Recasting Labour’s Brexit, Recasting Labour

The unanimous passing at Labour conference of the motion on free movement and migrant rights, while not a guarantee that it will result in inclusion in an election manifesto given the Clause V process, creates an opportunity for Labour to provide a radically different Brexit-related offer to the country.

A commitment to free movement, now explicit where it had been only implicit [1], moves Labour’s ‘credible Brexit towards a very straightforward deal with the EU, based on a bilateral Customs Union to replace the current Customs Union like-for-like, and an alignment with the Single Market which is, in effect, being in the Single Market.

It is, therefore, bar a few fairly cosmetic changes, such as the “protections, clarifications or exemptions” (it would mostly be clarifications) on State Aid that Corbyn has talked of seeking, Brexit in Name Only (BINO).

The question then arises: why on earth, if Labour wants to negotiate BINO, does it then want to put the country through a second referendum where the alternatives put are not, in any real sense, alternatives? For ardent Remainers, this will surely just look like Labour obfuscation about its real intentions, fuelling the conspiracy theory of Corbyn-as-secret-Lexiter. For ardent Brexiters, it will look like taking the piss.

There is, though, an escape route from this lose-lose position.

This route involves selling the two near-identical options as a proxy for the following questions:

Do we, as a set of nations, want to remain in the EU and carry on as before, writing the 2016–2020 period off as an aberration brought about by Cameron’s recklessness, but finally seen off by our democratic institutions, which proved to be robust enough for the task?

or

Do we, as a set of nations, want to take a break from EU membership, on terms which do not materially impact upon our economy or way of life, because our near-miss has caused our EU27 neighbours to lose respect for and trust in us, and because we need to go through a period in which we revamp our democratic institutions and norms, in a way which will help us to be a more constructive member state in the climate catastrophic years to come, when transnational cooperation will be vital, in the event of a successful application to rejoin in five to ten years? [2]

Recasting Labour’s referendum promise in this way allows Labour to present a mature case to the electorate (compared with the LibDems’ short-termism), with the campaign centred on the fact that the Tories brought us to the brink of the abyss, and that we must strengthen and adapt our democratic institutions to ensure this can never happen again, both by codifying our constitution and, more importantly, by creating more and better opportunities for citizens to engage in our democracy, should they wish. [4]

By the latter, I mean not simply further devolution, proportional representation or even some of the more radical thinking on political funding proposed independent of each other by Paul Evans and Julia Cagé, but the more complex challenge of developing the appropriate level of engagement with citizens in their everyday lives, where the right, only really won post-war, to be left alone is matched by the fostering of a culture in which

community instead becomes increasingly personal and voluntary, based on genuine affection rather than proximity and need (Jon Lawrence, 2019).

This puts Labour’s existing promise (for the last two elections) of a constitutional convention at the forefront of an election campaign, but it also requires Labour to rethink, in short order, its messaging, which currently apes the right’s ‘people vs the elite’ populist rhetoric, in a way which (as I’ve started to set out here [3]) simply enhances the widespread impression that Labour has totalitarian tendencies.

Notes

[1] While I am pleased that the campaign for a commitment to free movement has been successful at conference stage, it remains sad that so may votes have been lost, some irrevocably, to the LibDems through the failure of the pressure groups now (rightly) claiming success, to tease out and help make explicit the wiggle room on freedom movement that was in the 2017 election manifesto, and which was expanded through the quiet dropping in February of the migration ‘tests from the original six tests.

But we are where we are, and I suggest the strategy proposed here will recapture some of these votes, because it offers a level of humility that people would like to see from political parties right now, of the type that a Swinson-led party clearly does not have.

[2] Such a recasting does fly in the face of Another Europe’s ‘Remain and Reform’ slogan, but this has always seemed to me like an overreach. It is rooted, as far as I can see, in the idea that, because the left under Corbyn has had a resurgence, then a future Labour government has earned the right to lead on the transformation of the institutions of the EU, reducing the (treaty) emphasis on competition and replacing it with agreements on transnational cooperation, especially on the labour market. I am not, though, convinced, that we have yet earned the right to this, pending evidence that we can create a better, more tolerant society domestically.

[3] Of course, those who favour a harder Brexit can vote for BINO in the knowledge that, once out, they can campaign both to stay out and, in time, withdraw from biliateral treaty agreements, and this may bring some narrowing of the current divide in the context of a coalition of two sets of voters who wish exit for very different reasons but who can agree that domestic democratic failings contributed to the sorry state we’ve been in.

[4] A longer piece would weave John Lawrence empirical evidence about what voters really want from the state into an exploration of Paul Gilroy’s notion of ‘conviviality’, and set that against the current ‘authentocracy’ diagnosis so ably set out by Joe Kennedy, which is rife in parts of Labour and demands of the working a level of homogeneity that they actually spent a lot of time and energy getting rid of.

It would also ruminate on the notion that early New Labour thinking, reflected in Anthony Giddens’ still relevant Modernity and Self-Identity, actually understood the needs and wishes John Lawrence writes of, in his assessment of the shift from the politics of emancipation to the politics of lifestyle, but that this clarity of thought was sadly lost during the Blair years, swamped by less affirming, and ultimately damaging conceptions of community (and the role of the state in ‘supporting’ it) being imported from the US. It would, then, seek to recapture, in the way that Suzanne Moore has done, some of the commitment the left had to the creativity and rebellion of the reflective individual of modernity, in a way which fosters mostly healthy, but even Kierkegaardian forms of (intersubjective) self-exploration, and in so doing takes us beyond the patronizing attitudes with which the left is now associated.

Then, it would insert all this analysis in the Habermasian framework of legitimation crisis (and by extension re-legitimation). It would argue that a full re-legitimation of Labour — rather than what is currently likely at the election to be at best a grudging acceptance that at least we’re not the Tories — can only happen if we truly get to grips with how, even since Labour was last in power, the ‘social identities’ (p.3) of individuals, forged by individuals across towns and cities on the voluntarist, convivial model John and Paul identify and support, has come under threat. and that it is threat, not the ‘legitimate concerns’ that have been constructed on their behalf and without their say-so, which is the prime cause of the anger now so ably exploited by the Johnson regime.

Finally, it would argue, as I have already done here, that this process of re-legitimation, by a government committed to allowing people to live the lives they want to, creates the moral and political base for a restoration of the kind of security which had been won post-war, but has been lost to the ravages of neoliberalism turned neo-conservatism.

In practical terms, this will involve ending the punitive benefit system and replacing with some form of Universal Basic Income (using the very ‘creativity by security’ rationale Anthony Painter advocates), or at the very least breaking the lose-lose link between savings and benefits, but it is important changes to the welfare state are ‘sold’ on the basis that they enable people to reclaim the freedoms they had won.

But that, as I say, is a longer piece, and may depend on a book contract.