and will suffer a downward step change as it leaves, regardless of the post-imperial bluster that has gone off the scale.  When the Royal Navy boasts of four small boats defending British sovereignty you should know you’re in trouble.  As a nuclear power it awaits a decision on whether the US is going to go ahead with a missile system Britain depends upon for its ‘deterrent’.

Having rejected membership of the Single Market, even were the EU to agree to it, any deal that is now negotiated will be a ‘thin’ one.  In other words, it will address tariff barriers which average about 3 percent while leaving intact non-tariff barriers that are in the order of 20 percent.  Such barriers threaten the existence of whole industries, including motor manufacture, and many others that require EU approvals such as chemicals and aerospace.  Electricity interconnection with France and Ireland requires adoption of EU harmonised trading rules.  Not mutually accepted rules, not equivalent rules, but exactly the same rules.

The British have resiled against the necessity to align its rules with any development of those of the Single Market.  Why should it change its rules just because the EU changes theirs?  As we have seen, we have been somewhere like this before.

Were the British proposals to be accepted, and their rules to remain unchanged while the EU developed its own rulebook, the rules set by the EU would no longer govern entry into the Single Market.  Britain would have access without having to follow the same rules as member states.  In order to prevent this the EU would have to put on the brakes to take account of the European power that has assumed the strategy of preventing European unity for centuries.  The alternative would be to open itself up to other countries seeking the same privilege as the British.  Neither of these is going to happen.

So, we witness the issue of Fish remaining prominent as a way of allowing Britain to declare some sort of victory in a skirmish while surrendering on the main battlefield.

It seems fairly clear, as Denis Staunton from the ‘Irish Times” made clear this morning, that there will be a deal, but that won’t mean Britain can ‘move on’, except in the sense that it goes round another loop of either having to rejoin its European neighbours or sink by itself into an isolation its people will not accept. There is no ‘moving on’.

This means that the strategy of the British Labour Party of supporting Brexit through supporting or abstaining on the deal in Westminster will put it on the wrong side of history and make it joint owner of the disaster.  The referendum and tortured path since have demonstrated again and again that Brexit is toxic.  It will entail untold attacks on the working class, its rights and its standard of living.  The Labour Party should not be looking to be a donkey that blame can be tagged on to.

The division of workers along national lines shows how reactionary Brexit has been by inevitably promoting division within the British working class itself. We can see this through the millions of workers opposed to Brexit and the rise of Scottish nationalism, nurtured by the idea that one variety of British nationalism is somehow qualitatively better than another.  Already in England we see demands for some sort of autonomy for certain regions like the North of England, as if there was a geographical solution to a problem arising from the system that crosses all borders.  It is as if nothing has been learned from the failure of proposing the fix of devolution for Scotland as the solution to austerity and decline.

On the Left, the so-called Trotskyists are saying it could all have been different when it couldn’t; while Stalinists wallow in their own nationalism, in their demand for national sovereignty and their own version of (nativist) identity politics.

The unity of Europe and erosion of national political differences is objectively progressive. It is a task that socialists would themselves seek to accomplish.  That capitalism is doing it only confirms that it can be done in a rightist and conservative manner and that Marx was right to see capitalism as transitional to socialism.  Of course, it is only transitional to socialism if the working class makes it so, but it won’t if it fails to fight for the tasks that capitalism itself has commenced and imposes for its own ends.

Socialists in the Labour Party – should I stay or should I go?

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The suspension of Jeremy Corbyn for daring to state an opinion, and one that accords with the facts, is a provocation by the right of the Party.  Corbyn is obviously a much diminished figure since he ceased being leader, and the very limited revolt of left MPs in opposition to Kier Starmer’s support for the right of agents of the State to murder and torture show that his failure to democratise the Party has weakened the Left.

What this implies is that the target of the disciplinary action is not so much Corbyn as the mass membership who were inspired by him becoming leader and promoting the policies that he did.  That you can be suspended for simply expressing an opinion that happens to be the truth is obviously a weapon that can be used against anyone who thinks the truth is important.  It’s ironic that it is a former Director of Public Prosecutions who is leading the witch hunt, not perhaps surprising to those of us who consider the State he served in such a senior position is a weapon of the ruling class.

Opposition to this State comes naturally to socialists from the North of Ireland who have long ago been accustomed to agents of the State getting away with murder; but it does make a difference that they are actually sanctioned to do it by law, and important also that the so-called Party of the working class in Britain votes in favour of it.

So if the right wing of the Labour Party decides to provoke the left – what is it provoking it to do and what is the objective if Corbyn and left MPs are clearly too weak to be of any real obstacle to its plans?

This can only be the defeat and expulsion of the left membership inside the Party.  The election of Corbyn to the leadership obviously came as a shock to it and to the British establishment more generally, and both don’t want it in place in any strength with the potential to do it again.  In fact, even if there are other methods to neuter the membership, the right wing of the Party is as opposed to socialism as the Tories and since the largest grouping of socialists in Britain is within the Labour Party a key objective is to shatter this potential base of socialist opposition.

So if this is the plan, what should the response of the membership be?  Should it be to stay and fight?  And what would be the objective of such a fight?  Or should it be to leave and set up another organisation?

Support from the second alternative comes from those who have always said that the Labour Party can never be reformed and will always defend the fundamental interests of capitalism.

In this case the question has to be put to them, at least to those who are members of the Party, what are you doing in it now?  Why, if this is true, did it not exclude you permanently from membership before now?  Does this not mean that there are some other grounds for membership?  And what would these be except that revolutionary socialists can be part of a mass phenomenon that has the potential to be organised and radicalised in a much more significant way than creation of yet another small radical left organisation?  Given past experience, one that will only parrot left reformist politics while failing to garner enough support to be relevant to the mass of the working class?

Some members will no doubt be demoralised by this turn of events, having rallied to the Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader and the possibility of him leading a left Government.  But these people have just had an object lesson that significant progress and socialism will not be delivered to them from on-high, or from anywhere else, but only from their own organisation and activity.

They have been taught that the Labour Party is not democratic and a fight is needed to make it so, which can only come from the inside.  They have learnt that the right-wing of the Party is not on the same side as them and that appeals for unity that were ignored when Corbyn was leader will similarly get nowhere now Starmer is pulling the strings.  They will realise that it is the intention of the right of the Party that they should no longer be in the same movement.  The purpose of the provocation is to shatter the left by silencing and expelling it.  If this is the objective what purpose – whose purpose – does it serve by leaving the party or even making it easy to be expelled?

So, to return to the first alternative – should the left in the party stay and fight and what should be the objective of remaining in the Party in the current situation?

Given the accumulation of a mass membership it should be clear that the objective must be to defend its current position and oppose resignation and expulsion.  This should be the first task.  The alternative is to leave and set up an alternative and rival organisation.  The history of such organisations is not a good one and those that exist are by and large sects that have proved incapable of containing even a narrow spectrum of opinion within their ranks, never mind the current political heterogeneity of the left membership of the Labour Party.

Whatever can be said about the political weakness of much of the left membership from a Marxist point of view, there is no reason to believe that it does not faithfully reflect the leftist working class support outside the Party.  The so-called revolutionary left usually acknowledges this, without acknowledging it, by presenting itself as left reformist when it organises in its unity projects or goes before workers in elections.  Thinking that, alternatively, this failure can be overcome by adopting a revolutionary programme will leave any organisation small and fixated on getting their programme right, which translates into splits.

More fundamentally, a programme without the working class is an idea searching for a reality; in this case a small number of revolutionary militants searching for a working class membership that ignored, if it was even aware of, its previous left projects and joined the Labour Party.  This membership was right to do so, so there is no reason to expect it to rally to their banner now.

So the objective of this fight is to resist attempts at expulsion and to remain alongside the hundreds of thousands of members in the fight to learn the lessons of what is going on – the lessons as set out above.  This means the left must organise to resist the expulsion of Jeremy Corbyn and any other member – success will be preventing this from happening.

How this is done is for the members themselves and those much more in tune with what is possible than I am, but at a general level what it means is that socialists have to know how to retreat and how to defend their position in the Party by defending their membership.  If they think it’s about an opportunity to create a genuine mass socialist party then they have misread the situation completely and will play into the hands of the right.

Lenin said that it ‘is an incontestable truth’ that ‘communists must exert every effort to direct the working-class movement and social development in general along the straightest and shortest road to the victory of Soviet power . . . but it is enough to take one little step farther – a step that might seem to be in the same direction – and truth turns into error.’’  As he goes on to say, sometimes it is necessary to take conciliatory manoeuvres and make compromises.

