Progress deputy editor Conor Pope calls on pro-Europeans that want an internationalist Britain to join the Labour party – not another non-party that will amount to nothing
Another day, another new Twitter account claiming to be a political movement.
James Chapman, former Daily Mail political editor and adviser to David Davis as secretary of state for exiting the European Union, arrived upon the idea of founding the Democrats in August, a vaguely centrist, anti-Brexit political party (with the emphasis very much on ‘vaguely’). The party launched, and seemingly disbanded, with a rally in Parliament Square on 9 September.
Last night, Jeremy Cliffe, the Berlin correspondent for the Economist, ‘accidentally’ started his own movement, the Radicals. Cliffe’s own metropolitan liberal credentials are impeccable: he spelled out his thoughts on where the United Kingdom should be heading in a 2015 pamphlet, Britain’s Cosmopolitan Future. Setting out the same ideas in a shorter essay a month later, he argued that the country is becoming like its capital, both in demographics and culture. Commentators have remarked on a divergence; Cliffe argues that ‘London, though always distinct from the rest of Britain, has often incubated trends that have later spread out across the country’. For him, Brexit is a blip in public opinion, not a shift, and support for it will crumble with the inevitably of a new Britain.
Cliffe has already had to step back from the party due to his journalistic commitments, but says he will ‘hand it over to a committee in Britain that might, if it opts to do so, advance the Radicals to a next stage’.
There is a sense, as the New Statesman’s George Eaton noted this morning, that ‘centrists’, in defeat, are aping the pre-Jeremy Corbyn playbook of the far-left of producing more parties than votes. One of the many reasons we in Labour hold the likes of Ken Loach in such contempt is that for any of these parties to succeed they first need to destroy the institutions that stand in their way. For Left Unity, the Socialist party of England and Wales, Respect, the Socialist party of Great Britain and whoever else, that meant a primary focus on weakening the Labour party.
It is a simple case of practicality. The best hope for the Radicals or the Democrats in the short-term is to usurp the Liberal Democrats into a bad third place, by siphoning off their support, as well as a large chunk of disgruntled pro-European, centre-left Labour voters. The problem is that both of those parties are, in fact, growing: the Liberal Democrats claim to have over 100,000 members while Labour has over half a million. They not only have a bigger institutional clout than a new party could hope to achieve, but also far superior email lists too. If Brexit is in fact your priority, then you are surely aware the clock is ticking, and need to work out what practical difference you can make between now and March 2019 – especially when no general election is forthcoming. Starting a new party is now so common as to hardly be radical, and remains so fanciful as to not be pragmatic.
There is an obvious solution. The Labour party has 262 members of parliament, of whom around 95 per cent voted ‘Remain’, and largely support stronger ties with Europe than the government is offering. If the public mood changes, as it might, many will feel emboldened to be more vocal. The membership, in its hundreds of thousands, is overwhelmingly pro-European – regardless of whether those members joined before or after the ‘Corbyn surge’. It is the most uniting force in the Labour party today.
The biggest resistance to this feeling is a small cabal around the leadership. What those in the leadership are most susceptible to, however, is popular opinion within the party’s membership. For them, the notion of pro-Europeans outside the Labour party is of little concern – the areas where they might force most electoral damage are generally seats where the party now commands super-majorities.
The idea of Labour’s anti-hard Brexit membership asserting itself is what could really change the country’s course. Pro-Europeans should sign up – and join Labour’s pro-European, centre-left wing too.
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Conor Pope is deputy editor of Progress. He tweets at @Conorpope
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