The Guardian has reported that:
Labour MPs are being asked by the party's high command not to focus on problems caused by Brexit when asking questions in parliament, dealing with the media, or posting on social media, according to sources in the parliamentary party.
After a week in which Labour leader Keir Starmer delivered a major speech on how the country should rebuild the economy and reduce inequality without once mentioning Brexit, relations with the EU or the severe problems that have confronted many UK exporters since 1 January, senior party figures reacted with astonishment.
I am not surprised that they were astonished. This data combines the results on 106 opinion polls on Brexit since 2017:
The reasonable conclusion from that data is that at least half the UK still has considerable doubt about the wisdom of leaving the EU. I am amongst their number.
And what Labour is doing, in a first past the post electoral system in which the government is determinedly pro-Brexit, is to refuse to represent those people. The result is that, with the best will in the world towards the smaller parties in England and Wales, there is no real prospect of political representation for around half the population in those countries at present.
In Scotland, of course, it is different. The reason why SNP support continues despite its in-fighting must in part be because there is fundamental alignment between that party and many in Scotland on the key issue of the day, to which alignment on Covid can be added.
In England and Wales there is no such alignment at all. Instead, we have the key opposition party deliberately turning its back on half the electorate in a deliberate move designed to ensure that they only compete on the government's laid down terms, which guarantees that they will lose. They can never out-Brexit the madness of the ERG on the right wing of the Conservative Party. This, then, is a policy with guaranteed failure built in, and yet Labour pursues it.
I would be annoyed enough if I was a Labour member. I am more annoyed because I am not. Not only is Labour refusing to represent half of England and Wales, and more than that in Scotland, but because of its intense tribalism that denies us any chance of political representation that might reflect our views in a proportional representation system it is also denying us the chance to be represented by parties that do reflect our views.
The result is obvious. It is that Labour guarantees perpetual Tory rule whilst undermining any chance of democracy in this country.
And please don't say Corbyn would have been better on this. He clearly was not.
We are left in a desperate position where Labour joins with the Tories in destroying the proper functioning of democracy in this country by simply refusing people choice.
I loathe what the Tories are doing, but Labour has to be called out for facilitating it. And that's both sad, and as annoying.
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It is intensely annoying. You don’t necessarily have to be calling for re-entry into the EU – I get that this would be politically tricky but for goodness sake you MUST oppose THIS form of destructive Brexit.
Given the experience of the last 6 weeks, for the sake of Ireland and business it is time to rejoin the Single market.
I think the plan is to say nothing and hope all the negative fallout from it sticks to the Tories. But, they will be guilty by association.
They don’t want to criticise it (which they should be doing) because they are petrified of the reaction – i.e. remoaner, remainiac, you lost, get over it etc. – from the media.
Sadly, because of our voting system, voting Labour in any General Election is the only way to get rid of the Tories in my constituency.
Craig
“Radio Silence” Labour who’d have thought it possible from pioneering party to lickspittle!
Agreed.
It is simply failing those who knew what would happen and those who have learnt since.
It fails to put clear ‘red’ water between itself and the Tory party. I’m convinced that when people see more difference between the two, then Labour’s fortunes might change.
At the moment there is this debate it seems in the party about aping populism. It’s surely the wrong discussion to be having?
I’m in total agreement Richard.
Shocking. Awful. Abhorrent. And many more words in a similar vein.
Enough to want to swear, or take to the streets were I not nearly a pensioner…
There’s plenty of protest activity against the government planned for 20th March. Don’t let being under 55 stop you knocking up a banner and getting down to one.
Brexit has been a disaster of overwhelming magnitude for the Labour Party. It is key that an immediate consequence of the referendum result was the Chicken Coup in which the Labour Right made a pretty reasonable challenge to the leader.
Let’s reflect on how extraordinary that moment was. The Tories complacently call a referendum hoping to silence their rebels then calamitously lose it. The coup should have been in the Tory party as their Remainer leader was obviously unfit to run a Brexiting Britain. Instead it’s the Opposition that picks that moment to shoot itself in the leg. Extraordinary. It’s as if Wellington had chosen to attack the Prussians at Waterloo while Napoleon looked on in bemusement.