If this sounds like selling out then those thinking this must not be able to conceive how in current circumstances it is possible to take this sort of action, how to take a step back, how to make a retreat that prepares for future advances.  Those who reject this approach may sound very revolutionary but what they are proposing is anything but.  Corbyn made an absolute blunder by accepting the slanders about anti-semitism in the Labour Party and he, and we, are paying the price for it.  So, now that the going has gotten very tough the tough have to stay and fight.

In the shadow of Brexit

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Back in May I wrote a post ‘It’s not about supporting Jeremy Corbyn anymore’, which stated it was about opposing Brexit, and ditching Labour’s disastrous support for it, poorly disguised in such a way as to piss off anyone with a strong view on the matter. I said after the European elections in which the Tories came fifth, with less than 10 per cent of the vote that –

“The Tories only need a new leader promising Brexit, with a bit more credibility, to have a hope of some recovery, and they’re electing one.  And if they fall short it will not be because Labour has surged forward but because Farage has managed to carry forward his success into a general election.”

But of course, Farage was pulled into line by those with the money and the only significant shift in Labour’s policy was support for a second referendum, except that I noted at the same time that “it’s not about a referendum – if Labour supported some version of Brexit to be approved by a referendum Corbyn would be politically as dead as a Monty Python parrot.”  Which he now is, because his promise to negotiate his own Brexit, and then put it to a vote without committing to supporting it, made no sense.  Then he defeated a motion to support Remain at the Labour conference while promising that a future conference would decide.

In a Facebook discussion I was admonished for not recognising that the gains of the Corbyn movement were a massively increased left membership, a sprinkling of new left MPs and an audience for anti-capitalist ideas.

That a mass membership was encouraged by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is clear, but it also became clear that for this leadership the role of the movement was to follow the leader, not to transform the Party into the social movement that many hoped and believed it should become.  That’s why a claim could only be made that there was a smattering of new left MPs.  This is as much the legacy of Corbyn as defeat in two elections and a divided and untransformed Party, with no clear successor never mind a good range of candidates from which the left membership could choose.

As for an audience for anti-capitalism, I believe in something which is so much more than this negative identification and that has for two hundred years gone a long way in demonstrating not only what is wrong with capitalism but also setting out the alternative.  Brexit itself is a sort of anti-capitalism, in the Lexit, reactionary, stop the development of modern capitalism sort of way that wants to go backwards to when the nation state set the framework of economic and social development.  The proclamation of anti-capitalism as a touchstone is a political retreat and confusion by the left and is consistent with such anti-capitalist phenomenon as Stalinism, and other reactionary populist politics that are inconsistent with the fullest development of capitalism but also antithetical to socialism.

While Corbyn might be leaving the stage, we continue to be under the shadow of his triangulated Brexit policy, including the narrative of a non-existent principle that we must respect a reactionary referendum result regardless of its consequences.  Also included is the idea of a Labour Brexit, one that will supposedly be progressive but bizarrely involves no commitment to supporting it, in fact a declaration of neutrality by the leader with further evasion through postponing a conference that would determine the Party’s position in any second referendum

These are only some of the contortions that have characterised Corbyn’s Brexit policy.  To declare surprise at his unpopularity in the election after such a catalogue of evasion is to audition for the role of one or all of the three wise monkeys.

The failure to openly and honestly fight for Brexit by the leadership, hiding behind six tests; the nonsense of a Labour deal with all the benefits of EU membership but none of the costs; weeks of talks with Theresa May to identify a common Brexit policy, and then claims that a deal could be agreed and voted on within six months (because the EU had agreed to Labour policy!), all this continues to confuse.

For what is most striking about Corbyn and his Brexit policy is not his opposition to Remain but his inability to argue for Brexit.  Like the small left groups who claim that explicit support for Brexit would have defeated the Tories, they fail to explain how all those who are happy to vote for the Tories and Brexit Party could be won to a Labour Brexit that would be denounced as a fraud; or explain what price would be paid in terms of the reactionary politics of nationalism and racism that would be necessary to adopt even to make the attempt.

And what would these groups expect the 68 per cent of Labour’s voters who voted Remain to do while such a policy was pursued, including those in the North of England – in the ‘traditional working class’ areas – who voted to Remain?  How could it ever become Party policy when an even greater percentage of the Labour membership support Remain?

The answer, of course, is that it couldn’t.  And because it couldn’t it wasn’t, although this did not prevent all these groups declaring the need for the impossible – open Labour support for Brexit – that they didn’t even fight for themselves. When was this openly presented as the policy to be supported, as opposed to all the duplicitous evasions listed above?

What exactly was Lexit?  What would it entail? For some it seemed not to matter after it was assumed it would happen – the detail was unimportant, only the economic policy of a future left British Government would matter.  For others it was all the benefits but none of the costs – membership of the customs union and Single Market but no free movement of people and no seat at the table that sets the rules because Britain could help set them from outside, or ignore them if it wanted.  For others it became no deal and trade on WTO terms, sometimes with the lie that these WTO rules meant no real change to the current trading arrangements for years. For others, supporting Brexit seemed only a matter of timing (it was an ok idea before but not now) and a question of who would lead the caravan across the desert and not where it was going.  No wonder there was no open fight inside the Party to win it to explicit support for Brexit.

So now we have a leadership contest where we are threatened with all this vacuous and reactionary nonsense again, with added soundbites and personality claims that only embarrass the listener.

And the obfuscation also continues.  The latest piece I’ve read is an attack on “obsessive Remainers” who have scored “a massive own goal” because they pushed for a second referendum and thereby brought about the victory of Johnson and a hard Brexit.

While it is arguable that a second referendum was not the way to stop Brexit – that was better carried out by a general election in which Labour committed to stopping it – the real claim is that a Labour Brexit was the way forward.  In other words, this is another Brexit-supporting proposition that doesn’t quite declare its love but criticises those who had the temerity to openly fight for Remain.  That this was far from a lost cause can be appreciated from the vote at the Labour conference before the election, when only some sharp practice prevented such a policy being adopted.

While the target is those who fought for Remain the argument is framed around the centrist opposition, represented by “Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, and Chuka Umunna [who] knew how to play the media and get their message across”, plus the Peoples Vote campaign.

Absent from the analysis are the millions of people this campaign mobilised who were far from all being supporters of the Labour right, and who represented a movement that a Brexit-opposing Labour Party could easily have challenged for leadership of, but which Corbyn through his absence demonstrated opposition.  Along with failure to democratise the Party, this abandonment of a progressive mass campaign to a right-wing leadership is the most criminal of Corbyn’s failings.

Absent also, is any appreciation of the mass support of the voters and members of the Labour Party who also opposed Brexit and are the key constituency defining the possibilities that socialists have to make any significant step forward.  Instead we are invited by supporters of Brexit to orient to a so-called traditional working class that no longer exists in its previous form because the industrial, social and political environment that created it was destroyed.

The article states that “It would be fatuous to scold liberals for not supporting Corbynism, a project that was never their own (although some did claim to support the kind of social-democratic policies that Labour spelled out in its election manifestos). But we can certainly blame them for undermining their own self-proclaimed goal: to stop Brexit . . .”   Scolding  liberals, however, is all that the article does, so it is doubly fatuous by the fact that the author isn’t concerned that Brexit be stopped, so why would anyone with such an aim pay any heed to it?

The hypothesis is put forward that “a so-called ‘soft-Brexit’ deal would have been a perfectly acceptable framework for Labour to carry out domestic social reforms: a step sideways, not a step backward”, a claim made not in order to prevent “rewriting history and shifting the blame”, but to define the next step forward, including the identity of the new leadership of the Party.

This claim is certainly less bold than the ‘jobs Brexit’ claimed by the leadership of the Labour Party but it is still false: the exit of the UK from the EU will put up barriers to migration, trade, investment and economic growth that will very definitely not simply be “a step sideways”. Only those on the left who think that stuffing capitalism or a capitalism in crisis is the objective (i.e. ‘anti-capitalism’) could mistake this as a step forward for the working class.

The best opportunity to achieve the ‘soft’ Brexit that the author considers acceptable was when “Labour came forward with its own platform for the Brexit negotiations that set out clearly the terms of a soft-Brexit deal. It was practical and achievable — and the leading EU officials said so publicly.”

Unfortunately, this “perfectly acceptable framework for Labour to carry out domestic social reforms: a step sideways, not a step backward” turns out to be modification of Theresa May’s deal.

This proposal involved five tests which included ridiculous ideas such as leaving the EU while having a say in the EU’s trade policy, and a claim that a customs union would allow frictionless trade, which is also nonsense.  It could not therefore, as it claimed, prevent a border inside Ireland.

