According to this
report yesterday, there are up to 10 Labour MPs willing to follow Boris
Johnson into supporting a no-deal Brexit if the only alternative to that is to
remain in the EU. And we already know
that there’s a whole host of other Labour MPs regretting
that they didn’t vote for the only deal that was ever on the table while they had
the chance.
It’s a position that I could understand if
they seriously believed that Brexit would actually benefit the people that they
represent, but I’m not sure they do. There
are, of course, some people in the Labour Party who genuinely believe (no matter how
many times the idea has been debunked) that the EU is an obstacle to creating
the sort of economy that they want to see, or that, freed of the EU’s economic
rules (and equally blatantly running contrary to all the available evidence),
the UK electorate would vote to pursue socialism in one country (not an idea
with the most encouraging historical precedents)
with a vengeance. I might disagree with
their conclusions, but the objectives are at least honourable in principle, and
based on the idea that such an approach might serve the best interests of the
people they represent.
I’m not convinced that they all share such
motivations, however. Some are clearly
motivated by the idea that, having asked the opinion of the electorate on the
issue at a specific point in time, and with a majority having voted to leave
(and accepting all the problems of definition involved in such a simplistic
statement), ‘democracy’ demands that the ‘will of the people’ be implemented. Whilst I can understand why they might draw
that conclusion, or even believe that having promised to honour the result of
the referendum they are duty-bound to do so, I do not understand how members of
a party founded to pursue the interests of working people can feel in any way
duty-bound to trash those interests and make those people worse off just
because some of those people were misled into believing that the opposite would
happen. The Labour Party was founded to
lead, not to follow; to set out a vision of a better future and work to bring
it about, not to blindly follow where public opinion might lead at a point in
time. It would be bad enough if the ‘majority’
opinion that they were following was a majority of the people who voted Labour,
but it isn’t; all the research suggests that the majority of those who voted
Labour voted to remain. In insisting on
following the ‘majority’ those Labour MPs taking this stance are giving more weight
to Tory and UKIP voters than they are to Labour Party voters. It’s a very curious stance for a party
founded to represent working people to be arguing that it is more important to
represent the opinions of every other sector of the population instead.
But even that stance of supporting ‘democracy’
doesn’t explain the stance of some of those Labour MPs minded to support
Johnson’s rush to the cliff edge. As one
of those taking this stance put it, “if it comes down to no Brexit or
no-deal then I would go with no-deal because the consequences mean that Labour
will not be in government in the future and we will lose seats. For me that is
a far worse scenario than any Brexit outcome would be”. In short, following the opinions of people
who have never voted Labour, and wrecking the economic prospects of many of
those who have, is a preferable outcome to the possibility of losing that minority
of Labour voters who supported Brexit by being honest about the consequences. They would, in short, prefer to have a Labour
government struggling (and probably failing – why would anyone believe that
they could be more successful than the Tories in this endeavour?) to deal with
the effects of Brexit on the livelihoods of the people they represent than act to
avoid those effects in the first place.
They’ve travelled a long way since their party was founded – and not in
a good way.
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