They then could never find a comfortable Brexit position. While the Tories went from being the party that had led the Remain campaign to the party of Brexit means Brexit Labour equivocated and argued. Then Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer’s much admired intervention in conference to commit Labour to putting Remain on a second referendum ballot paper was an extraordinary act of rebellion against his party leadership. A unilateral act that once done leadership was scared to row back on.
For Corbyn the fundamental problem was that he didn’t recognise Brexit as a social rebellion, a transformative project in the minds of people he was trying to sell his own transformative project to. It’s the worst time to pitch a new project when many people felt they were already partway through a different transformative project that would restore better wages and working class status. He never understood this – when he lost in 2019 he wrote a Guardian article saying the people have rejected change. Wrong, Jeremy. The people voted for Get Brexit Done, the biggest change since 1945. (I’d argue that leaving the EU is a bigger project than joining it was).
Starmer’s current position is based on the post-election analysis that Labour lost because of its Brexit position. If you can’t out-Brexit the Tories and you can’t advocate Remain then the position that is left is being neutral on the matter. That is why he’s taken the position he has, it makes sense. He doesn’t want to be seen as fighting yesterday’s war after it’s already been lost.
There is an alternative strategy where the Opposition talk about specific sectors such as the Scottish creel fishermen or touring musicians but he’s worried that doing that would let the media paint him as still a Remainer.
It’s a zugzwang – every move that Labour can make is bad. And that’s pretty much been the case all through Brexit.
Simon,
I suspect over the next two years, Labour will be forced to justify NOT pointing out the defects of Brexit.
Many of those who voted for it will “forget” they did so and look for someone to blame. Sadly, it is what some people do.
Starmer needs to have something where he can say, ‘I saw this coming’ or ‘I was right about this’.
The fall in exports may reduce but they will still be down. The effects can’t be hidden forever.
I don’t think you’re wrong I just think Labour are stuffed either way.
@ Simon
You talk as though there was never a Third Way Strategy to stay in the EU, refuse to operate an open economic migration policy because English is the majority second language of EU member citizens and refuse to implement automatic fiscal collar policy (Austerity Cuts). Corbyn gradually shifted to this strategy but it was too late. Corbyn failed primarily because he didn’t understand global (Barge Economics) and monetary economics (MMT) neither it seems does Starmer!
Can you explain the term “Barge Economics”? (Neither DDG nor Mountain View had an answer for me.)
Like 2 bald men fighting over a comb, Labour and the Tories are fighting over 10% of the electorate. And the tragedy for Labour is that in my view, it’s on a hiding to nothing chasing those votes.
Meanwhile the open goal of representing those who want to rebuild our relationship with Europe is being totally ignored by Starmer. And this group does contain a proportion of new votes for Labour. It’s unconscionable.
They voted for Johnson’s hard right Agreement. Labour own it as well. They have nowhere else to go on Brexit other than agreeing with it. Monumental stupidity and they’re stuck with a leader who’s blindly led them into this cul de sac.
No party has a right to continue to exist. People will simply have to get used to the fact that Labour is going the way the Liberals did a century ago. The numbers simply aren’t there any more. Scotland has been lost to Labour, Welsh support is declining and traditional socially conservative Labour supports started peeling off in 2005 – it just became a mini-avalanche in 2019. Only in the most exceptional circumstances has it any chance of holding or gaining seats outside of London south of a line beyween the Severn estuary and the Wash. The Lib Dems (aka the Really Useless Party) seem capable of holding or increasing their current c. 4 million votes.
Labour is assailed within and without by the anti-capitalist, anti-western left, by climate fantasists and the purveyors of identity politics. The pro-Tory print media set the agenda which is slavishly followed by the broadcasters. The Grauniad is just an echo chamber for bleeding hearts, the morally and ideologically pure and the “woke”.
