Things that Marr Labour's Brexit ambitions
This post is a write-up of a thread I did on Twitter [evergreen introduction] about Andrew Marr’s recent New Statesman article when he chatted to Starmer and Reeves at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. My interest was piqued - actually my scepticism baked in from the start - when I read the billing ‘why Labour thinks it has solved the Brexit connundrum’ [see this advertising the article on Twitter.]
Labour’s Brexit ambitions become more interesting as evidence emerges of a decisive shift in sentiment against Brexit; and as the next general election approaches without a significant recovery in the opinion polls for the Conservatives, and as Sunak’s personal ratings deteriorate, presumably as he becomes more associated with the problems blamed on the Conservatives that he inherits as PM.
This blog is not really self standing if you don’t read the original Marr piece. Sorry about that!
The first thing that made me raise eyebrows was the observation that the LOTO was doing something important by going to Davos, and talking and listening. I would have said that the only point in going to Davos is to be seen talking and listening.
Especially when you don’t have a job formally interacting with foreign leaders, you have to use opportunities like this to cosplay at doing so so that people can start to see you as someone who might be good at the real thing.
And it’s arguable that Davos even offers this now. It is notorously badly attended now and become something of a laughing stock in the post Trump/Brexit era, being branded [as Marr implicitly concedes in his humorous references to ‘lizards’, the stuff of globalist conspiracism] as elitist and out of touch.
Turning to the meat of the article, which is about Marr’s interpretations of Labour’s Brexit offer and hopes…
Later we read from Marr that:
'Senior Labour people in “Red Wall” constituencies assure me that returning to the customs union would certainly lose them their seats'.
What on earth does this mean? I have severe doubts that most people know what the customs union is. I can believe much more readily that conceding Freedom of Movement in order to rejoin the EU’s Single Market [so goods can be seamlessly sold across EU countries] would cause poblems with constituencies most hostile to immigration. But the customs union element - almost never spoken about by Starmer and others in Labour — which involves us committing to the same trade relations with 3rd party countries as the EU, and then obviates the need for rules of origin hurdles for trade inside the EU - is highly unlikely to be a big risk factor for the Red Wall.
This made me wonder whether Andrew Marr or whoever he was speaking to understood the distinction between the Customs Union and the Single Market.
I found this extract interesting:
Go over this again.
‘If they say fine, but you have to have freedom of movement, then know we can’t accept that’ [note red line] ‘But they are talking seriously.’ Which seems to translate as ‘they are not doing that thing they did with the Tories and not offering anything economically beneficial that comes only with freedom of movement which they know we cannot accept.’ Here is the cakeist optimism, as pure as the Tory version.
Then comes ‘We have no problem with dynamic alignment’.
What does Marr or his Labour source think that means, or will produce?
We have no problem with committing to not diverge from EU regulations in the future. Great. So we commit to not making the border frictions any worse than they currently are. And get what? This is in our interests anyway, so it is not something the EU ought to need to exchange for anything [all the weirdness of Tory Brexit departure, but in reverse]. This is not stated. When we are on our way out, The Tories were threatening to shoot themselves in the foot [No Deal is better than a bad deal]. Now Labour are threatening not to grab a cookie from the plate unless we get something else we want?
Then comes ‘If Labour wins I would expect a slew of specific London Brussels treaties [‘treaties'!] to be negotiated, quite quickly, from outside the customs union and the single market. Why does Marr expect this? Because we are ok with dnyamic alignment of regulatory standards, we will get what? Not spoken here is that this sounds like ‘Switzerland’, which relates to the EU via multiple, sector-specific deals. Yet Switzerland also has to accept freedom of movement. And everyone knows the EU hates the hotch-potch of deals. Yet with no freedom of movement and in the face of the EU’s hostility towards sector specific deals, we are to expect a ‘slew’ of them. In the form of ‘treaties’? Does he really mean that word? Multiple things to be ratified by all EU states? And ‘quickly’?
Here is another choice, puzzling bit of text:
What does this mean? We must get the EU’s cooperation to sort out the NIP before we commit to dynamic alignment? But the problems with the Protocol become much the greater if there *isn’t* dynamic alignment. That alignment - which is in our interests anyway, remember - unless you are prey to the delusion that there are great growth leaps to be made by regulatory divergence - would help greatly with the NIP: in the limit, if we were simply in the Single Market and the Customs Union, the NIP would be redundant.
And next: ‘suitable parts of the exporting economy’. What is meant here? There are parts of the economy where it would be harmful to dynamically align even though we are exporting to the EU? Which parts are those?
And ‘It all depends on the EU’. This - I’m not sure whether this is Marr or LOTO talking - is a repeat of the Brexiteer trope: if not for the pesky EU that wishes us harm, we could sort this Northern Ireland Protocol and then offer them dynamic alignment. You have to take a pretty extreme view of the impasse to think that the UK government and the DUP do not also bear responsibility for the impasse.
Returning to the billing, ‘Why Labour thinks it has solved the Brexit connundrum’, there is no answer here. The Brexit connundrum being: how to significantly reduce the costs of Brexit without conceding anything totemic on Freedom of Movement or entering into a Customs Union, or, obviously rejoining the EU itself.
Marr either demonstrates, or passes on without comment or criticism, a lot of confusion and false optimism about what the EU might offer. This article reminds me of the Cummings-Kuenssberg-Peston era. Lost-in-translation, stenographic accounts of briefings, passed on as though they made sense as policy aspirations, and would be acted on, and passed on uncritically.
If I DM’d you to say that ‘My next blog is going to land me a column at a major outlet paying 100s of 1000s of £’, would you announce, without comment, ‘Tony Yates plans lucrative major column deal with newspaper, explaining everything everyone else gets wrong, netting him 100s of 1000s of £’?
Probably not.
It is not explicitly stated in the article, but, joining the dots between this and Labour front benchers’ other interventions on Brexit, it is tempting to think that Labour imagine - or want to let the impression arise that - there are going to be significant economic improvements in the deal to be had by simply being a more progressive and trustworthy negotiating partner.
If I have read this correctly [see also the tweets of Alexander Clarkson who makes this point] they are likely to be disappointed, or setting the public up for a disappointment. Labour’s Brexit position is remarkably similar to the Tories’, and not coincidentally, because they are fighting over the same 'Red Wall’ voters that switched from Labour to the Tories in December 2019, over a mixture of issues connected with Brexit and Corbyn, voters it presumes absolutely do not want to revisit any of Brexit’s key planks like Freedom of Movement.
And just like the Tories then, Labour now wants to keep in place these essential pieces of Brexit and yet lower its costs signifiantly, so as to ‘make Brexit work’. This similarity thus derives from a continuity in both parties failing to confront important parts of their target vote with the realities of economic and political life.
The fact that Labour are less likely to engage in regulatory divergence or tax cutting to gain market share does not alter the fact that its demands of the EU derive from this same hope that the EU will do something it perceives not to be - and is not - in its interests.