Calls for ‘close alignment with the single market’ does not mean membership of the single market, which anyway would be impossible if the UK left the EU, but which then raises questions of what barriers would this Brexit cause the UK to fall behind, and how much would it assume of having your cake and eating it.  The proposal was for “clear arrangements for dispute resolution” but the EU has these and they’re not going to be subject to British influence.

It is claimed that this platform was “practical and achievable” but if Brexit has taught everyone anything it is that detail is the devil that cannot be ignored and that it isn’t practical and achievable unless it is explained, and it wasn’t.

So, it is not true that the EU considered that this Labour proposal was both practical and achievable, but rather simply a step forward in the right direction, a diplomatic way of opening negotiations that would sort out the detail and remove what nonsense elements were included.  The press interpreted this as a step towards the Norway option but apart from the enormous agreements required to replicate such an option for the very different UK economy, it would involve acceptance of EU rules, which is what is claimed to be the problem, and renunciation of any say in making these rules, which is the purpose of a social democratic government.  How would this have made any sense even if it had been “practical and achievable”?

Another example of the potential for a Labour ‘soft’ Brexit is given by reference to the alternatives to Theresa May’s deal voted on in the House of Commons.  It is noted that the closest to succeeding, losing by only four votes, was Kenneth Clarke’s ‘’customs union’ proposal.  But this, like the rest, got less votes than Theresa May’s deal and only got as close as it did because of abstentions.  Given the lack of clarity in the proposal any clarification was more likely to provoke opposition.

The paucity of these so-called alternatives that might have avoided the disaster of Johnson’s victory, as the article would have it, is precisely shown by the one that came closest to succeeding.  It was so vague it didn’t actually constitute a plan.

It didn’t touch on the single market so wouldn’t have addressed the backstop for Ireland that was the centre of the controversy.  Its customs union didn’t make clear whether it would be dynamically aligned with further development of the EU customs union, or whether the European Court of Justice would have jurisdiction, or whether it was meant as an attempt to go back to arrangements created in 1973 when the UK joined the EEC.  And it didn’t say anything about what arrangements would apply to the 80 per cent of the UK economy comprised of services.  But apart from that it could have been a winner?

While it might seem very passé to go through all this again, the argument about Brexit hasn’t gone away and is very far from being done.  The time given for agreeing future arrangements after officially leaving at the end of next month is not long enough to negotiate a comprehensive trade deal.  If any deal is made, or number of sector specific side-deals agreed, it will not be enough to maintain current levels of trade.  Jobs, living standards and employment will all suffer and the identity of the cause will not be hard to find. All Tory promises about nursing and police numbers, however counted, and of new investment in infrastructure, will be unaffordable, unless borrowing increases significantly, which would only cause its own problems of increased interest rates.

If, on the other hand, the transition period is extended, Johnson’s purpose in doing so will damage his credibility and he will come under pressure from the ultra-supporting Brexiteers.

All this will raise challenges to the new leadership of the Labour Party, which will have to do a lot better than its triangulation over the last three years.  Yet, the issue that defined the election, determined the defeat and will determine and define the next period, has not so far been placed clearly at the centre of the debate over who should be the new Labour leadership.

The policy pursued by Corbyn of pretending every other issue matters more, that the question has been settled, that everyone will move on, that tail-ending the Tories by making piecemeal criticisms while having no principled or oppositionist alternative, or any combination of these disastrous approaches, will allow all the problems stored up by Johnsons to be overcome, or at the very least prevent Labour taking advantage of Tory failures.

The majority of people rejected Johnson’s reactionary policies, including Brexit.  Labour can choose to represent this majority or chase after that minority who will become increasingly disenchanted with it and who will have only three alternatives to choose from.

The first is that pursued by the majority so far – forget about the promises of market access and easy trade agreements and accept only the hardest of exits as a real Brexit.  The Labour Party cannot win by appealing to the more and more radicalised reactionaries who will follow this course.

The second is acceptance of what will become increasingly apparent – that Brexit cannot deliver on its promises and was a mistake.  A soft-Brexit approach will become less convincing to Remainers as it appears more and more pointless and may become indistinguishable from Johnson’s policy, should he so choose.  In effect the Labour Party would be hostage to the vagaries of Johnson’s opportunism and lies.  Labour will get little credit for mild criticism of a policy seen to fail so thoroughly.

The third is that a section of Brexit supporters will retreat into political inactivity and apathy as their prejudices are dashed, at which point ‘politics’ and ‘politicians’ will be blamed for the world not behaving as they think it should. Labour will not win by appealing to the prejudiced and deluded.

For all these reasons the lessons of the Brexit election need to be learned and the great schism in the left between those who have trailed behind this reactionary project and those who have opposed it will have to be settled.  Settling it will not be achieved by reconciliation of socialist internationalists to a successor Corbynista leader, who may simply follow the Brexit water down the plug-hole in ever decreasing and quickening circles.

Whoever is considered best to be the next leader and whatever their strengths and weaknesses, the left must prioritise opposition to Brexit and democratisation of the Party and judge the candidates on this basis.  This will involve examination of candidates’ platform and the forces ranged behind them.  If it is the Labour apparatus and union bureaucrats that is their base, these will determine the favoured candidates future policies.  It is not enough to seek the candidate most likely to defeat any soft left or openly centrist candidate because without opposition to Brexit and fulfilment of Party democracy the return of the right wing will only have been prepared and not prevented.

 

The Fall of the Red Wall

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What do you do when you are leader of a Party and the vast majority of your members support a policy that you oppose?  Well, you can’t very well allow them to control the party can you?  So you can’t ensure it operates democratically.

What do you do when the majority of your voters also support that policy?  Well, you dissemble, confuse, appear to sit on the fence and declare neutrality.

In the case of the membership you first prevent them getting their way by stopping them voting on it at conference.  The next year you so manage the policy that is voted on that you can effectively continue to push your own, while of course appearing to do something different and pretending that the members got what they wanted.

But since the new policy does not make much sense the party membership are still not happy and come back to the next conference in the next year and vote again on what they want – and this time they win!  So what do you do now?  This time your friends say to the membership – ‘You Lost’ – and they start singing your name at the conference.  And it’s a victory!

For the rest?  Well, for them it’s then like being at a party where people start singing, and you don’t feel like joining in, but you’re made to feel your spoiling it for everyone, and spoiling the fun, if you don’t join in.  You really don’t want to be a party-pooper so you’re invited to suck it up.  After all, this leader has had it tough.

He’s been accused of all sorts of things that were so ridiculous that your first response might have been to ignore it. But the slander and smearing goes on and on and you want to have a square-go at the traitors inside the Party who are telling these outrageous lies, but the leader can’t trust you, so you’re not allowed.  Remember, the leader can’t very well allow you to control the party.  It’s a ‘broad church’, and just like in church it’s your job to listen to the preacher and then go out and do God’s work.

But this goes on and on, so the leader says he’ll do something about it and these terrible things will be stopped, and again and again you hear the same record.  Some people wonder why he’s saying the same thing about how bad it is, yet he’s saying it again. Why is he having to say it again?  Surely it’s been sorted?  He’s told to apologise and effectively he does, but if this happens again and again why is he apologising and nothing is changing?

Then I hear on the radio that the new manifesto is going to empower people, and I think to myself – WTF, really?  The only thing you have had the power to lead to ’empowerment’ is the membership of the Party you lead, and you’ve stood in the way of it.  Instead you’ve allowed all these reactionary shits to accuse you of nonsensical crimes.  The last time I viewed such a nightmare I was reading ‘The Trial’ by Franz Kafka, and it didn’t end well.  And this one doesn’t look like it will either.

In the election you’re facing a compulsive liar, whose own supporters don’t even trust.  They don’t believe him, but they do agree with him, and they are going to support him. But many people have gotten fed up with you.  You’re supposed to be different – he is what he is.  You are not what you have claimed to be. You’re supposed to be a conviction politician, who embodies honesty and sincerity and many people can see that you haven’t embodied either.

The dam that that held your so-called ‘red wall’ has just sprung two leaks and the first one is the enormous one. Just like a dam that you have seen in the films, your wall of support doesn’t break open only at this point, and other fractures appear in the edifice, and water spurts out of every one of them, everywhere – a hundred and one different cracks appear and it seems as if there are lots of reasons why this wall is going to fall.  When it falls it might seem difficult to say which one is responsible for the whole thing collapsing.  Lots of people look for more and more deep reasons for the collapse, the better to demonstrate their appreciation of the enormity of the collapse. But really the one big crack was vital in creating the rest.

There is a particular risk in immediately seeking the most profound reason for what has happened, although it’s not inevitably wrong and does not invalidate the attempt, but it does involve a risk.  It’s the risk that the explanation becomes so deep and meaningful that it can convey the impression that nothing could have been done about it.  We could never have won, the pressure against the wall of the dam was just too strong.

