Labour should vote against Johnson's bad Brexit deal. It fails all of Starmer's Six Tests. If Starmer supports it now, that can only confirm the view that he previously opposed Brexit as a means of undermining Corbyn. After all, Labour could have voted for a better deal than this, when it was put to parliament by Theresa May, two years ago. But Starmer, will back Boris Johnson, because he has acted as Johnson's wing man over the last 18 months, be it in relation to Brexit, or in relation to lock downs, or in relation to the move to an ever more authoritarian, nationalistic regime, as with the new laws on immigration, and on protecting British war criminals.
The basic truth about the Brexit deal is this.
1) NI in the EU indefinitely, with a border down the Irish Sea. Not what Brexiters wanted or promised.
2) Britain as a whole tied to the Single Market and its regulations indefinitely. Not what the Brexiters wanted or promised. And,
a) Britain has to abide by those rules, but, now, with no say in determining them,
b) Britain has had to stay in some regulatory bodies, for which it will pay more than it did as a member, whilst for those its not in, it does not get equivalence, and now has to bear the cost of running those bodies on its own,
c) That only gets tariff free trade on the less than 20% of its economy involved in material production, but
i) still means trade frictions in regulatory border checks etc., and
ii) no provisions for the 80% of the economy involved in service industry.
d) Britons lose all the benefits of free movement etc.
3) Britain gets to do its own trade deals, but the ones it has done only replicate those it already had with the same countries as an EU member. As a small economy, the UK cannot negotiate from the same position of strength that the EU did with those other countries, which is why Britain will get worse terms in any of these future trade deals.
4) Because of the UK's signing up to Single Market regulations, any trade deals will be highly constrained to comply with the Single Market rules on country of origin.
5) Britain collapsed even on fishing.
In other words, this is Brexit In Name Only (BRINO). It means Britain continues to have all the obligations of being inside the Single Market, apart from free movement, but has virtually none of the benefits, including having no say over the formulation of the rules it will now have to abide by indefinitely. The savings on Britain's budget contributions are already exceeded by the additional costs of having to set up separate regulatory bodies, the costs of additional border staff, the cost of additional paperwork, the costs of non-tariff frictions on the movement of goods and services, and so on, not to mention the 4% hit to the economy caused by Brexit. Why would anyone in their right mind think this was a good deal, or a step forward? Why on Earth would Labour want to associate itself with such a disaster?
Starmer's argument will be that, if Labour votes down this deal, then the alternative is No Deal. That is nonsense. Labour can vote down this bad deal, and demand the right to also vote against No Deal, as they have done repeatedly over the last two years. They can put down amendments and so on, to prevent it being a binary choice between this bad deal and No Deal. But, in the end, that comes down to the government, and its majority. If the government cannot get the backing of enough of its own MP's to push through this bad deal, without the backing of Labour, that is their problem. If the bad deal is voted down, and the government then chooses to interpret that as voting through a No Deal, then the government alone will have to bear the responsibility for that disaster. Of course, Boris Johnson would not push through a No Deal if this bad deal is voted down, for the same reason he was led into again capitulating on all of his red lines, in order to secure even this bad deal. That is that he knows that a No Deal Brexit would be a disaster that would bring down his government and consign the Tories to the wilderness for a generation. If Labour is asked if a No Deal is better than this bad deal in those conditions, they should answer “No, but that choice is in the government's hands, not ours.”
Already, we see Boris Johnson, setting out in the Telegraph his plans for reneging on the deal he has just signed with the EU, and which he almost certainly has not read or understood, given his record of failing to read details. He has set out his plans for divergence, and for scrapping regulations, for example. That is an even more rapid declaration of intent to renege on an international treaty than was the case with his UK Internal Markets Bill provisions that were openly declared to break international law, by reneging on the recently signed Withdrawal Agreement. Johnson is setting out his intention to break the agreement he has just signed that requires Britain to abide by EU regulations and standards.
Johnson has talked about this in conjunction with “levelling-up” inside Britain. We know what this scrapping of regulations in order to level up means. It is the proposals for scrapping minimum labour standards and protections for workers, by the creation of enterprise zones and free ports. It means trying to redress the lack of competitiveness that Brexit entails, by screwing workers even harder. But, that will mean breaching the agreement on those terms that Britain has just signed up to. It may yet be that, MEP's will do what Labour should do, and vote down this agreement.
The agreement does not deal with services, which account for 80% of the UK economy. The EU is not giving UK service industry equivalence, which means that UK service industry will either have to find some way of being able to be covered by EU regulatory bodies, or else will find it cannot operate in Europe. Already a large number of UK service industry companies have relocated to the EU, in order to avoid these problems. Ireland is benefiting, because of the language advantage it has, but it now seems likely that Scotland will become independent in a few years time, and become an independent EU state, and it already is home to a large part of the UK finance industry. It will become a natural magnet for all UK service industry.
