Gina Miller, the Emmeline Pankhurst of the Remainer movement, tweeted yesterday: YOUTH TO CORBYN: GET OFF THE FENCE ON BREXIT, OR ELSE! What struck me as so odd about this tweet is that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t on any fence on Brexit. I can’t say he was never on the fence on EU membership – he equivocated a lot during the actual EU referendum campaign itself (remember the “I give it a 7 out of 10” routine?). Yet since June 24th, 2016, Corbyn has been very, very clear on Brexit in terms of both his words and his actions. He wants Brexit to happen as soon as possible and he wants the most full-strength version of it available.
To repeat, Corbyn has been very, very clear on this. I would be the first one to call out Corbyn being half-arsed about something, and he’s done it many times since becoming Labour leader. Yet on this, he’s been utterly consistent. “The British people have made their decision. We must respect that result and Article 50 has to be invoked now so that we negotiate an exit from European Union.” He said that the day after the result was in.
“The Single Market is dependent on membership of the EU,” he said recently, while making it clear a Labour government would not seek Single Market membership. This has been his consistent position since the vote to Leave. Throughout 2017, he was urging “caution” about the Single Market, reiterating his perception that being in it would hamper his programme.
To be fair, the Labour front bench has been absolutely all over the place on Brexit for the last year and a half; trying to figure out what Abbott, Thornbery or Starmer are actually trying to say about Brexit, Single Market and Customs Union membership has been intentionally impossible to follow. Yet Corbyn has always been crystal clear. He’s couched things in political speak at times, of course, but he’s never relented on his basic position that Britain needs to leave the European Union and not remain in either the Single Market or the Customs Union when Brexit occurs.
Added to all this is the fact that Corbyn has not only three-line whipped his MPs to vote for every piece of pro-Brexit legislation that has come before the house since the referendum (and carried through sackings when the whip has been defied), he has whipped his MPs to vote against any amendments which might soften Brexit in any way. He has very consistently used his position to stop any Brexit other than one of a kind favoured by Jacob Rees-Mogg.
I find the need for Remainers to constantly try and reframe Corbyn as one of them intriguing. I never stop hearing from pro-EU folk about how if only a Corbyn government could get elected, it would be job done. What makes this all the more baffling is that Corbyn was an open throated Eurosceptic in the Tony Benn mould for decades before the referendum. I’m going to say it again, Remainers, because it seems to not be getting through: Corbyn doesn’t like the EU. He never has. He’s not saying all that stuff about the Single Market being bad for a leftist programme because he’s trying to maintain a balancing act. He really, really means it. Corbyn is ideologically pro-Brexit.
If stopping Brexit is the be all and end all of your political existence, then stop supporting Corbyn now. Reverse take over the Lib Dems, start a new party, whatever, but at the very, very least, stop pretending Corbyn is on a mythical fence on this issue. If he became prime minister, he would see hard Brexit through to the end.
Martin says
Although you are correct, it is true to say that Corbyn is equivocating in the sense that, like Tory Brexit zealots, he claims to want all advantages from the EU, whilst determined to be wholly outside the EU.
He is confidant that any outcome is one he can oppose and of course this definitely includes dropping out of Brexit.
Nick: I do think you are being disingenuous in your final sentence: I do not believe that you think that Corbyn would see anything much “through to the end”, were he Prime Minister. One day, when there is more of a prospect of an election and if Corbyn still leads the Labour Party, you may feel you have to write an article about this.
Simon Shaw says
Well said, Nick.
Hugo Rifkind put it well in a Times article late July last year, as follows.
… Another misconception, albeit one that may have somewhat hit the skids this weekend past, is the idea that Corbyn, at heart, is sad that we are leaving the European Union. “So what,” his Remainer supporters shrug, “if he voted to leave the common market (1975), voted against the single market (1986), opposed Maastricht (1992), opposed Lisbon (2007), and campaigned for Remain (last year) with all the keen enthusiasm of a chap with vicious haemorrhoids having his annual prostate check-up? He’s still one of us!”
This misconception survived even his sacking of three shadow ministers for backing a pro-single market amendment to the Queen’s Speech, which led Nigel Farage, of all people, to declare “he’s almost a proper chap”. Billy Bragg, the folk singer, immediately declared that Corbyn must be playing a cunning “long game”, with a plan to soften Brexit once the Tories had self-destructed over it. Hey, it’s a theory. This weekend, the Labour leader told the BBC that his party would leave the single market so as to end “wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe”. Is this the great antidote to Tory Brexit? Is it the politics that the crowds of Glastonbury gathered to cheer? Doubtless, some will be frenetically triangulating, right now, to find a way to insist that it was.
M says
It’s a bit weird, this. For years, the about 50% of the population who wanted to leave the EU were completely unrepresented in mainstream politics, at least at the leadership level. Now — quite, quite suddenly (remember Corbyn, currently the longest-serving party year, has been in office for less than two and a half years) — the about 50% who want to stay in the EU are the ones totally unrepresented.
No wonder people are finding it hard to adjust. Some degree of cognitive whiplash, of ‘No, no, it can’t really be like this’, is only to be expected.
Gav says
50% didn’t want to leave “for years”. I highly doubt 50% of the population cared much about it either way prior to spring 2016. You offer people a binary choice, they’re going to split into tribes.
M says
If you look at the opinion polls, from about the mid-90s there’s about 50% support if you combine the options ‘leave the EU’ and ‘stay in the EU but reclaim control of significant areas of sovereignty’. So, yes, I think it’s fair to say that since then about half the population has been broadly Euroskeptical, and that that strain of thought was completely unrepresented in the leaderships of the mainstream parties.
Of course, that’s once you discount the ‘don’t know’s. But all evidence is that those who don’t vote split in pretty much the same proportions as those who do, so yes, I’d say the population has been pretty much split down the middle on the question for the last twenty-five years or so.
But the initial question was, why do Remainers find it so hard to believe that Corbyn is a Leaver? And I think (part of) the answer is that for all that time, people on the pro-EU side have been living in a world where it was just a given, and accepted norm, not even really something they would have noticed but something just taken for granted, that those at the top of politics agreed with them and the people on the other side were the outsiders, the weirdos, the swivel-eyed loons.
Clearly it’s going to take some time for them to come to accept that they are the outsiders now. So they’re going to latch onto someone at the top of politics and project their worldview onto them, and it’s obviously not going to be the PM who is currently pushing Brexit, and it’s not going to be Vince Cable because the Lib Dems are an irrelevant fringe party just like the Greens, so that leaves Corbyn.