Brexit

Letter: Focus on rejoin and free movement

Mohan Sen’s article ( Solidarity 654 ) ends by stating: “The labour movement should demand the UK rejoin the Single Market and Customs Union immediately, and launch a serious discussion about reversing Brexit”. It is wrong to propose demands for Single Market (SM) and Customs Union (CU) membership. We should focus straightforwardly on the demand to rejoin and transform the EU, and short of that, to restore and extend named, specific working-class rights we have lost or are in the process of losing — chief among them, free movement. Workers’ Liberty summarised its stance on Brexit as “Remain...

The Morning Star against free movement

Keir Starmer addressed the CBI last week and said Britain needs to get off its “immigration dependency” and companies need to be weaned off “cheap labour” from oversees and to “start investing more in training workers who are already here”. This marked a big shift in Starmer’s position: in 2020, while standing for party leadership, he’d championed freedom of movement and implied he’d continue to campaign for it even after Britain left the EU. Few commentators (the exception being the i ’s Ian Dunt) seem to have noticed that Starmer’s argument made no sense: as Dunt put it: “Is the problem with...

Labour and the “trend of Bregret”

The “trend of Bregret” — people who supported Brexit changing their minds — “is accelerating and looks set to cause a growing problem for the... Conservative Party”, wrote Matthew Goodwin, an academic focused on the Eurosceptic hard right, on 18 November. It may — it should — cause a problem for the Labour leadership too. Goodwin identifies the main things driving this as “younger and more pro-EU voters entering the electorate and people who did not vote at the 2016 referendum changing their mind”. In any case, it is indisputable. The view that Brexit was right has not held a lead in polls...

The politico-economic consequences of Liz Truss

Andrew Gamble, author of The Conservative Nation and other books, talked to Martin Thomas from Solidarity . There’s been a long civil war in the Conservative Party over Europe. It became more intense after the 2016 referendum. A majority of Conservative MPs and Cabinet Ministers voted Remain, but 57% of voters who had voted Conservative at the general election only a year before in 2015 repudiated David Cameron and voted Leave. Ever since 2016, the party has been disoriented. It has radical factions who want to do different things with Brexit, and a bigger group of MPs who haven’t known what...

Tory fiasco raises the stakes

The Tory party melée may now subside a bit, with Rishi Sunak nodded in as the new prime minister on 24 October. But it has triggered an economic crisis. It has taken the lid off a swirl of dispute in the Tory party. And it has raised the stakes for the labour movement. The usual pattern of capitalist crises is that debt builds up in a boom, with easy credit and speculative ventures, then a jolt reveals that many debtors are unlikely to pay, and collapse snowballs. Not through a boom, but through the Covid lockdowns, government debt has increased hugely since early 2020, corporate debt mildly...

67% of Labour voters want to rejoin EU

Of those who voted Labour in 2019, polling firm Redfield & Wilton Strategies found 67% would support a campaign to rejoin the EU; only 16% would oppose. 55% positively say Labour should campaign to rejoin the EU, with 28% opposed. Meanwhile wider public opinion is shifting too. For a long time polls found a narrow majority or plurality against rejoining. The last five national polls have an average “rejoin” lead of 10.2%; in the five before that it was only 3.6%... This in the absence of pretty much any leadership, including from an anti-Brexit left that feels deflated. Yet, despite some buzz...

The Morning Star and "muscular genius" Johnson

Right to the end, the Morning Star couldn’t hide its admiration for Boris Johnson: “[His] genius was –despite the division among our rulers over the membership of the EU – to capitalise on the disillusion in working-class areas to get a Tory Brexit rather than the version which could be discerned in Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 election manifesto” (editorial, 11 July 2022). The truth is that when it came to Brexit, the Morning Star and its masters, the Communist Party of Britain, essentially agreed with Boris Johnson and wished him well. They even (incredibly) harboured hopes that he might introduce...

Change Labour to beat Tories

Johnson is going. The Tories are discredited and at odds with each other. Yet polling data, and mountains of evidence from everyday life, suggest that, while the Tories are reviled, they still have a strong base of right-wing, nationalist support. They also tell us there is little positive enthusiasm for Starmer Labour. Keir Starmer’s leadership is offering little on the huge issues facing workers and society: collapsing living standards, the threat of climate change, and the mess of Brexit. The relatively left-wing pledges Starmer made in the 2020 Labour leadership election have been ditched...

Labour: demand a debate on Brexit

On 23 June David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary, made up a new Labour policy on the EU at a “Changing Europe” conference “The questions that divided us for half a decade have been settled. We will not re-join the Single Market or the Customs Union...” He proposed some tweaks on the margins of of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, but only to “seek to improve the deal. Not by re-opening it, or re-negotiating it”. None of those tweaks are about restoring worker and social protections “inherited” from the EU which the Tories plan to scrap over the coming years. It is not true that Brexit is “done” and...

Break the left’s Brexit silence

Right-wing Labour MP Stella Creasy ( Observer , 19 June ) has called for the Labour leadership to break its silence over Brexit. Creasy is vague. She doesn’t advocate restoring free movement between Britain and the EU27, as we do. But she’s right that “Labour cannot make people’s lives better until it dares to start talking about Brexit… Silence on the issue, for fear of saying the wrong thing, means the Tory dogma and narrative on Europe will go unchallenged”. A few days earlier, shadow minister Anna McMorrin was reprimanded by the Labour leadership for suggesting (in an internal Labour...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.