And this can lead to feeling sorry for the leader, who has been up against it all this time.  And I would feel this way too except I, like millions of others, is soaking wet and praying I’m not going to drown further down the line.  You can feel sorry for the leader if you want, my attitude involves rather more colourful expressions of emotion.

The historic defeat of the Labour Party was the result of a swing to the Tories of just 1.2 per cent and a swing away from Labour of 7.9 per cent.  The Tories won it because Labour lost it.

It lost it primarily because it lost voters loyalty on the big question that mattered – Brexit.  The machinations around it infected everything else Corbyn did, just like the real Brexit will determine so much else in the real world; limiting what good is possible and spurring on everything nasty, cruel and reactionary.

Sky called it the Brexit election, the Labour Party complained that it wasn’t, but now the Party leaders admit it was – a bit late to recognise the obvious.  The Political Studies Association reported polls asking about the issue ‘that will help you decide your vote’ and it was Health – 47% and the Economy – 35%; only 7% said Europe.

But that was in 2016.  In 2019 63% said Europe, while Health was 43% and the Economy 9%.

I could get even more annoyed now because I really dislike stupidity, especially in those who have no business being stupid.  But it wasn’t really stupidity – the reactionary position on Brexit and all its calamitous concomitants, such as suppressing Party democracy, is a sort of politics: ‘socialism from above’ is the kindest way of describing it even though there is no such sort of socialism.   It’s why it might be better to describe it as ‘state socialism’, or much more accurately, better to call it social-democracy and Stalinism.  (In this respect what was also worrying was the impression given by many socialists that the radical aspects of a social democratic programme was really socialism.). But to get back to the point.

What we saw was the nationalist politics of Brexit devour its misguided children, exemplified by Denis Skinner losing his seat to someone better able than him to embody the reactionary logic of Brexit. Unfortunately, these people brought down the rest, the majority, who have always known that Brexit had to be opposed.

If we want to look at the weaknesses of British social democracy we could do worse that start here – the narrow nationalism of the British left going back to Tony Benn or even further to Manny Shinwell and Aneurin Bevan.  Their opposition to ‘Europe’ resting on the Sterling Area and the Commonwealth, a bogus commitment to internationalism that rested entirely on the relics of Empire.

These weaknesses have been imbued by the radical left supporters of Brexit who think using one less letter and replacing one other makes a difference.  These people share the same conception of socialism – state ownership and a national state to implement and defend it from foreigners.  Entirely disappeared from consciousness is that we should be uniting with ‘foreign’ workers against our own state and theirs.  In fact, for a socialist, no worker is foreign, foreign to us is the nationalism that seeks to divide us.  Just like the Shinwell’s of old they condemn the narrowness and racism of Europe for not embracing the world while sailing on a boat that doesn’t leave the shores of Dungeness.

Labour lost 2,585,564 votes from 2017 to this election but the media narrative of the working class deserting Labour over its failure to support Brexit is a continuation of the distortions and lies that has been their staple.  Early estimates claim that over 1.1 million of this reduced vote was Labour Remainers voting for other remain Parties while perhaps 250,000 Labour Leave voters also transferred their vote to these Remain parties.

Antipathy and opposition to the figure of Jeremy Corbyn also seems to have played a major role but this is a combination of very different things that became important precisely because one person could be the focus of all of them.  For more than one reason the leadership is to blame – making Corbyn the sort of Presidential figure to the exclusion of other leaders in the campaign is probably the least important.

Anti-Corbyn hostility combined the opposition of Labour leavers; those prey to the calumny of the mass media; the failure to openly explain and discuss massive policy proposals dumped on the electorate at the last minute giving rise to some cynicism, and most of all duplicity over Brexit and apparent failure to take a position.  What price the one-day conference to discuss the Party’s Brexit policy now?

We need to stop talking about the Corbyn project in the Labour Party because clearly that project didn’t include opposing Brexit and didn’t include empowering the membership, which remain vital to any future progress.

One take on the election had a wonderful quote, ‘Disappointment is a trifle.  Disappointment is a luxury we cannot afford. The dilemma is simple but imperative. Whether to submit to mere fortune or to understand and take action.’  Perhaps not enough for the politically uninvolved but a good enough starter for the rest of us.

The struggle remains to fight Brexit, which hasn’t ceased to be the reactionary threat to the working class it has always been.  ‘Get Brexit Done’ is another lie to join everything else associated with that project.  Lies are ultimately useless because sooner or later they collide with reality.  The issue is who pays for them.  If there is one saving grace from the result it is escaping the embarrassment of an attempted Corbyn Brexit.  The Tory Brexit will fail its supporters and Labour must fight it and all of its consequences, including the disillusionment that its ‘success’ will provoke.

The second is to demand and fight for a democratic Labour Party. The mass membership has proved to be right, even if only negatively, and it must be confident in saying so.  The debate about responsibility for the defeat is not a distraction from fighting the Tories but an indispensable requirement.  Get it wrong, or lose it, and that fight will be hamstrung.  What to do depends on what is accepted as what went wrong, and there must be no truck with those who want to deal with defeat by following those who either led it or caused it.  We don’t want to tack right in pursuit of nationalists and racists and we don’t want another Corbyn who didn’t know how to fight either.

 

Saying yes to Jeremy – part 2

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Brexit and any step forward by the working class in Britain are incompatible.  So what attitude do we take to a party that promises both?  Up until now the way forward was to fight for the Labour Parry to be democratised so that its Remain supporting membership, backed by the majority of Labour voters, could impose a progressive Remain policy on the leadership.  This had to be done irrespective of the Jeremey Corbyn leadership.  In other words, it was a gulp, and then ‘No, Jeremy’.

Failure to see this or to carry it to success, for whatever reason, now means that we have to face a Labour Party of MPs who don’t support Corbyn, especially any progressive policies he stands for, and are no more likely to force a radical agenda in Parliament if the Party won a majority than they were under Blair.  On the other hand, if the Party lost the election badly, Corbyn would be finished and there would be an almighty push to finish any progressive element of the Corbyn project with him.

This is one reason why socialists and working people more generally should call for a vote for Labour, because it provides better grounds on which to fight for socialism, inside the party and outwith it.

Even if the Party won, of course the fight to get the parliamentary party to take the action it needs to take to implement any sort of radical agenda would remain.  The Party would also still be run by a Brexit-supporting apparatus that would deliver up either an unsustainable Brexit or simply more years of political paralysis and crisis.  If so permitted, in either eventuality the Party would suffer, and especially the leadership that delivered either of these outcomes.  It would be better that the Tories bear responsibility for Brexit than it be implemented by Labour, although this means only that we should fight for Labour to adopt a socialist policy on Brexit, not leave it to the Tories.

A socialist policy would not simply mean opposition and support for Remain.  It would mean taking advantage of EU membership to organise on a pan-European basis, trying to win support for the social democratic policies that are currently put forward only within national limits but can only be implemented, at the very least, on a European level.  Of course, such a social democratic programme is not in itself socialist, but a fight to ensure solidarity across each member state would seek to level up labour rights, working conditions and regulations etc. in order that national differences are eroded and the nationalism that feeds off them is undermined.  In this way the grounds for the international unity of the working class can be increased.

So the socialist position is not to attempt to prevent or hold back the unity of Europe but to rapidly advance it in order that the best conditions for the organisation of workers as a class, irrespective of nationality, is created.  We don’t take the view that this cannot be done under capitalism but must somehow wait until after socialism has been created, just as we don’t wait for socialism to unite workers right now within nation states.  If capitalism breaks the restrictions of these states all the more so should the working class.

Those reactionary socialists who can conceive of socialism only as a set of sympathetic diplomatic relations between separate states have no comprehension that the real unity of workers will arise from the internationalisation of capitalism, just as the working class itself is a creation of capitalism, upon which the independent organisation of workers has been and will continue to be built.

The former can only emphasise the sovereignty and independence of separate states while the latter stands for the self-determination and independence of the working class – in opposition to these states and the institutions they create for subordinating workers at the international level, which includes the EU.  The objective is therefore a single socialist polity across the continent.

The first priority now is to campaign for all those standing in the election who at least support Remain and do so on an internationalist basis, who are seeking to advance workers’ interests in the knowledge that the principle of solidarity that ‘divided we fall and united we stand’ applies at the international level as well.

But of course, we have a problem.  Opposition to Brexit also defines the right MPs that still form a large slice of the parliamentary Labour Party, not to mention the Liberal Democrats and Scottish and Welsh nationalists.

It would not make sense to call for a vote for only left-Remain Labour candidates – there are not two Labour Parties and we have not yet democratised the one we have so that it reflects the views of the overwhelming majority of the membership.  If we could ‘solve’ this by only voting for left-Remain MPs then this task would not be necessary.

