The Labour Party has quite enough problems of its own without Brexit to add to them. But as it happens Brexit is a major challenge to the party. Although it is exaggerated, there is no doubt that a lot of the working class people who Labour is supposed to represent voted for Brexit. But the majority of Labour voters, and a large majority of Labour members voted against it. It is a tricky situation. Even though the popularity of Brexit is beginning to decline, it might still be an issue that could alienate people that Labour needs. But it isn't going to be easy to come up with a message that might be acceptable to this group of people without offending the many people who are very strong supporters of continued membership.
I don't know what the answer to this one is. There may not be an answer and it may, unfair as it would be given the history, turn out to be the issue that keeps Labour out of power for a generation.
But the short term tactics are pretty clear. Whatever you think about Brexit as a concept, there is still the issue of the way it is to be delivered. Leaving the EU may or not be a good idea. But given the decision has been made Labour can at least unite around finding fault with the way it is being done. The politics more or less require it to do so.
It would suit Labour for Brexit to be something of a shambles, so the fact that they are saying it is does not signify much. But that it is a complete shambles does help. I did have an exchange with a person on Twitter who thought that it was a good thing that this major change in the country's way of doing things had not been planned. But amongst sane people the idea that no plan for leaving even existed must be the craziest aspect of the whole thing.
So this is an open goal for the Labour party. The ability of the Labour Party to miss own goals is well known, so when I heard that they had proposed 170 questions my initial reaction was to assume that this was exactly what they had done. Who is going to work through 170 questions about Brexit? And who can come up with 170 good questions? Troublesome as Brexit is there can't be that amount of issues that require our attention. They must be largely filler, meaning that on top of all the other problems Brexit has posed we now add having to wade through an unreadable mass of suggestions from the official opposition.
So I started what I thought was going to be a long and tedious business of looking through them to discover the ones that might have some substance and hopefully any that were risible enough to get a laugh from. To my surprise, they turned out to be a lot more interesting than I was anticipating.
I haven't had the time to go through every single one yet, but the sample I looked at were pretty impressive. Take for example question number 22.
Will the government also consider applying regional variations in post-Brexit migration arrangements so that different parts of the UK can agree bespoke arrangements with the government related to the different levels of EU migrant labour that they require?
This is a very precise question that goes to the heart of the problem with conflating Brexit with immigration as a problem. Consider one of the regions that voted most heavily for Brexit - Lincolnshire. This is a region where there is very heavy eastern European migration for the purposes of picking fruit and vegetables. It is understandable that the locals here have misgivings about the scale of immigration. But there aren't enough locals to pick the harvests even if they wanted the jobs. Banning EU migrants means that the growers will have to source labour elsewhere or go out of business. They could conceivably get them from elsewhere in the UK. This would be easier to swallow culturally, though even this wouldn't be without problems. Liverpudlians have more in common with Lincolnshire residents than Estonians do, but even they aren't a perfect match for the local customs. They could recruit people from outside the EU, but without wanting to second guess the thoughts of Brexit voters too much, I have feeling that immigrants from the Horn of Africa would not be regarded as greatly preferable to those from the Baltic.
If the news goes quiet on Brexit I'll dip into these questions a bit more and find the more interesting ones to write about.
http://labourlist.org/2016/10/labours-170-questions-for-david-davis-on-brexit/
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