Demand An Emergency LP Conference Now – Revoke Article 50

Labour MP's continually hide behind weasel words. We could be weeks away from a General Election, and yet still they refuse to say what programme Labour would stand on, in respect of Brexit. They use the get out that the manifesto is drawn up in the Clause 5 meeting, but in respect of Brexit the party policy, itself, that should determine the outcome of that meeting, is not clear. Corbyn managed to prevent the clearer position put forward by CLP's, of backing a second referendum, with Remain on the ballot watered down into the composite which put that position as the last stage in a convoluted process that has allowed the leadership to, essentially, continue to argue that its preference is to implement Brexit, and only to support a second referendum if that becomes impossible. All of the statements from the leadership suggest that, if an election is called, they will fight it on the disastrous basis of supporting Brexit. That is opposed by 90% of the party membership, and by more than 70% of Labour voters. We need an emergency conference now, to set down a clear progressive position on which to fight the election. That position should be, Brexit is reactionary, Labour will oppose it, because it is reactionary, and if elected we will immediately revoke Article 50, and begin to build a progressive alternative with other progressive social-democrats and socialists across Europe. 

Labour's position is not credible, and parties do not get elected with programmes that are not credible. Labour's plan in which Britain is allowed to have cake and eat it, as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove also suggested, by being outside the EU, and yet having all of the advantages of being inside it, is totally ridiculous. No one believes it is credible, because it quite clearly isn't. For Labour to go into an election promising a Brexit that 90% of its members oppose, and that more than 70% of its voters oppose, is a quite obviously stupid strategy, and deserves to result in disaster. To go into such an election promising such an incredible position, in the vain hope of winning over a handful of Tory bigots, or worse, in a handful of seats, and thereby risk losing millions of votes from Labour voters, and others, who would lend the party their vote to stop Brexit, is naïve in the extreme. It reminds me of the current adverts which point out the folly of companies that offer potential new customers benefits over existing loyal customers. In fact, its notable that this week, when, eventually, Corbyn, whipped the PLP to support the option of a second referendum, Labour's standing in the polls rose sharply, putting Labour 5 points ahead, in one poll, having for months being on the decline, as Corbyn continued to back Brexit. 

Right-wing Labour MP's like Gareth Snell and Lisa Nandy have tried all sorts of ploys to be able to find some justification for their scabbing on party discipline, and voting with the government to pass May's deal, as witnessed by the amendment they, and others, attempted to put to May's third failed attempt to get her deal passed last week. That amendment tried to cover their scabbing, by asking that parliament be given some say in the next stage of negotiations. That is no better than the attempts to cover up such scabbing by saying that MP's had been persuaded by the Tories commitments to abide by workers' rights and so on. Really? Are you that naïve that you would trust this Tory government to look after workers rights, let alone the Bojo, or Gove Tory government that is likely to succeed it in coming months? Anyone, who has seen the problems that parliament has had in trying to have any meaningful say in controlling the government over Stage 1 of the negotiations, must be wilfully blind, and self-deluding, if they think that there would be any chance at all of exercising control over a Tory government in Stage 2, when all the leverage that parliament has, whilst Britain remains inside the EU, is gone, and an increasingly Bonapartist executive, acting in an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic manner, rides roughshod over parliament and the rule of law, and appeals directly over their heads to a reactionary mob, whipped up by a reactionary Tory media. This is the stuff of the development of totalitarianism in a mass society. 

What their willing self-delusion represents is a willingness to kowtow to reactionary ideas, rather than confront them, and to appease bigots within their own electorate, in the hope of holding on to their seats - a goal they prize far above actually defending any kind of progressive, let alone socialist principle. But, as I've shown in previous posts, even that is a naïve outlook. Take the seats in Stoke, which voted by around 65-70% in favour of Leave. That might suggest that a lot of Labour voters also backed Leave, but the reality is different. What it actually shows is that a far higher proportion of Tory voters, in those seats turned out to vote Leave. Some of those Tory voters are people who often would not bother, because they know their candidate is not going to beat Labour. In addition, the Leave vote was bolstered by a turnout of people who generally do not bother to vote, or who in the past have voted for the BNP, and other fascists. As I pointed out before the referendum, it was this phalanx of a core reactionary vote of bigots that would win it for Leave, and so it turned out. In places like Stoke, it meant that core vote of bigots was mobilised, including some that often vote Labour, but the proportion of those bigots who normally vote Labour is still a minority. As the studies by the BES and others has shown, even in the North and Midlands regions which voted Leave the proportion of Labour voters who voted Leave was not significantly more than in those other regions of the country that voted Remain.  Moreover, those amongst them who vote Labour, continue to do so for other more significant reasons that are unlikely to change.