A majority Labour Party is the best position at the present time to not only defend ourselves against the Tories plans for massive attacks on the working class through Brexit, but also to move forward to opposing Brexit itself inside the Party.  Such a fight would provide a way out of the prospective dangers already mentioned, of a unjustifiable and unsustainable Brexit or continuing paralysis and crisis.  So while the resources of socialists should be concentrated on supporting left-Remain candidates and campaigning more widely for the socialist Remain argument, the overall call is for a Labour vote.  In this process the left inside the Party can demonstrate the correctness of its approach through the inevitable failure of Brexit to deliver what it claims.

Where this does not apply is to those Labour MPs who have voted for the Tory Brexit and who have employed reactionary arguments to defend it, while advancing reactionary politics that essentially blame foreign workers for the problems faced by British workers. In this they are also fundamentally no different from the Tories, which is the ultimate reason why they voted for it.

So what about the Liberals and the nationalists?  They are for Remain – so why not support tactical voting in an attempt to get a Remain majority and at least prevent the Tory’s Brexit?

At this point we have to take a step back, and remember what was said in the first post.  It was argued that Brexit would entail economic disruption that ‘means loss of markets and economies of scale in production; reduced capital accumulation leading to lower economic growth, and loss of necessary labour power both skilled and unskilled without which some current production will cease, shrink, or grow more slowly.’

This is obviously no more in the interests of the bigger capitalists who engage in foreign trade, seek economies of scale and require as wide a pool of labour to exploit as possible, as it is for workers – whose interest is not in more primitive forms of capitalism, in comparison to which the form of capitalism encapsulated in the EU is actually more progressive.  It’s why the Liberals and nationalists, not to mention the Blairites and some Tories, are also for Remain.  They do not do so because, as I said, Brexit will reduce workers’ incomes and employment and diminish the capacity of a social democratic government to provide welfare payments and to redistribute incomes.  They aren’t interested in this, except to stop it; their opposition to Brexit is not our opposition and cannot be endorsed.

So, apart from the fact that the Liberals and nationalists’ keenness for an election has revealed that their priority is not opposition to Brexit but their own party, their projects cannot be supported in any way.  Their politics are antithetical to the interests of workers in the same way that Brexit is, in so far as they seek to divide workers by nationalism, and in the case of the Liberals, in pursuing an opposition to Labour that has so exceeded their differences with the Tories.  It would not even be such a massive surprise if the Liberals did another deal with the Tories after the election, if the Tories required one; a deal for example that could be packaged as a ‘soft’ Brexit.  However, even on their own account, their reactionary politics can easily encompass support for a Tory domestic and foreign policy agenda that would be perfectly consistent with a Tory Brexit.  In short – the Liberals are a party of the class enemy.

The election may facilitate increased awareness that the choice now facing working people, at least outside Scotland, is more and more to be considered as one of Johnson and his Brexit or the social democracy of Corbyn’s Labour.  Much of this awareness will come from increased understanding that the dangers posed by the Johnson-led Tories derive particularly from their plans for Brexit.  This makes it even more inexcusable that the Corbyn leadership refuses to oppose it but has effectively come down harder in its defence. Even so, contrary to speculation that Corbyn would, as he first appeared to indicate, talk about everything but Brexit, he has said more about it than expected precisely because it has become so clear that Brexit is the sharp end of Tory plans to assault the living standards and rights of the working class.

Nevertheless, the position of Corbyn on Brexit makes it less likely that the Labour Party will appear as the alternative that strong supporters of Remain would like it to be.  And we now have numerous polls indicating that a very large number of potential Labour voters fall into this category. The call for a united party from Labour spokespeople in the election has so far effectively been used to further unity around the leadership’s Brexit agenda.

Nevertheless, opposition will not be advanced by abstaining from the election on the grounds that an election victory would see the Party likely end up in the same Brexit position as the Tories.  This is because at least in the short term, this would not be the case.  While a Corbyn proposed Brexit may be of the ‘softest’ variety, it will entail a cost, and will appear all the more pointless the softer it is.  Opposition to any Labour deal from the right and from the left would end up effectively making this same argument.

The view of the left that Brexit is not in reality compatible with any radical social democratic programme will impose itself one way or another. Labour supporters will not dismiss mounting evidence of its threats as do the demoralised, blinkered and prejudiced supporters of Brexit who in their majority now favour no deal.  They will less and less accept a policy of ‘respecting the referendum’ the more this entails they’re having to respect their rights and living standards being shredded.

So the truth that socialists must always fight beside the working class, however backward it views, will find support from the majority of Party members and supporters who are opposed to Brexit.  A Corbyn policy of getting Brexit ‘sorted’, if put to the test, would encourage further efforts to sort it by stopping it.

The longer the struggle goes on to impose this reactionary project the more likely it is that the reactionary supporters of Brexit will be demoralised.  ‘Taking back control’ will seem further away the further Britain gets into the reality of Britain on its own.  Whatever the result the reality of Brexit will impose itself with the most obvious losers its Lexit supporters, whose illusions are the most absurd.

While elections are important, socialists argue that it is not fundamentally elections that are determinate. Rather elections reflect the state of politics and the class struggle and can influence them but not decide them. What is most important therefore is that the vast majority of members of the Party are mobilised in the election in such a way as to strengthen the left in the party and its capacity to impose its views by putting a Labour Government into office.  In 2016 the referendum was to decide the question and it didn’t, and neither did the 2017 general election.  It would not be a great surprise if the current election didn’t either.  In any case the the task is to ensure an election result that puts us in as strong position as possible to resist a Brexit that still has a long way to go.

Back to part 1

Saying Yes to Jeremy?

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So, as far as Jeremy Corbyn is concerned, when it comes to Brexit – ‘look, this debate is now over. We’ve done it, the party has now made its decision, and that’s it; and that’s what we’re going to campaign on.”  (As quoted in The Guardian) As for his decision to support a general election in the shadow cabinet meeting – “it was my decision. On my own. I made that decision. And they gulped, and said, Yes Jeremy.”

So how do we as socialists reconcile the Labour Party’s support for Brexit, which is reactionary, and its radical social democratic programme?

Firstly by recognising that they cannot be reconciled, that ‘friendly relations’ – employing one dictionary definition – cannot be established between the two projects: they are incompatible and one will have to give.  They are inconsistent and the contradictions between them will lead to one, or perhaps both, being ditched.  Anyone believing that a Labour Brexit is part and parcel of a radical social democratic programme is therefore mistaken.

Brexit will disrupt the insertion of the British economy into its biggest trading partner, which is its main market and theatre of operation; main supplier of additional skilled and unskilled labour power; intermediate goods that enable production to be sited in Britain; and the main route through which it inserts itself into the economies of the rest of the world – through agreements and deals which it has, as part of the EU, negotiated with the United States, Japan, South America etc. etc.

Disruption means loss of markets and economies of scale in production; reduced capital accumulation leading to lower economic growth, and loss of necessary labour power both skilled and unskilled without which some current production will cease, shrink, or grow more slowly.  The loss of these markets means that the reduction of existing and potential production will also reduce incomes and employment and the capacity of the state to syphon off revenues to finance its services.  It will reduce its capacity to provide welfare payments and to redistribute incomes, which are sold as central to Labour’s declared project of reducing inequality, insecurity and poverty.

The idea that a transformation of ownership of utilities and other companies from private capital to state ownership will compensate for these effects ignores the reality that state production will be affected just as much by the loss of skilled and unskilled labour, loss of markets and economies of scale etc. as private capital.  State ownership does not by itself create new markets that have just been shut off or reduced, or provide the labour power that is necessary for the current British economy to operate efficiently and grow.

This is all obvious from even cursory examination of media coverage of Brexit’s effects, today reporting potential damage to the tourist industry, but previously in relation to international research and university teaching, to EU staff in the NHS, the whole car industry, aircraft production, financial services and seasonal workers in agriculture, and many others. When asked this morning on Radio 4 whether any sort of Brexit could be better for the NHS, the Labour spokesman evaded the question – ‘the people had voted for it so they were going to be given the opportunity to get it’, was the gist of his reply.  As if it was not obvious what the honest answer had to be.

So, left supporters of Brexit treat it as a separate issue from every other, all of which can be made amenable to the actions of the British State.  The entirely un-socialist view, that the state should and could have such power to banish all the problems created, could only come from one that believes –

1, capitalist state ownership is somehow socialist;

2, the state can suspend or abolish capitalism through its ownership, and do so  in a relatively small country within a much larger and more powerful capitalist world;

3, the division of workers by nationalism and racism can be ended by providing answers that include shutting out foreign workers as if they were part of the problem, rather than their existence in Britain seen as an opportunity for unity that can banish nationalism and xenophobia, and

4, it is possible to ignore the failure of such experiments across the world that have distorted and tarnished the understanding and reputation of socialism.

