Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the party's chief whip Nick Brown walk through Portcullis House in Westminster, London, to Prime Minister Theresa May's office. January 30, 2019. Stefan Rousseau/Press Association. All rights reserved.
Theresa May seems to be quietly benefiting
from a bizarre, instinctual deference from wearied senior journalists covering
Brexit, the political equivalent of an endless wait at baggage reclaim. The
source of this deference possibly arises from a repetitious familiarity with
all six lines of the script, or the vicarious predictability of her statements
both to parliament and to the media, in all their patrician, pedestrian
emptiness.
Whatever the explanation, this
cap-doffing is becoming increasingly difficult to explain to inquirers on the
continent, who rightly point to the untenability of May’s position and are
exasperated at the gall of someone who denies that she faces undeniable
checkmate within three moves. Jeremy Corbyn has astutely manoeuvred Labour into
a position where he can illuminate an alternative outcome, but is both
constrained by this deference and overshadowed by others more convincingly
articulating unworkable silver bullets such as a second referendum. But an
opportunity presents itself right now for Corbyn to set out a radical but
realistic agenda to remain and reform the European Union. Offering socialist policies as solutions to Europe’s growing
problems, it could unite a
pragmatic coalition of Leave and Remain voices and oust a zombie Conservative
administration.
The outcome of last Tuesday’s parliamentary
votes will be quickly forgotten in the coming weeks, not least because they are
likely to be rehearsed soon in some scantily disguised variation, but primarily
because they only negligibly alter the choices the government faces. One
positive outcome, however, is that the chorus for a second referendum was
confronted with some cold facts from
Brussels on Wednesday.
A second referendum would require an
Act of Parliament, which would take months, assuming there is a government that
can successfully deliver it. There must be around a dozen competing combinations
of questions, responses and voting methods in contention. The small issue of
actually having a campaign seems to have eluded scrutiny – are the most ardent
Remainers actually confident the odds would be in their favour? The first
referendum would be remembered as a paragon of transparent, evidence-based
debate and considered, critical analysis beside the reductive, shouty binary of
the second. Regardless of how many questions or ballot papers, the entire
campaign would be a straightforward, grotesque brawl with immigration as the
one and only item of debate, conducted with all the patience and finesse of a
Westminster far-right protestor aggressively “just having a chat” with passing journalists and MPs. The
thought of another referendum is a frightening prospect for some of the UK’s
most vulnerable people – refugees and migrant workers and their families – yet from
the moral uplands of Westminster it is thoughtlessly promoted as the only way
out of the mess. What would happen if Leave won, again?
The presumptions around extending
Article 50 also seem to go unchecked. It is hard to envisage any circumstances
in which the EU would permit an extension to allow for the full second
referendum process. The scope for extension is so short as to be pointless – a
few mere weeks before the European Parliament elections present legal obligations in the
event of continued UK membership. And if Brussels managed to fudge some kind of
extension, they will surely be keen to avoid offering flexible and convenient
Article 50 packages to Viktor Orbán and the Italian Five Star Movement. To what
end? Europe is fed up to the back teeth repeating that the (UK-manufactured)
backstop and the rest of the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened.
While UK commentators and
parliamentarians opine on the inevitability of extending Article 50, it is not
hard to see why there is opposition to it in the EU27. It is, in the end, a
“hair of the dog” strategy designed only to delay pain. The second referendum
argument might carry weight among Scottish and Northern Irish remainers, but it
is now time to set it aside given its irrelevance to the task at hand, at a
time when the indisputable priority across the broad liberal and left spectrum
in the UK is to remove the no-deal billionaires’ utopia as an option.
The disappointment of Tuesday’s
amendment votes in Parliament is outweighed by the opportunity for Corbyn to
emerge from meetings with the Prime Minister eliciting the unavoidable conclusion that she is
content to redraw red lines while the UK sails into the social
emergency of a no-deal Brexit.