In 2017, Snell's vote was 17,000, which was a 12.2% point increase on Labour's vote in 2015. Much of the increase came from the fact that the Liberal and Green vote collapsed. The Liberal vote which had been 7,000 in 2010, and had fallen to 1200 in 2015, fell to just 680 in 2017. The Greens who had scored 1100 in 2015, fell to 294 in 2017. By contrast, the Tories who were in third place in 2015, with just 7,000 votes, saw their vote nearly double, due almost entirely to the collapse of the UKIP vote from 7,000 in 2015 to just 1600 in 2017. In the referendum, Stoke Central voted 65% Leave to 35% Remain. If all of the remaining UKIP vote in the constituency can be counted as having voted Leave, whilst 80% of the Tory vote of 13,000 voted Leave, which is highly likely, especially given that half the Tory vote comprised returning UKIP voters, then it only requires around 40 - 45% of the Labour voters to have voted Leave for Leave to achieve the overall 65%. In other words, even in a heavily Leave voting constituency like Stoke Central, a clear and large majority of the Labour vote is comprised of people who voted Remain, not Leave. 

Trying to appease bigots in places like Stoke will only act to legitimise the bigotry, to encourage the bigots to demand even more appeasement, more reactionary policies in future. 

The other weasel words used by Labour politicians comes in the form of the argument put by Emily Thornberry on the Sunday morning politics shows. She argued that whilst she supported Remain, and continues to believe that Brexit will be damaging, she thinks its necessary for Labour to pursue the reactionary Brexit policy, because that is what people voted for in 2016. This is a nonsensical argument. A reactionary policy does not stop being reactionary, just because a majority voted for it at some fixed single point in the past, or indeed at any point! 

Let's assume that in 1973, Britain had never joined the EEC. In the following period of 40 odd years, the UK economy then continued to decline, and seeing all the advantages of being in the EU, the Labour Party came to the conclusion that it would be in the interests of Britain to join the EU, for all the same reasons that they now argue it would be a mistake to Leave. They would then attempt to implement that policy, and in doing so they would attempt to win over sufficient support from the electorate to put that policy into effect. So, why not do that now? Put that another way, if in five years time, having Brexited, it was obvious that Britain would indeed be better off to have stayed in the EU, wouldn't the Labour Party be bound to want to argue that Britain should rejoin the EU, so as to correct that error. In which case, why stand by and allow that pain and suffering to happen during the intervening period? Why not do the obvious thing, and argue for what you believe in here and now, rather than pander to bigots, and democratic primitivism. 

It was, indeed, a serious mistake for Labour to have fought the 2017 election on a programme that committed it to “respecting” the referendum result. Labour should have fought the election on the basis that Brexit is reactionary, and that it would seek to stop it at the earliest opportunity. But, even in 2017, Labour did not come out to say that it was a pro-Brexit party. It continued to make clear that it thought that Britain was better off in the EU. This is the real nub of the problem in respect of Brexit, and the conflict between the plebiscitary democracy of the EU referendum, and the parliamentary democracy, which is the basis of the British political system. 

In Ireland, in the 19th century, nationalist political parties fought for an independent Ireland, and there was no doubt, who, therefore, would implement such a policy should the opportunity arise. In Scotland, the SNP has campaigned, centrally, for decades on the programme of Scottish independence. Had Scotland voted, in 2014, for independence, there is no doubt, who would carry through the necessary measures to bring it about. The same could be said of the campaign for Catalan independence. And, when Norway sought to become independent from Sweden, as Lenin said, it was quite a straightforward matter of the Norwegian parties advocating independence, to simply declare, in the Norwegian parliament that they had become an independent state. 

But no such situation exists in Britain in relation to the EU. There have indeed been nationalist parties in Britain advocating independence from the EU. The Communist Party opposed staying in the EEC in 1975. Its successors, and alliances, such as No2EU, have argued the same line in more recent times. The National Front, opposed the EEC in 1975, and in more recent times, the BNP advocated the same line. All of those nationalist parties and alliances obtained less than derisory votes in General Elections. The one party to have done slightly better is UKIP, but again its success has been limited to low polls. When it comes to General Elections, its vote has been only slightly less derisory than that of these other fringe nationalist outfits. Unlike say the SNP, or Sinn Fein, UKIP has serially failed to get any MP's elected to parliament, including its own demagogic leader, Farage, who tried on numerous occasions. 

With no sizeable British National Party focussed around the question of British independence from the EU, it was always going to be the case that there was no real political basis for bringing it about. When Leavers complain that the Leave vote is not being implemented by MP's who overwhelmingly oppose it, that is simply a reflection of this basic fact that, unless national independence is such an overwhelming demand of a people, mobilised behind a party that is geared to implement that demand, it is never going to turn out well. 

The closest to such a party now is the Tory party, and trying to act in accordance with that is tearing that party into shreds, as it has for decades. Whatever happens over Brexit, unless it becomes such a concern for a large enough segment of the population to create a nationalist party whose sole focus on carrying through such a policy enables it to win a parliamentary majority on that basis, as with the Irish, and Scots nationalists, then the idea of British independence will always be fraught, and unstable. No such party has ever been able to win more than derisory support, and that continues to be likely to be the case.