Could the cautious Brexit approach come back to harm Jeremy Corbyn, asks Mark Stuart
At last, David Davis, the secretary of state for exiting the European Union, has revealed his initial negotiating hand on the customs union. The government proposes a temporary ‘virtual partnership’, following Britain’s departure from the EU in March 2019. But only hours after the policy been announced on 15 August, Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s Brexit spokesperson, described it as ‘fantasy’. More significantly, Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, has repeatedly stated that frictionless trade is not possible outside the single market and the customs union. Given such a lukewarm response in Brussels to the Conservative government’s plans, should the Labour leadership look afresh at their whole approach to the Brexit negotiations? In particular, how realistic would it be for party to adopt a stronger stance in parliament on the single market and the customs union?
Labour’s current position is deliberately vague, with their 2017 manifesto simply stating that Britain should ‘retain the benefits’ of the single market and the customs union. More recently, a slew of shadow cabinet spokespeople have repeatedly used the phrase ‘retaining the exact same benefits’ as the single market. However, no one on the current Labour frontbench has yet had the courage to take a more decisive line on the issue.
Instead, earlier in the summer the baton passed to around 50 Labour backbenchers who supported Chuka Umunna’s unsuccessful attempt to amend the Queen’s speech, regretting, among other things, the government’s failure to set out proposals to remain in the customs union and the single market.
Umunna is fast becoming the House of Commons’ champion for retention of access to the single market, ably supported by a clutch of senior Labour figures such as Ben Bradshaw, Chris Bryant, Stella Creasy, Margaret Hodge and Alison McGovern, as well as a number of younger rising stars such as Wes Streeting and Jess Phillips.
Across in the House of Lords, Andrew Adonis also failed in a parallel attempt to change government policy, which he compared to ‘trying to fill a swimming pool with a teaspoon’.
A good centre-left case can be made for full access to the single market, beyond the obvious points about the importance of retaining prosperity and jobs. As Umunna has pointed out, EU rules on worker protection and consumer rights provide valuable protection against unfettered globalisation, and can therefore be sold to Labour supporters on social justice grounds.
There is also a notable parliamentary precedent for a Labour opposition taking the fight to a Tory government on the issue of Europe. If we cast our minds back to 1992-1993, John Smith, a principled, longstanding pro-European nevertheless maximised Tory divisions over the parliamentary ratification of the Maastricht treaty. Indeed, the Labour whips’ office colluded with the Conservative Maastricht rebels to increase the chances of defeating John Major’s government. The opposition’s aim was in the words of Derek Foster, then Labour’s chief whip, ‘to prolong the government’s agony for as long as possible’. All sorts of parliamentary devices were deployed to this end, including preventing the government from moving its business motion at 10 o’clock in the evening, which would have allowed it to carry on debating until the small hours of the morning.
The strategy worked, inflicting a number of damaging defeats, in particular Labour’s efforts to reinsert the social chapter into the treaty. In the end, Major resorted to the ‘nuclear option’ of threatening his own members of parliament with a general election if they did not fall into line. It is worth noting here that the Fixed Term Parliaments Act of 2011 specifically removes the ability of a prime minister to call an election if he or she loses a specific piece of legislation. Of course, Theresa May could still threaten to resign in such circumstances, but if things became really messy in the Commons, her own MPs might be pleased see a change of leader.
Smith’s parliamentary strategy over Maastricht was not without its downsides. Keeping MPs up until the wee small hours proved tiresome for some. At one point, a young Diane Abbott complained, according to the official minutes of one parliamentary Labour party meeting: ‘Is this not becoming a charade, and if so why should she be staying here until late hours, when she could be putting her baby to bed?’ Lively meetings of the PLP ensued in which Eurosceptics like Dennis Skinner warned of the dangers of Labour being seen to wound but not to strike, while Europhiles like Giles Radice and a young Peter Mandelson became increasingly concerned about Labour diluting its pro-European position. These pro-Europeans were in constant need of reassurance that the frontbench was not seeking to wreck the treaty. Moreover, the PLP remained split, significant Labour rebellions occurring at all stages of the Maastricht bill.
But crucially, very few commentators noticed or reported on these Labour splits. In situations where political parties are divided in parliament on major issues, there is always less media scrutiny on the stance of the opposition. While few journalists now remember Smith’s rebels on Maastricht, most commentators can still vividly recall the Major government suffering big rebellions from his own backbenchers night after night.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Labour’s policy towards Maastricht, the key point is that if an avid pro-European like Smith can change his stance for parliamentary advantage, what really stands in the way of an avid Eurosceptic like Jeremy Corbyn from playing such games?
Of course, there are real problems with engineering an about‑turn on Labour’s position on the single market. At the moment, the parliamentary arithmetic simply is not there. Umunna’s recent amendment to the Queen’s speech only attracted the support of around 100 MPs, including the Liberal Democrats and most of the other progressive parties, while Andrew Adonis’s amendment suffered a similarly modest level of support in the House of Lords. But were the Labour frontbench not to actively whip against it, that could change. Right now, it seems only a handful of pro-European Tories like Ken Clarke and Anna Soubry would be likely to back Labour in the division lobbies if it came to a crunch Commons vote on the single market. But could that change if the opposition gave a free vote on the issue? Then, a government defeat might be seen as a victory for parliament rather than the Labour party.
The worry is that the leadership of the Labour party is not in favour of a change of policy on Brexit. The current shadow cabinet strategy is to stay true to the mantra of accepting the referendum result, keeping its policy on Europe as vague as possible, and letting the Conservatives stew in their own juice in the hope that Tory MPs engage in the maximum amount of bickering and internal division, leaving a future Labour government to pick up the pieces.
Perhaps one can see the logic of playing such a waiting game for the next 18 months, but what if, come March 2019, no deal has been reached between the EU and the current government? And what if, in the meantime, the country has experienced a significant loss of blood in terms of declining economic prosperity, particularly in London’s financial sector? Surely, in such dire economic circumstances, Labour’s desire to accept the referendum result would be trumped by the party’s other manifesto commitment to put the ‘national interest first’?
It is also worth pointing out that Labour’s manifesto explicitly rejects the option of ‘no deal’ on Brexit and calls for a ‘truly meaningful vote on the final Brexit deal’. Might this be the moment for Labour to make the relatively short leap from seeking the ‘exact same benefits’ of single market membership to supporting a policy of full access to the single market, or dare I say it, retaining full membership?
However, potentially the greatest danger of Labour dithering over Brexit until 2019 is that the young people who turned up in 2017 for the first time – because May’s government is currently robbing their future and voting Labour, they were told, was how to stop a hard Brexit – are lost to democratic participation forever. Corbyn should take his responsibility to them very seriously indeed. If he does not do so, Labour could yet come to regret playing the waiting game.
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Mark Stuart is assistant professor in the school of politics and international relations at the University of Nottingham
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This article is part of a series of pieces for the September 2017 edition of Progress magazine on the United Kingdom’s membership of the single market being ‘In Corbyn’s gift‘. Please check out the other pieces now and support the Labour campaign for the Single Market while you are at it