Arguing for remaining in the Single Market and Customs Union, for now, avoids the contradictions that arise over the Irish border, citizens rights, free movement and so on, and the disastrous effects on the economy that a cliff edge split with the EU will bring with it. But, all of those questions still exist, if Labour continues to argue for withdrawal from the Single Market and Customs Union at some future point. Yes, theoretically, if Labour were to argue for becoming a member of the EEA or EFTA, some of those contradictions could be removed, but that ignores the fact that whilst such solutions might be workable for small countries like Norway or Switzerland, in practice, they are not solutions for Britain's larger economy.
Even politicians in Norway argue that its relation to the EU is not desirable. It means they are bound by EU obligations, decisions and laws, but with no input into forming those rules and obligations. But, for small countries like Norway and Switzerland, that may be a small price to pay for being able to obtain the benefits of membership of the single market or customs union. For Britain, it's clear that whilst it is a small fish compared to the whole EU, or to economies like the US, or China, it is big enough not to be prepared to play such a back seat role as a Norway or Switzerland. The current UK-EU negotiations have made that clear, as Barnier talked about Britain's stance reflecting a kind of nostalgia, of wanting to enjoy all the rights of EU membership, in framing rules and regulations, but without being a member of the club. In other words, it is an expression of the arrogant British stance of seeking to have cake and eat it. There is no way the EU will accept such a stance, and those Brexiters who continue to think otherwise are simply deluded, and are misleading the British people, as they did during the referendum campaign itself.
Labour's change of stance has already had an effect on the Tories. It is probably why May has come out to more firmly announce her intention of staying and fighting the next election, and why the hard Brexiters have rallied around her. The fact is that now, the Tory Remainers, and soft Brexiters have a flag to rally around. Its only a pity that Labour had not provided it during the parliamentary debates over Article 50. The other consequence of that, however, is that it looks like the hard right in the Tory Party are angling to create an excuse to break off talks with the EU, as UKIP had been advocating. That will require a determined struggle in Parliament, and probably the need for another General Election. The shift of stance is also welcome because had Labour continued to appear merely as a pale reflection of the Tories on Brexit, the chance was that many of those younger voters who flocked to Labour as the only hope of resisting hard Brexit, would begin to splinter away.
The shift in stance means that the support of those younger voters and all those that went further and joined the party, can be consolidated, and the chance of fake left parties such as the Greens, Liberals, Plaid and SNP acting as a pole of attraction is cut off. But, that only applies for so long, and the current shift in stance is only a stop-gap, in that respect. Moreover, Labour's stance is back to front. It argues that it will accept free movement, as a part of remaining in the single market, but the starting point ought to be arguing positively for free movement. It is free movement that is the basic element of promoting workers rights, whilst it is the elements of the free market ideology of the Single Market, that undermines workers rights and interests that Labour should be seeking to change along with socialists and social-democrats across the EU.
And a recent poll suggested that even amongst Leave voters, the principle of free movement has majority support, as a recent Left Foot Forward post illustrated.
Labour's stance has so far continued to be framed in those old Blair-right terms of what is good for business as being the basis of what is then good for workers. Yet, even in those terms, what the free market policies that underpinned the EU really represented was not the interests of capital per se, of large-scale socialised capital, but only the interests of the owners of fictitious capital, of share and bondholders. Its foundations framed by people like Thatcher, and other European conservatives in the 1980's, reflected the interests of that fictitious capital, in contrast to the original foundations of the Common Market, based upon extending social-democratic principles of planning and regulation, as the basis of the accumulation of real productive-capital.
What Labour, merely as a progressive social-democratic party needs to get back to is the advocacy of those same principles of longer-term planning and regulation, as the basis for creating the stable conditions under which capital accumulation can proceed across the EU. It needs to get back to the ideas that underpinned the EU's Draft Fifth Directive on Company Law, that proposed establishing the same kind of co-determination of companies by having 50% of company boards made up of elected worker representatives, as already exists in Germany. And that requires also not a breaking up of the EU, but its further integration, and the harmonising of taxes, benefits, minimum wages and so on within its borders. It requires a more rapid development of a Federal United States of Europe, as the minimum basis upon which the struggle for a Workers' Europe can be undertaken.
And that same approach also needs to be taken inside Britain itself. Blair pushed forward the devolution agenda for typically Blair-right reasons. Blair's politics was based entirely upon electoralism, as a form of populism, and the tailing of public opinion. It saw a party's politics as being merely a commodity to be sold to voters, like washing powder, simply packaged up in a fashion that its market research told it would be most effective. Every policy, if such it could be called was merely a consequence of a process of triangulation to maximise votes from different segments of the electorate, in the same way that advertisers seek to maximise sales by stratified marketing.
The various focus groups told the Blair-rights that Scots voters wanted something different to what English voters wanted, particularly those English voters in the South-East that Blair was desperate to win away from the Tories. A single Labour message across the whole of Britain thereby threatened to retain Labour's core vote, whilst alienating some of the English “middle ground”. Devolution meant that a different Labour message could be sent out in Scotland to England, and that, it was intended, would be the way of undermining the SNP, and maximising the Scottish Labour vote. In fact, it inevitably had the opposite effect. It meant the nationalists could continue to blame Westminster for all the ills of Scotland, whilst taking credit themselves for any success. It meant that politics in Scotland was increasingly fragmented along nationalist and loyalist lines rather than class lines, not yet as clear-cut as in Northern Ireland, but moving in that same direction.
Indeed, the logical extension of that has been seen more recently, where that trend has infected the Labour Movement, and Labour Party itself with increasing calls for the Scottish Labour Party to separate itself from the Labour Party in the rest of Britain, much as the SDLP in Northern Ireland exists as an independent party, and the logical extension of that is for the Scottish TUC and Scottish trades unions to separate themselves from their English brothers and sisters, much as is the case with the Northern Irish trades unions. Wherever, these vertical cleavages in society are allowed to become more decisive, or where they are by the history and nature of the society, already more decisive (for example, in Northern Ireland, but the same kind of cleavages exist in a more exaggerated form in places like Iraq, Syria Egypt etc.) they undermine the organisation of politics on class lines. They encourage the formation of cross-class alliances that always weaken the position of workers, and subordinate their interests to those of the respective national bourgeoisie.
Indeed, the same thing could be seen over Brexit itself. Much as Corbyn and others sought to fight the referendum on the basis of the shared interests of workers across Europe, the media were only interested in framing the discussion around a binary choice of the interests of Britain v the interests of the EU. And, when it came to the Scottish referendum that same binary choice was what was on offer. Labour's disastrous Scottish referendum stance was to become good English Nationalists, arguing the case for the union, as it stood, as a capitalist union.
With Kezia Dugdale standing down as Labour Leader in Scotland, the opportunity opens up for a different approach. The approach throughout the UK should be the same as our approach to Europe. We start from the position of what is in the interests of the global working-class. That is why we support the right of free movement, irrespective of whether Britain is in or out of the EU; we start from the position that the minimum practical unit in which to pursue even progressive social-democratic policies is that of the EU. The reason to advocate staying in the EU is not because it would be good for Britain, or good for British business, but because it is the best basis upon which to forge workers unity and class solidarity across the continent, and thereby to undertake the political struggle for workers' interests.
And, the same is true in relation to Scotland, as socialists we argue against Scottish independence not because we are English nationalists, or because such union is good for British business, but because nationalism is a diversionary dead-end, and distracts from the need to build ever closer unity in action of workers throughout Britain, and beyond to ever closer unity in action with workers across Europe.
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