Labour Beginning To Make Sense On Europe

Norway option is a very soft form of Brexit

The whole point of the EU referendum was to restore order to the Tory Party.  Cameron would get out on the stump and follow up his surprise general election win with a barnstorming campaign uniting the country behind Europe.  As a two time winner he'd be able to flatten opposition in his own party and see off UKIP in marginal seats.  The swivel eyed would be shut up and would have nothing better to do than to go back to moaning about the EU, reminiscing about the empire and wife swapping parties.


Well it didn't quite work out like that.  But it has united the Tories to a pretty big extent.  They still have a few high profile people who are keeping the pro-EU flag flying but by and large they have lined up behind Brexit.  And the form of Brexit they have gone for is currently shaping up to be the hardest one on offer.  If the rhetoric is anything to go by we are going for unsucked gobstopper hardness levels.  (I think that may be expectation management to some extent, but that's another blog post.)

So the Tories are surprisingly united by the issue. Labour on the other hand had been pretty much talking with a single voice on this one up until the referendum result was announced.  A lot of people have criticised Jeremy Corbyn's lack of enthusiasm for the campaign, but given that a win for remain would have predictably given Cameron a boost it is easy to understand his reluctance.   Why help your rival's cunning plan.  But I don't think anyone realised what the result was going to do to the Labour Party.

In fact if you had designed a result to traumatise the Labour Party it is hard to see how you could do much better than what the voters actually delivered.  For a start the result was close, so partisans for the two sides were not likely to give up and move on quickly.  The bulk of Labour Party members - some 90% - wanted to remain.  Most Labour voters did too, around 70%.  But leave scored strongly in Labour's most working class areas.  Many Labour MPs found themselves representing seats where a majority of voters had voted leave.  Whether a majority of their own voters had voted leave was another question - but given the numbers there must have been at least some in that situation.

So Labour found itself in an excruciating situation.  If it continued to back remain under any circumstances it could put off voters it needs to retain just to stay where it is - and where it is electorally at the moment can hardly be where it wants to be.  But switching to supporting leave will upset a lot of its existing supporters too.  In fact Labour MPs represent both the strongest leave seats and the firmest remain ones too.

And there is also the question of democracy.  Labour is a very democratic party and so is naturally inclined to respect the verdict of the voters.  And the voters have spoken, and said leave.

It is hard to see any good strategy that can get Labour back into a winning position from this situation.

And so far the Labour Party has given every indication that in this business it has no strategy and not much of a clue as to what it even wants let alone how to go about getting it.  Mildly agreeing to allow the triggering of Article 50 to go through on the nod was a pretty abject position for one of the two big parties of the UK to end up in.

And yet today I heard something that suggests that maybe, just maybe, they have hit on a way to possibly turn the situation to their advantage.   Kier Starmer let slip on Marr that Labour's condition for future support was that any deal should leave Britain in no worse a trading situation than it was while in the union.   This is, now I think about it, a really smart position to take up.  There is only one way that this requirement can be fulfilled.  It is to go for the kind of arrangement that Switzerland and Norway have.  Membership of the single market, membership of the customs union, free movement of people and probably some payments into the EU budget.  This isn't what the anti-Europe campaigners have dreamt about, but it definitely fulfils the democratic mandate of the referendum.

It is also what I think most people would choose if they had to pick between it and having no kind of arrangement with the EU at all.  We can all look at the map and we all realise that we need to have some kind of harmonious relationship with the neighbours we share the continent with.

So that begins to look like a way Labour can square respecting a democratic result, coming up with a superior and probably more popular approach than the Tories and also be able to turn round to its existing pro-EU members and supporters and say that they are at least supporting the least damaging form of Brexit.

Not being a Labour Party member I am not that invested in how well it works out for the party itself - though as I think I have now been cured of ever voting Conservative again I hope that they at least look like an alternative government again some time soon.  It is entirely possible in any case that Mrs May's real aim is the same of Kier Starmer's anyway and has been all along.   So it might not pay any dividends for Labour if the government goes for this option anyway.   But if hard Brexit really is where we end up, I think it will be significant that it didn't happen with Labour acquiescence.  Because whatever happens, the EU is going to be a major issue all the time we are outside it.