Even if we were to have another referendum on changing the voting system, any proposal to make it more proportional would be defeated – mainly because the Tories (and a core of Labour supporters) would always oppose it. In addition, it would prove impossible to devise a single option that all favouring change would support. So that’s a non-runner.
This Tory hegemony won’t last forever, but it will last for a long time. We’ll just have to get used to it until a new political generation emerges for whom Labour’s current internecine, quasi-ideological, tribal fueds, fetishes and obsessions will mean nothing – as they already mean nothing for the vast majority of voters.
@ Paul Hunt
“The peeling off” as you call it is largely because the leaders of the Labour Party can’t be bothered to investigate what is really going on in the world, particularly in regard to economic and monetary theory, preferring to rest on the “vague laurels” that the party is for “the many not the few”! In short they don’t have anything to “sell” that actually meets the needs of the many.
I probably should have said Labour is at a theoretical dead-end.
There is the exception of a few Labour MP’s but they’re regarded as ideological trouble-makers by the leadership.
Paul Hunt.
Change is coming.
Massive change is coming.
The impact of climate change is going to change everything forever.
Party politics will be overtaken by events.
Covid has given us a glimpse of what is in store.
Does Starmer have a job to do in regard to Brexit? Read the following article, one of many that keep cropping up in the UK media and realise making it Labour Party policy to maintain “radio silence” in regard to Brexit is economically and morally irresponsible:-
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/21/sussex-medicines-firm-takes-production-line-abroad-white-van-beat-brexit-ban
” If you can’t out-Brexit the Tories and you can’t advocate Remain then the position that is left is being neutral on the matter. That is why he’s taken the position he has, it makes sense”
That’s the position that Labour appeared to take in the election – triangulating to not offend anyone and ending up looking either terminally indecisive or a bunch of shapeshifters that no one could trust. Possibly both. I don’t see how that was ever going to fly. If devious chaunty rustlers were what you wanted you’d vote tory – it’s what they do, why take second-best? OTOH if you wanted someone vaguely honest, competent and aware that there is such a thing as society the main alternative were a crew who patently couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make their minds up about the biggest issue if the day. That’s no good. They were frit, as the late unlamented M Thatcher might have said – and it showed. Who votes for that ?
No explanation from Labour why Tory “austerity cut” council tax rise is monetary illiterate at the current time. Anneliese Dodds might just as well have gone on TV and foamed at the mouth!
“Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s shadow chancellor, said: “Rishi Sunak’s £2bn council tax bombshell in the middle of a pandemic isn’t just economically illiterate — it’s wrong.”
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/feb/21/middle-income-households-to-be-hit-by-2bn-council-tax-bombshell
“Foaming at the mouth” is more correct as a metaphor than I thought. Here’s Neil Wilson on how a corrupt establishment is trying to hide the details of how the UK’s monetary system works:-
https://new-wayland.com/blog/uk-government-spending-gory-details/
Re-join parties should build influence similar to what UKIP achieved (not through lies). They should present all the evidence we have so far about the performance of the economy, alienating our European neighbours, UK losing its international standing in the world, risking a return to violence in Northern Ireland and of the union breaking up which will be irreversible etc. It should be more about explaining to the public about the benefits of the EU membership, that freedom of movement is a two way system rather than one, that the Brits also need it to work and study in the EU without restrictions, that a member state has the right to deport an immigrant if he has not found a job within 3 months, which no UK government has ever applied, to make them aware that immigration can be controlled even with freedom of movement etc.
In summary, new re-join parties should be more about educating the public about the the benefits of being a member so that they would be well informed when voting in a future referendum.
Agreed.
There are a number of sensible commentators who point out that a country is always going to do more business with its neighbours than those far away. The far and distant trade is the jam – the near trade is the bread. In East Anglia and parts of the south it had been easier to do trade with e.g. Netherlands than say Scotland.
Consistently making the points of what can be done with freedom of movement, trade, cooperation, alignment of standards and, well, fish!! will get through.