For Labour to be tying itself to this reactionary Brexit is not just rampant, but misguided opportunism, flavoured by the natural chauvinistic tendencies of Labourism, but it is also electorally insane. Starmer calculates that progressive Labour voters will have nowhere to go, but 2019, shows that is wrong. Labour voters can simply sit on their hands, or they can vote for other Remainer parties such as the Liberals, Greens, Plaid or the SNP. Recent polls shows that the strength of feeling over Brexit is hardening not disappearing. Two-thirds of voters now identify as either militant Remainers, or militant Leavers, whilst the majority, now, clearly oppose Brexit. The idea that militant Remainers are going to vote for a wishy-washy, conservative Labour Party, rushing headlong away from the social-democratic agenda of Corbyn, and, at the same time, embracing Brexit and reactionary nationalism, and the worst forms of jingoism, is deluded. A look at the fate of Scottish Labour gives a glimpse of what is in store for Welsh Labour, and Labour in large parts of England, if that is what Starmer plans.
The stance that Starmer is adopting appears suicidal in relation to Scotland, where Brexit, and Labour's support for it, is driving voters into the hands of the Scottish nationalists, and making Scottish independence an almost inevitability. Without Scotland, its hard to see how Labour could ever win another election. Without Wales that becomes even more problematic. But, in large parts of England too, progressive voters will feel betrayed by Starmer, and drift away to the Greens, Liberals, or may even vote for some new alternative party. After all, this is not the 1980's or 90's, when the idea of some alternative party to Labour was doomed to failure, as the working-class was subdued by conditions of economic stagnation, and years of defeat.
The underlying reality that we are still in a period of long wave upswing remains, even if that reality is hard to see given the consequences of the response to the 2008 financial crisis, and more recently of lock downs.
In fact, the lock downs have created the conditions in which the response to the 2008 crash is now unsustainable. That response involved suppressing economic activity, via austerity, at the same time as printing money tokens to be used to hyper-inflate asset prices, dragging further liquidity from the real economy into speculation. Lock downs have caused borrowing to rise to astronomical levels, and that level of borrowing must cause interest rates to rise. Rising interest rates cause asset prices to crash. The basis of speculation is undermined, and along with it, the idea that revenue can be created by realising capital gains. To obtain revenues, capital must, then engage in actual investment, i.e. the accumulation of real capital. This brings with it the employment of additional labour, and the conditions last seen in the 1960's, when labour can stride forward confidently, and rebuild its basic organisations.
Even with the depressing effects of Brexit, this underlying dynamic will force its way through. In fact, Brexit, because it is a movement of the reactionary small capitalists, may even enhance this process. The small capitalists pushing forward Brexit are inevitably businesses that are labour intensive – they have lower levels of fixed capital, and lower productivity – as against the highly productive, capital intensive large-scale businesses that support the EU. By favouring small capital over big capital, it means that this less productive small capital needs to hire proportionally more labour. An increased demand for labour, means a strengthening of the position of workers, if only because of increased competition between firms to hire labour. The process is contradictory. The strengthening of the position of workers, pushes wages up, and so profits down, but the much lower levels of productivity of this small capital means that even as wages rise, living standards fall, because with lower productivity, the unit value/price of the wage goods that workers buy, increases. They have higher money wages, but these money wages buy proportionally less.
This means that the conditions for heightened distributional struggles are put in place, and with the vast oceans of liquidity that the Bank of England has put into circulation, the conditions are set for a sharp rise in inflation, which means that these struggles become even more intensified. These are the conditions that existed in the 1960's, and which inevitably found their political expression in the growth of more left-wing political organisations such as the International Socialists, the International Marxist Group, Workers Revolutionary Party, and Militant, as well as in a growth of left-wing activists in the Labour Party itself. That is the opposite of the conditions of the 1990's, when Kinnock was able to expel activists in their thousands, and when thousands more left the party voluntarily in a vain hope of creating alternative parties, or simply to descend into apathy.
As I wrote at the start of the year, and reviewed a couple of days ago, in these conditions, a split in Labour looks inevitable. Either, the rank and file reclaim the party from Starmer and the Right, by pushing through democratic reforms, and beginning to deselect right-wing councillors and MP's, or else a large mass of those members will create the basis of a new party, in much the same way that the Labour Party itself was created as an alternative to the Liberals. If the first happens, then the Right will split, taking the name and machinery with them, and will base themselves on their parliamentary representation. That would be short-lived for them. If the second happens, it will be a slower process to form and establish such a new party. The best option remains for members to stay inside Labour and fight.
A central plank of the programme of the Left in organising that fight inside Labour remains opposition to Brexit, and support for free movement. Its on that basis that we can mobilise the 90% of party members, and large majority of Labour voters, who militantly oppose Brexit, and who will be mortified at the jingoistic trajectory of Starmer, and the Right. It has the advantage that it is the only principled position on which to stand, because there can be no sustainable progressive future for the British working-class separate from that of the working-class across the EU.
No comments:
Post a Comment