On top of all this, it describes the socialist alternative – based on an international approach to workers solving their problems – as a question of ‘culture wars.’

Whenever Costas Lapavitsas, a left supporter of Brexit, spoke at a meeting in Belfast I told him that he had come to the wrong country if he wanted to parade the British State as the answer; and I cited internment, Bloody Sunday, murder and torture as all products of the state that we are required to believe can alone deliver progress.   Brexit threatens to further divide workers in Ireland with a harder border while its left supporters complain that the EU is responsible.

Meanwhile it threatens to divide in Britain as Britain has divided Ireland.  We can see this in many ways and not just in speculation that Scottish nationalism will be strengthened.  We see it from the speeches of Brexit supporters claiming that the only way to prevent violence is to support Brexit; that the only way to respect the memory of an MP murdered by a nationalist fanatic is to carry through the policy he killed her for; to describing opposition to the nationalist and reactionary policy of Brexit as a question of ‘culture’, just as in Ireland opposition to sectarianism is declared to be opposition to Protestant ‘culture’.  A culture composed of sectarian demonstrations and burning bonfires upon which Catholic, foreign, gay and any vaguely progressive flag or symbol is burned.

Perhaps it could be claimed that Corbyn’s Labour Party might reconcile its social democratic agenda with Brexit because it doesn’t actually support it?  Except no one believes this, and not just because of Corbyn’s own presumed Brexit views.  No one, that is, except the most ardent Brexit supporters of both right and left for whom the dangers and damage of Brexit are actually its attraction – the separation and isolation, the attempt to turn the clock back, and the illusions in the special role and place of Britain in the world.

From ‘respecting the referendum result’, to seeking how it might support a Theresa May deal, to seeking to negotiate its own deal, to refusing to accept the view of the majority of its own members, everything the Corbyn leadership has done has facilitated a policy of letting Brexit happen. All on the spurious grounds that it can be dispensed with as an issue, Labour can ‘bring people together’ around its agenda and continue with the lie that Brexit is not a part of it.

A second defence is that Labour’s Brexit is not a Tory Brexit, but one that protects jobs and living standards through a customs union and adherence to workers and environmental standards, while striking one’s own trade deals and having a say in future EU deals.  In other words, a deal that shares the illusions of the Tories, before they actually had to negotiate the first step of withdrawal.

It should not need to be said – the EU will not allow Britain the benefits of membership without being a member and paying for it as every other member of the EU does.  So yes, new customs arrangements can be agreed, as can regulatory alignment, and even alignment with future regulation; but you will have to pay for these arrangements and you will have no say in them or any other deal that the EU negotiates with other countries that you will have to accept.  If the EU is so irrevocably rotten why do you want to leave if you will have to pay for accepting its rules without having any say in their formation?

Perhaps you think you can strike your own deals and improve your own protections of workers’ rights?  But you can improve workers’ rights now, if you want.  If this creates a threat that British companies will leave to avoid these new regulations, why don’t you stay in the EU and fight for them to be adopted across the continent?  Would this not give you a strategy to unite workers across Europe and challenge the EU as it currently functions, as opposed to kidding yourself you can just walk away from it?  Perhaps you think you cannot succeed in this, because changes require unanimity within the EU?  But this means your single voice at the very least is an obstacle to a race to the bottom – Brexit on the other hand threatens an unrestricted, Trump-led sprint downwards to the bottom of the barrel.

Perhaps Labour thinks its own deals with other countries will be better.  But what sort of level of workers’ and environmental regulation does it think much bigger countries and trading blocs, such as the US, China and India, will demand for any deals?  Will the EU accept unrestricted trade with a Britain that has agreed that goods can enter Britain from these countries that do not conform with the trade deals that the EU itself has agreed with them?  A relatively small country like Britain may be forced to accept the EU’s regulations or everyone else’s.  What it won’t be able to do is enforce any of its own standards, especially if they were to be higher.

What you have left is a dystopian vision of an isolated and backward Britain dominated by the state that will be declared a socialist paradise by the enemies of socialism and by the defenders of its Stalinist inspiration so discredited in the last century.

Forward to part 2

Corbyn wins and condemns himself to defeat

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Image result for labour party conference 2019

The Labour Party has just decided, in advance of the general election that cannot be far off, that it won’t tell those who might think of voting for it whether, on the big issue of our time, it is in favour of Brexit or against it.  It wants instead to unite the nation around the belief that this is so unimportant that you don’t really need to know.

According to its leader Brexit might, or might not, be better than Remain, although if you believe what he says about his ability to strike a ‘credible’ deal, that might indicate to you that your support for Labour will result in support for Brexit.

Or, if Johnson decides to go for a deal that the EU will accept, it might well mean that Labour will support that deal instead. Perhaps by allowing it to pass through parliament so it can then be opposed by way of referendum, if it gets one?  Not very consistent and not very principled, but since when have these qualities ever contaminated Labour’s position on Brexit since the referendum?

The Party says it ‘respects’ the 2016 referendum result.  Any deal would undoubtedly involve a transition period within which future arrangements would be determined, so that the Labour Party could perhaps claim to have another opportunity to negotiate its own Brexit final arrangements.

After all, a Johnson deal would not be far from the Theresa May deal and the Party spent long enough before deciding not to support it.  Forced in the future by any parliamentary majority in support of such a deal the Party would be compelled to stop playing games and might find it hard not to continue ‘respecting’ the referendum result and allow the Tories to have their Brexit.

There is therefore absolutely no reason why the absurd position Labour has concocted should not throw up further absurdities, already its competitors in the opposition are picking apart the corpse of Labour’s non-opposition to Brexit.

But of course all this means that the real position of the Party is not to remain neutral but to continue to see how a ‘good’ Brexit could be obtained.  Not that this matters.

The Labour leadership wants its members and supporters to continue to play the role of mushrooms and to forget that with this policy it received less than 15% of the vote in the European elections. It wants everyone to forget about being out-polled by the Liberal Democrats for the first time since 1910, a party on the way out just before; forget that it failed to win a majority in 2017 with 40% of the vote but has only around two-thirds of that support now in one opinion poll after another.

So, it doesn’t matter because Labour will go into the election with a dishonest position, that makes no sense even on its own terms; that has proved a failure in the European and local elections; that is opposed by the vast majority of its members and big majority of its supporters, and that will most certainly lead to defeat.

Worst of all, its true position – support for Brexit – is a reactionary policy that will condemn workers in Britain and the North of Ireland to severe attacks on their living standards and democratic rights.

Socialists cannot support such a policy and such a perspective.  All other Labour promises mean nothing in light of it since the economic decline that Brexit will cause will rule them out anyway.  Brexit as a Tory policy will be delivered as a Tory policy by its authors.

From now on the Labour leadership can promise no more than defeat and trailing after the agenda-setting Tories.  All the anti-Tory invective and promises of a Labour transformation are now meaningless.  Rarely has opportunism been so inopportune.  So why is this?

Undoubtedly much of the Labour leadership such as McDonnell knows that the policy is a disaster – the evidence is too obvious to ignore, but they cling to Corbyn because the union bureaucrats cling to him.  They in turn aren’t interested in transformation but only in having a friendly state bureaucracy with which to cut deals, which requires a Labour Government. The failure of the Corbyn project to democratise the party means that these leadership figures have no base outside of him, which is unfortunate since he has just shit all over it so he won’t have one soon either.

The apparatus around Corbyn is Stalinist and believes in a purely national road to what it calls socialism but which has just exhibited what this really means by the vote at the conference. First Corbyn explains the new Brexit policy on the Andrew Marr show; then screws up getting rid of one Blairite Deputy Leader; then cobbles an NEC decision and conference resolution without a meeting and discussion; and then doesn’t bother to properly count the vote in the conference before it trumpets success over the membership.

For some, this type of politics is just a variety of socialism, a difference in approach among various others, but once again Stalinism has proved itself to have nothing to do with socialism.  Stalin thought control of the apparatus of the Soviet State would ensure perpetual rule of his degenerate system and history has given its verdict on that.  As I noted in my last post on this, Corbyn and his Stalinist coterie believe that a Corbyn Labour Party can be assured, not by democratising the Party, but by a Corbyn apparatus.  This idea will go the same way as the Soviet Union, only much more quickly.