With the covid pandemic, many people and I would say a majority locally, at least, have made decisions on e.g, shielding, social distancing, the need for restrictions, well before they have been mandated.
The point being there is a quiet majority who understand the realities of Brexit and the pointlessness of it, than those who make a lot of noise.
It is impossible to disagree with your comment Richard and many of the others. What the graph shows very clearly is that no decision on Brexit should have been made by a simple majority, especially since green Leave shows a consistent minority throughout the post-referendum period. This in turn shows very clearly that the referendum was a sham, driven through by an anti-democratic establishment who knew they couldn’t achieve their aim via the normal Parliamentary democratic process and chose the unprincipled Johnson to drive it through with lies and manipulation for personal advancement. Does anyone really believe otherwise? Again the finger points towards FPTP but even Polly Toynbee is not prepared to condemn it as other than ‘archaic’, when it is in fact a carefully designed system of subverting democracy, fiercely preserved by that anti-democratic establishment through its faithful government for that very purpose. The half-baked attempts to get rid of it by the Lib Dems (who blew their chance in 2011) and numerous campaign groups are easily shrugged off by the government, aided, depressingly, by the opposition.
@ Richard,
What about the Lib Dems? They must be pro EU enough for you surely? Mind you, they don’t seem to be benefitting from pursuing a line closer to the one that you advocate. Ed Davey seems to have expressed some public doubts, much to the chagrin of his party activists, that being seen to be a party of rejoin is going to do them much good.
There was a good case to be made, and probably the right one, for hanging on to our terms of membership as they were. Unfortunately we aren’t going to get them back if we decide we’ve made a mistake. If the EU decide we can rejoin, and that is not a given, it’s going to be on their terms. We know what they will likely be and we all know they aren’t going to be generally acceptable.
It looks to me that Keir Starmer is simply recognising that there is no going back and we do have to make the best of a bad job.
The LibDems are past another revival, I think
2010 was it for them
As ever some comments are forgetful. In 2017 Labour was defeated only because an historically reactionary party DUP saved the Tories. Many on the left criticised the EU because of it’s neoliberal economic policies (look what they did to Greece).
And I suspect many voted Brexit( including I believe Larry Elliot) as a protest against the notion of the EU as a nirvana when many Remainers couldn’t name their MEP or who determined EU policy.
Clearly a number of key factors determined what happened between 2017 and 2019.
Despite your suggestion, Richard, that we can’t raise the Corbyn bashing syndrome again, it still plays a key part of Starmer’s current activity.
If the Labour party is finished it will be as much because of the current driving out of the younger left by MPs who would prefer a cushy job and back to Blair’s keep in with the media and don’t change much. It was after all the notion of ‘Corbynomics’ that reflected change.
McDonnell refused to use Corbynomics
He promoted an austerity narrative
They lost the election due to offering a referendum with remain as an option, the so called red wall didn’t take that well.
We have elections coming up in may, if that outcome is repeated then starmer will look pretty pathetic.
They aren’t going to say much at all about brexit, if anything.
Yes half the country isn’t happy with brexit maybe more, but our electoral system gives them no voice
It’s not just the now back to fully controlled Labour Party that is engaging in radio silence on BrexShit. The MSM is also doing Narrative Control. As an example the ‘BBC’s Europe editor’ has not been ‘allowed’ to publish any article on the matter since December. Her Twitter seems to be ‘off that topic’ too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cne6kq5evr5t
Am I being paranoid?
‘DunGroanin says: Am I being paranoid?’
No you’re not being paranoid. You are just living in the real world rather than the trusting, unthinking world that the government wants you – and the rest of the population – to live in. The BBC may try to be impartial, but not on issues which the government regards as sensitive. Probably the most damning example is the BBC’s recent failure to report one of the biggest news stories of the year:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vetted-more-than-1000-laws-via-queens-consent
There can be no other rational reason for this other than the government preventing the BBC from exposing the nonsense of the conventional view that HM’s role is purely ‘advisory and ceremonial’. We must always remember that it is Her Majesty’s (sic) Government.
Her Majesty does!