If parliament is still willing to
indulge this histrionic spectacle, then the waves of popular support that saw
him (re-)elected to the leadership of the Labour Party need to resonate in the
country once more to jolt parliament into the real world, and to oust a no-deal
government. General Strikes are already making a comeback in 2019, from Kerala to Paris. Corbyn, Momentum and the trade unions should
get ahead of the curve and call one in mid-February if no-deal is not
categorically taken off the table. Such situations might make for more winnable
votes of no-confidence in Her Majesty’s Government, and produce the General
Election that the Labour Party have been calling for. Were that election to
elevate Corbyn to No. 10, the stark, inherited choice would be to revoke
Article 50 or crash out without a deal – an impatient EU is not going to
substantially reopen negotiations on May’s deal at this stage.
Think of the political capital PM
Corbyn would accrue from revoking Article 50 in this Hobson’s Choice scenario.
The European Union is a changed place since David Cameron embarked on his
failed “reform” initiative preceding the referendum. The refugee crisis of 2015
has been compounded by a crisis of neoliberalism in 2018, instigated by
resistance to Emmanuel Macron’s deepening of privatisation, austerity and
labour market liberalisation. In France, at least, the gilets jaunes are winning. The EU’s top brass had thought until
recently that austerity measures had weathered the 2008 financial crisis, that
the rise of the far right is only a temporary wobble in an otherwise sound
political economy. They have still not been disabused of this notion and
meanwhile the far-right profit from the low-wage, debt economy proliferating in
post-industrial urban centres across Europe for two decades. Attempts to
conflate the various strands of Europe’s crises into ‘populism’ demonstrate
this denial of reality quite clearly.
The result is precisely what
conservative and liberal national governments in France, Germany and elsewhere
are now contending with. Neoliberalism has reached its limit and is undermining
the foundations of the post-Cold War political settlement. The electoral and
street-politics gains of the far-right have shaken one pillar of the Union – free
movement. Now the whole building is shaking.
Far from being aloof, Corbyn has
identified the priority for the UK correctly – to understand why people voted
Leave and address that through investment, instead of accepting the immigration
rhetoric peddled by the far-right. This is not achieved by flashy tinkering
with policy or a rehearsal of the losing arguments of the first Remain campaign
– it needs transformative economic heavy lifting in everything from welfare to
the NHS, energy to public transport. People voted Leave in 2016 as much out of
having nothing to lose as for half-baked prescriptions
for restoring sovereignty through restricting free movement. These are lessons
with relevance to several of the EU27.
The risks? Revoking Article 50 would be
seen as illegitimate and embolden and anger the far-right. Well, the same goes
for every other option, including a second referendum. The holding of the first
referendum was the real boon to the far-right, and any outcome of the Article
50 process is one in which they gain ground through waves of reaction on the
street, goaded by the Brexiteer elite. The conversation needs to quickly move
to interrupting their stride—and in this regard Labour’s putative programme of
social investment is robust, fresh and timely.
What should his gambit be? Here’s one
idea: a new EU Treaty for a Social Europe to replace Lisbon, not only
democratising the EU’s institutions, but rolling back austerity dressed as
“fiscal discipline” and the straitjacket of privatisation and outsourcing in
public procurement (removing the perceived barriers to renationalisation of
industries and services). And rolling out a realignment of the State’s role in
the economy towards social security and environmental protection, with more
power to harness industry to innovate towards social ends and to address
serious threats such as climate change.
If Corbyn was rebuffed or obstructed by
Brussels in his efforts to negotiate a new Treaty with other left and
social-democratic EU Council allies, Article 50 would be the threat, this time
not because of some Etonian playground fisticuffs spilling into national
politics – rather for jumping ship before the EU disintegrates under the weight
of its own inertia in failing to reform its way out of its growing problems.
European neoliberal hegemony is
entering a major crisis in 2019, and the resulting opportunities for major
reform need to be seized on. Corbyn could lead that charge and deliver to the
UK electorate what Brexit simply cannot.