At such times it would seem appropriate to make a call for ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ but it’s necessary to be clear what this means.  “Pessimism of the intellect’ – don’t recoil from the conclusions to be drawn from Corbyn’s failure – ‘Love Corbyn, Hate Brexit’ – makes no sense at all, and would be a case of what is now called cognitive dissonance. “Optimism of the Will” – don’t recoil from acting on this conclusion by breaking from Corbyn and creating firmer ground for socialists inside and outside the Party.

The Labour conference has shown there is plenty of room in politics for duplicity, insincerity and underhandedness.  What there isn’t room for is stupidity, which means there is no room for Corbyn’s Brexit policy and no room for him.

 

It’s not about supporting Jeremy Corbyn anymore

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The article below was written just before Jeremy Corbyn decided to enter ‘stupidest politician of the year competition’. Having seen Labour punished in two elections for supporting Brexit he has decided to reaffirm this support and again put on a very long finger the prospect of a second referendum, this time even ruling out Remain as an option.  In doing so showing as much contempt for democracy outside the Labour Party as he has shown for it inside, ignoring as he does the shift to a Remain majority.

Socialists should be clear that his position on the most vital question of the day is thoroughly reactionary. Most people can record this empirically through the leadership and support for Brexit coming from the right and far-right and through the growth of racism and general xenophobia that it has encouraged. Others have realised the damage it will do to the capitalist economy, also realising that such damage has nothing to do with creating a socialist alternative.

It is fundamentally reactionary because it seeks not to replace capitalism, as a reformist we would not expect that, but to make reforms to it through winding the clock back to a time when capitalism was essentially a national phenomenon, where there may have been a world market, but not world production.  Brexit, in fact, implies such a disruption and narrowing of trade that it seeks even to retreat from the world market never mind the international division of labour.

It seeks not to replace the capitalist state, again as a reformist we would not expect that, but to make more perfect the capitalist state that exists, a more perfect national state, without the international features that arise from the internationalisation of trade and production.  Worse, it is a belief that what international interaction that must exist can involve influencing international political arrangements but not being subject to any influences in return, which by necessity limit national policy making.

This is clearest in Corbyn’s idea that Britain can be in a customs union and wider trading arrangements within the EU, and have a say in its policy, but not be a member, with all the obligations this entails.  It is also clear from his opposition to free movement of people and belief that socialism will come to Britain by its own state, and not by the actions of the working class, which cannot ultimately be defined or limited by nationality.

Brexit thus has to compress the productive forces that have spread across the world into a purely national framework that they long ago burst asunder, within a declining nation and its weakening economy.  This project can therefore only fail and fail so badly that it will not get past the first engagement with the EU.  Britain can no longer determine the terms of its interaction with the rest of the world, which is why it only makes sense from the right-wing reactionary point of view that somehow Britain is still or will become a world power again, or Empire 2.0 as it has been dubbed.

It is reactionary because it attempts to change the world by taking capitalism backwards, not build on its growth, development and achievements.  Any such attempt, if it were successful, would produce the monstrosities of Stalinism that came into being during the twentieth century.  But of course, it won’t even get that far.  Even the attempt to go back to the national stage of capitalism championed by the reactionary right cannot succeed, because capitalism will not go backwards, unless it transforms itself/is transformed into something else entirely.

Socialism will be built upon the creations of capitalism and its highest developments, not its earliest and most primitive forms.  Only a fully developed, educated and cultured working class can build a socialist society, which depends on it being an international class, and this in turn depends on the international development of capitalism itself.  There is not, and cannot be, an international working class without an international capitalism from which it arises.

This is what is truly reactionary about any idea of socialism that seeks to retard capitalism and turn it back from its international development – it sets back and subverts the only possible source of socialism.

*         *            *

“Let the people decide the country’s future, either in a general election or through a public vote on any deal agreed by parliament. For Labour any outcome has to work for our whole country, not just one side of this deliberately inflamed divide.”

So said Jeremy Corbyn after the disastrous European election results.  It’s his version of Theresa May’s “nothing has changed” – the world changes dramatically, but their view of it is frozen.

Which isn’t necessarily a problem if your view of the world is correct, if it has understood the change and determined correctly the course of action. Theresa May’s “nothing has changed” came to reflect her inability to get a Brexit that fulfilled the impossible promises of Brexit with the only deal she could negotiate.  She only said it once, but sometimes once is more than enough.

And now Jeremy Corbyn continues to proclaim that he wants an outcome that works for everyone – Leavers and Remainers – as thoroughly dishonest as Theresa May’s version because it’s Brexit with similar impossible promises as her’s.  In his case, it’s a policy that opinion polls show must ignore the wider and stronger identification people have with Remain and Leave than with Labour and Tory, so that hoping to rely on the latter to over-ride the former just won’t work.

And we know it won’t work because we have had local elections and now European elections that reveal the collapse of the Tory and shredding of the Labour vote.  But still we get the Corbyn meme that Labour policy must work for everyone.  He fails to appreciate that Brexit is a policy for the (very) Few and not the Many. And that millions of Labour voters didn’t vote for the Party, or voted for the Liberal Democrats, Greens, Plaid Cymru and SNP.  After all, they have a range on Remainer choices.  Only a much smaller number voted for the Brexit Party, which shows the reactionary character of the policy Corbyn clings to

It is claimed that a general election will be different because the Tories will be offering a hard Brexit and Labour supporters will be compelled to vote against them.  There are so many things wrong with this it’s hard to say what is the most important.  A ‘Corbyn’ transformation based on no more than hatred of the Tories?  A vote against a Tory no-deal Brexit which would mean supporting another Brexit prospectus based on the same impossible conditions that led to a withdrawal deal so pointless it led to support for no deal – in other words a vote for a Labour Brexit that has nowhere to go but the same dead end that May ended up in? And all those voters will be won back to gain a Labour majority when Labour is 5th in Scotland, third in Wales and down to 14%?

The Tories only need a new leader promising Brexit, with a bit more credibility, to have a hope of some recovery, and they’re electing one.  And if they fall short it will not be because Labour has surged forward but because Farage has managed to carry forward his success into a general election.  And how would this be a success?

Brexit will still be the issue in a general election.

It is also claimed that Labour’s message was confusing, but Corbyn’s policy of attempting to cover-up policy by process was supposed to be confusing.  Except most people are not confused – they understandd perfectly well that his policy is to support Brexit.  You can’t repeat “respect the referendum result”, put forward your own Brexit ‘plan’ and spend weeks negotiating with the Tories to get a joint Brexit without revealing that you support Brexit.

Now there is a debate raging about whether the Party should support a Peoples Vote.  But the majority of Labour supporters of a ‘Peoples Vote’ only want it to stop Brexit.  It’s not about a referendum – if Labour supported some version of Brexit to be approved by a referendum Corbyn would be politically as dead as a Monty Python parrot. On the other had, If the Labour Party had vigorously opposed Brexit the march of 1 million people would have been demanding a general election and a Labour Government.  Instead it was led by Liberals who were allowed to come back from the dead and Chukka who is now irrelevant.  The real leader of that demonstration was missing, so no wonder so many on it kept on walking into the polling booth and will continue to do so, ignoring him as he ignored them.

The increasingly delusional and rancid nature of Brexit statements by supporters on the left reveal the growing contradiction between its claims about the progressive character of Brexit and the more and more obvious reality.  From being a necessary break from neoliberalism they went on to claim that it really wasn’t that important after all, to some now saying that Corbyn’s problem is that he isn’t Brexit enough.  They seem utterly oblivious to the fact that this trajectory of supporting Brexit (without a clue as to how it could happen), to support for the most extreme version, is exactly the same as the right-wing leadership of the movement they are so obviously trailing behind.

A similar process is now underway inside the Party, with the Brexit supporters more and more exposed as their ‘confusion’ becomes less confusing and the disastrous results of their policy bears fruit.  The latest article in ‘The Guardian’ is but one more example.

Inside it Ian Lavery, the Party chair, puts together an article less rancid than the Stalinist nonsense in ‘The Morning Star’ but every bit as delusional and misleading.

“Our duty is to heal rifts, not exacerbate them”, he starts, as he surveys the failure.

“Polls in the run-up to the European elections showed that voters did not understand Labour’s position on Brexit. Conference had voted to leave all options on the table to stop a destructive Tory Brexit and our position has been fairly straightforward.” So all options were on the table and this is straightforward?

We are told that “Labourlost voters in all directions and polling appears to show middle-class voters moving to the Lib Dems and Greens, with working-class people moving to the Brexit party.” A repeat of the nonsense that the working class voted Brexit and the middle class Remain – a middle class that is getting bigger by the day it would appear.

He claims that he “has opposed a so-called public vote, not least because parliament has no majority for it in principle and nobody has the faintest idea what we would actually put on the ballot,” although I think most Remain supporters would be able to help him with the wording.

