When do you have to lie?

Conservative dishonesty over Brexit has put Labour in a dangerous position. By holding back from formulating a coherent and realistic Brexit policy, the party has left itself with many hostages to fortune. Democratic renewal is needed if the labour movement is to openly debate and resolve the real tensions between socialist internationalism and the drive to build a Britain 'for the many, not the few'.

'When it becomes serious, you have to lie.' The notorious declaration of the then-Eurogroup president, Jean-Claude Juncker, is a favourite point of reference for Eurosceptics left and right. It encapsulates what they see as the coercive and conspiratorial essence of the EU. In his blockbuster history of finance and politics since 2008, Crashed, Adam Tooze explains the context and reasoning for Juncker's famous remarks. (1) The future president of the European Commission was more worried about financial markets than democratic publics. 'The people' certainly had to be kept in the dark about the perilous situation of the Euro. But hypersensitive traders also needed to be shielded from knowledge of the persistent uncertainty and inertia of European politics. For Juncker, lying was a means of buying time, of avoiding hard decisions, and of preserving the autonomy of a small, confused and overwhelmed political clique, confronted by popular and market reaction.

This kind of tactical dishonesty is everywhere in contemporary British politics. Its leading practitioner is Theresa May--still, at the time of writing, the prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party. From the beginning of the Brexit process, May has attempted to utilise the referendum as a wedge issue within Labour's electoral coalition. Her predicament, since the start of 2019, is a logical consequence of her failure to 'crush the saboteurs' in the general election of 2017. The false theatrics of cross-party talks over the withdrawal agreement, and her attempts to portray Labour as a party opposed to implementing the 'will of the people' as expressed in 2016, are but a newer and more extreme version of the Conservative rhetoric of 'national interest'. Since the 1920s, this rhetoric has sought to delegitimise the Labour Party as a legitimate claimant to state power in Britain. It has never, however, been more nakedly hypocritical.

The sheer shamelessness and vapidity of the contemporary Conservative Party has had the curious effect of placing Labour on the back foot. The party's talkative trade spokesman, Barry Gardiner, described Labour's strategy in terms derived from Napoleon Bonaparte: 'never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake'. But the wilful refusal by the Conservative Party (and particularly the hard Brexiteers) to deal honestly with the British public has had the effect of making it more difficult for Labour, too, to discuss the real facts of Brexit. The long months of May's Brexit negotiation sucked the party into a bidding war of false expectations. Labour has repeatedly claimed that, through the sheer force of his personality, a Corbyn government would be able to secure a Brexit agreement with the EU that goes against everything we know about the interests of its member states and the progress of the negotiations to date. The party has been evading hard truths. Any withdrawal agreement with the EU will involve a Northern Irish backstop. Any future relationship will involve adherence to its (much-maligned) regime of state aid rules. Any relationship worth having will also involve participation in the continent's system of free movement. And it will take many more years, and far more difficult negotiations, before there is any clarity at all on what that relationship will ultimately look like.

The risk now is that the realities of the negotiation will, sooner or later, force sudden shifts of position in favour of outcomes that the party has previously condemned as unfair or inadequate. This would leave Labour dangerously exposed to accusations of bad faith, from voters and negotiating partners alike.

A moment for democratic renewal?

The core argument in favour of Labour's holding position on Brexit has been that it enables the party to transcend divides between 'Leave' and 'Remain' and build a winning electoral coalition around anti-austerity politics. This was the central message of Jeremy Corbyn's speech in Wakefield, on the eve of Parliament's 'meaningful vote' on the withdrawal agreement. Leave and Remain voters, he told us, are 'up against it', not 'against each other'. They have a shared interest in a Labour government that attends to their material interests: jobs, wages, public services.

We wouldn't be in the Labour Party if we didn't believe that a broad political coalition against poverty and inequality was both possible and necessary in the circumstances of twenty-first century Britain. But we believe that the path to achieving that coalition runs through taking a clear, consistent and realistic position on Brexit, based on broad public consultation, deliberation and persuasion...