I was fortunate to have a critique of my EU Elections article from Robin Bunce, a Cambridge politics professor who is far cleverer than me. (However, I maintain that I sourced better GIFs.) You can read the public exchange on Facebook here if you like.
After some quibbles about my maths, Robin made three substantial points about Labour’s stance on Brexit which make sense to me, but still need a push back. They were:
- “Labour’s strategic ambiguity has stopped Brexit.” (At least for now, because otherwise enough Labour MPs would have put Withdrawal Agreement (WA, or May’s deal) across the line.)
- “In a situation where Remain is not strong enough to win a full-on battle, the best solution is a guerilla struggle.” (Stretch it out, avoid losing, keep Remain “in the game” essentially.)
- “As soon as the Tories elect a new leader and adopt a harder Brexit stance, Labour can endorse a second referendum as a last resort.” (It can be said that Labour tried everything else first.)
While that sounds kind of sensible to me, it also sounds all kinds of horrific, for reasons I’ll explain in my reply below.
But Robin’s most powerful point, I thought, was that “Remain have won all of the arguments* but lost the POLITICAL battle,” and that Labour needs a political strategy. (* by “arguments” I think Robin meant economic analyses rather than elections, but he could correct me on this.)
In any case, I thought I should post my reply here rather than just leaving it in a Facebook comment.
What stands out for me in your excellent analysis is the idea of perhaps winning an (economic?) argument but losing the political battle. I’ll stick with my breakfast analogy for a bit, but put it in a domestic situation...
Let’s say Dad wants black pudding but Mum says it’s too expensive and gross. Mum wants Marmite, which is better economically, but Dad says it’s yeasty shit which no one in their right mind could like, and now Mum is crying.
There’s an economic argument here, but the kids won’t remember it. They will remember how Mum and Dad started to make them feel when they kept shouting “bollocks” at each other and nobody had any breakfast, even that crappy dust in a jar which no one likes or remembers why it ended up in the kitchen in the first place.
Fact is, the significance of broken politics is starting to overtake the significance of who’s right in the economic arguments. There’s an economic cost to pay for this as uncertainty is not an attractor of business investment. But the political cost of a prolonged fight should be a scary wake up call to Labour, Conservatives and the rest.
It’s possible that Labour forces the election it wants, but in doing so loses the trust of the electorate. Enter parties like the Brexit Party which might get real wide-ranging power without offering any real policy other than Brexit. You might think that’s as unlikely as a lying, repulsive, impetuous, emotionally stunted, economically incompetent reality TV star winning the US presidency, and you’d be right.
(At time of writing, I forgot that the Brexit Party had also recruited a candidate who may be most famous for appearing on a popular reality show and not being very good at what the show is meant to be about. But I strictly shouldn’t mention that.)
The political battle is everything now, and if parliamentary democracy can’t or won’t deliver something, anything, even an unpopular but workable option, it may get overwritten by the next charismatic dictator who comes along and says we can have what we want if only we’ll trust them. Even if we obviously can’t trust them.
So Labour needs to get its shit together. “We want an election” is not a policy you can put into a manifesto if you get one. So grow a policy.
I’m thinking Labour might regret trashing the WA quite so much. After all, if policy was to deliver Brexit but make it nice and soft, the WA was (and, err, still is) the way to get that. Yes, it seems like a political win to unseat May, but who’s going to celebrate that if it leaves Labour unelectable? I’m not going to write publicly about how a Conservative could reframe the whole debacle to make that happen, but they could. I think we’ll find that at least one of the leadership candidates will be better at basic political competence like this than May.
Paths for Labour to proceed with political credibility have narrowed. I think there are two, and they both involve reframing unpopular Brexit options in the hope that people will buy into one.
The one I don’t want but I think is easier, and stands the best chance of avoiding no-deal Brexit, is to embrace the WA as a bowl of crud nobody wants, but at least it’s a bowl. If we can at least settle on cornflakes (and if you’re feeding a whole crowd one thing, it obviously has to be cornflakes), that’s the way to get them. Start with an empty bowl, which is what the WA should always have been described as. It’s not what you want, it’s the way to get what we all need. But Labour have trashed and possibly smashed the WA bowl to the point where they might not be able to use it at all.
The harder option is to sell the benefits of Remain to people who hate the idea. There’s maybe a little hope here. I actually hate Marmite but still like Twiglets. I know, that makes no sense. They’re covered in Marmite and even say so on the packs now. But if enough people who don’t want Marmite for breakfast can be persuaded that they might like Twiglets for breakfast, it’s doable.
What that means in political practice is not trying to sell the idea of being internationalist to people who don’t want it, but reinforcing the power of being British and proud of it.
Having a vote about what we do with Europe is having power. So let’s have a vote. And what can we do in Europe? Focus on Brits and British influence abroad, which is a positive thing to celebrate, rather than just worrying about people “coming over here taking our jobs”. Focus on the transforming for good we can get done in Europe rather than the paralysis implied by “remain”.
Labour ideally needs reframe “remain” with a better word, and back it up with positive, deliverable promises of what Britain can achieve for the many if it takes back control (yes, use that term) from a paralysed, incompetent, not-listening, failing Conservative party.
That’s snack food for breakfast, eat all you want.
So, what do you think? If you’re reading this far, I’m guessing you’re super into politics, or really can’t sleep.
Is there any good way to bring people happily along into a new point of view on Brexit? Can you think of a better term than “Remain”? And what do you want to do about it?