“It does feel that a certain portion of “leftwing intellectuals” are sneering at ordinary people and piling on those trying to convey the feelings of hundreds of thousands of Labour voters. Perhaps, in reflecting on the results, we should consider the effect all of this has had.”  So, it’s ‘not my fault guv’nor’ – it’s those intellectuals, who, like the middle class, seem to have developed extraordinary powers.

“We’d do well to remember that Labour is an internationalist party of social and economic justice”, says the advocate of the policy of national isolation – called ‘sovereignty’; restriction on freedom of movement and a British road to social democracy.

“We cannot win a general election by simply fighting for the biggest share of 48% and, while some polling data suggests more people left Labour for the Greens and the Lib Dems, it is equally concerning to see leakage to the Brexit”, says he who thinks the percentage of the Labour vote going to the Brexit Party is the same as that going to Remain parties.

It reminds me of the Paul Merton joke on ‘Have I got News for You’, who proclaimed concern for the ‘ho’s’ when Czechoslovakia split between the Czechs and Slovaks.  His policy must presumably be to go for the 0% who don’t give a f***.

“The reason we are in this mess is because those in government who engineered the original referendum had no idea what to do if they lost” – as if it was the Tories responsibility not to shred the Labour vote.

“Polling expert Professor John Curtice has lambasted the People’s Vote campaign because of its failure to attract any significant support from the leave side of the argument”, he says, except when you go to the link the Professor doesn’t lambast the People’s Vote campaign.

But, it is, as they say, a poor book from which you can learn nothing, and Lavery manages to say something very true: “Given that it is associated almost entirely with the remain campaign, it does raise the question as to why its proponents don’t simply issue a call to remain . . .”, which is of course correct.

As I have said, the only point of another referendum for the large majority of Labour activists, members and voters is to prevent Brexit.  Lavery tells us that we are headed for a no-deal but he is mainly concerned simply to accept it – “For some, the prospect of no deal is too frightening to countenance, but we need to be prepared for what is an ever growing threat.”

“If we do crash out on 31 October some on the right will be eager to exploit their newfound freedom to roll back protections in the workplace, exploit the environment and enrich themselves. We need to be united and ready to rally the entire Labour movement and all progressive forces in the country against this.  If the Tories do take us over the edge, we must be ready to spell out what a Labour future for our country looks like outside of the EU.”

He doesn’t explain why such freedom should be given to them and why therefore we shouldn’t campaign against their reactionary project by opposing Brexit altogether.  It would therefore be good if he could actually explain what a Labour country would look like outside the EU, after a fall in the value of the currency; capital flight; drop in new investment; disruption to trade and its consequent reduction in jobs and incomes.

Perhaps he believes that the British State, which alone seems to be potentially uniquely progressive (or why leave all the other capitalist states in the EU?), will start making cars made only in Britain and all the other goods that cannot be made in the UK.  Perhaps he believes that having blamed foreigners for the austerity and inequality he can then turn round and reject charges that it is immigrants and non-whites who are still the problem for the greater austerity and inequality that must follow Brexit.

The real consequences of Brexit, and not delusions about what might happen, are what has led a majority to now oppose Brexit.  The elections now confirm opinion polls and other evidence such as the enormous demonstrations and the petition of six million.

Politics isn’t about forgiveness.  As Corbyn seeks to continue his dissembling support for Brexit the membership cannot afford to wait to give, or withhold forgiveness.  It’s time to change party policy to complete opposition to Brexit, and if Corbyn gets in the way that’s his problem.

Reasons for Remainers to vote Labour?

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I usually read ‘The Guardian’ during my lunchbreak in work, so my attention was struck by an article headed ‘Remainers, you have nothing to fear from backing Labour in the EU elections’.

Mmm . . . this might be interesting I thought.

So, I read it.  The article informed its readers that, unlike the Conservatives “Labour will enter the EU elections from a completely different angle, with a programme that is actually about Europe.”  Yes indeed, and that’s the effing problem; because that programme is Brexit.

Its big message was that Labour’s policy is at one with the manifesto of the Party of European Socialists, although I’m fairly certain that this manifesto doesn’t actually support Brexit.

The manifesto “spells out, concretely and in the abstract, where the solutions lie”, and so “the party has an overriding imperative. It must, in solidarity with its European socialist allies, spread its hopeful vision for the bloc.” Except, of course, it wants to leave “the bloc” and, if it is the least bit logical, wishes that there was no bloc at all.  And, concretely, the policy of the Labour Party – of a ‘jobs Brexit’ – is nonsense and in the abstract is unviable, that is, unviable in the dictionary definition related to biology.

The European Socialist’s manifesto contains all sorts of admirable objectives such as “a carbon-neutral continent by 2050; strong welfare states, social safety nets and quality public services; standards driven up by collective transnational action; a ban on zero-hours contracts and fake self-employment.”  But there is a problem, I’ve yet to see a coherent argument for a national road to changing the climate, or unilateral national action that is collective transnational action.

We are told “We can fixate on the persistence of a pro-Brexit faction within Labour – unarguably, it exists – but it is tedious to continue to locate and analyse it when it cannot have a decisive voice on Labour’s position in the European elections.” But again, happy to be proved wrong, but unless the Party campaigns against Brexit, I think there’s a mistake hiding somewhere in this argument.

And I don’t think Remainers are finding Brexit tedious.  In fact, the one million plus march and 6 million plus petition shows that they are quite fired up. Rather it’s the Leavers who are tired – and why wouldn’t they be?  They were told, and many still believe, that leaving the EU would be easy, quick and painless.  The “let’s just get on with it” mood that Theresa May keeps on saying ‘the British people’ want is from all these leavers who still desperately want to be proved right, and equally desperately want some charlatan to confirm their prejudices.

We’re told of the Labour Party – “Never mind the pro-Brexit faction” – what a pity it happens to include the leadership.  And what can we say about such a leadership that, for example, presents us with the ridiculous spectacle of continuing negotiations with the Tories, that never should have started, that are based on the reactionary-ludicrous assumptions that some sort of progressive Brexit might exist, and might be agreed with the Tories.  And the longer they go on, the greater the effort, the more alienating the Labour leadership becomes to all those members and voters who long ago realised that Brexit is a dish better not served at all.

It gets harder, the more one reads it, to understand just what this Grauniad article is saying.  For example, when it states that the European manifesto “is the foundation for a much bolder question: how could these (EU) institutions be transformed so they served their original purpose?”  Doesn’t the Brexit leadership assume that this is impossible?  And do they not also assume that Brexit is still Brexit while adhering to a customs union and regulatory alignment, while having no say in setting the rules for either, while still in a position to ‘transform the institutions’.

You really could not make this up, which is why the leadership can’t explain how it can be made up, and the EU will tell it how it simply can’t be made up.

So, to sum up, supporters of the ‘successful ambiguity’ of Labour policy appear to be missing the rather unambiguous support the Corbyn leadership is giving Brexit – so unambiguous they proclaim their goal as one of unity with the Tories for their favourite Brexit option, which doesn’t look very different from May’s favourite Brexit option.  And this is called opposition?

Some people nevertheless comfort themselves with opinion polls showing Labour ahead, or rather Labour doing less badly, than the Tories, although this wasn’t the case in the Newport byelection.  What they fail to factor in is a Tory campaign for a hard Brexit– deal or no deal – should an election actually be called, which only they could deliver, and in the process hoovering up the Leave voters – who have no reason to vote Labour despite its policy. A Labour-supporting Brexit meanwhile, might present no reason whatsoever for Remainers to vote for it – which is why this otherwise ridiculous ‘Guardian’ column has seen the need to think up a reason to do so, which it abysmally fails to do.

So how ironic would it be if Theresa May should have called an election in 2017 on the basis of opinion polls, only to see the election campaign pan out differently and the arguments put during it actually have an impact, only for Corbyn to seek to do the same and go into an election telling everyone to ignore the elephant in the room?  What sort of argument for Brexit that almost all his members think is crazy or stupid, or something worse, could possibly win the election, unless relying on the opposition being useless?

But isn’t this what Theresa May did before?  Does this obviously failed leader, who isn’t even the leader of her own party anymore, really have to end up leading no one except the Labour Party, in its policy and strategy?

It is very, very hard to see the next election campaign repeating the same outcome as that in 2017, with a massive increase in the Labour vote – except perhaps in reverse.  About as hard as seeing what’s progressive in Brexit and how it could possibly benefit the Labour Party to support it.

Perhaps that article really should have been headed ‘Remainers, you have everything to fear from backing Labour in the EU elections’.  Of course if you still want to do so you perhaps you had better start doing something about the Party’s policy and its leadership. Non?