Europe and the British Left: Beyond the Progressive Dilemma

By Owen Parker, Matthew Louis Bishop and Nicole Lindstrom

The European question has divided the Labour Party and the progressive left for over 50 years. The contemporary left-wing antithesis to the EU harks back to Bennite anti-marketeer narratives: a neoliberal EU undermines the potential for national progressive policies in relation to labour markets, state intervention and finance. However, many make the case that the EU’s four freedoms support a progressive politics: the single market project embeds social and workers’ rights, challenges member state support for large corporate interests and facilitates free movement for EU citizens.

There is, in short, a progressive dilemma for the British left in relation to the European issue, which the authors navigate through the analysis of four policy issues that arose during the Brexit debate and remain significant for British politics and for the left in particular: free trade and the single market, industrial policy and state aid, free movement of persons and finance. Crucially, they point to a route beyond this dilemma for both Europe and the British left.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Jun 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9781788215442

Book preview

Building Progressive Alternatives

Series Editors: David Coates†, Ben Rosamond and Matthew Watson

Bringing together economists, political economists and other social scientists, this series offers pathways to a coherent, credible and progressive economic growth strategy which, when accompanied by an associated set of wider public policies, can inspire and underpin the revival of a successful centre-left politics in advanced capitalist societies.

Published

Corbynism in Perspective: The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn

Edited by Andrew S. Roe-Crines

Divided They Fell: Crisis and the Collapse of Europe’s Centre-Left

Sean McDaniel

Europe and the British Left: Beyond the Progressive Dilemma

Owen Parker, Matthew Louis Bishop and Nicole Lindstrom

The European Social Question: Tackling Key Controversies

Amandine Crespy

Flawed Capitalism: The Anglo-American Condition and its Resolution

David Coates

Getting Over New Labour: The Party After Blair and Brown

Karl Pike

The Political Economy of Industrial Strategy in the UK: From Productivity Problems to Development Dilemmas

Edited by Craig Berry, Julie Froud and Tom Barker

Pursuing the Knowledge Economy: A Sympathetic History of High-Skill, High-Wage Hubris

Nick O’Donovan

Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit

Robbie Shilliam

Reflections on the Future of the Left

Edited by David Coates

© Owen Parker, Matthew Louis Bishop and Nicole Lindstrom 2024

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2024 by Agenda Publishing

Agenda Publishing Limited

PO Box 185

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE20 2DH

www.agendapub.com

ISBN 978-1-78821-245-8

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan

Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I Europe and the progressive dilemma

1The British left for market Europe

2The British left against Europe

3The British left for a social Europe

Part II The progressive dilemma in four European policy areas

4Trade and the European single market

5Industrial policy

6The free movement of people

7Finance

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the years preceding Brexit, each of us had, in one way or another, and from a broadly progressive perspective, adopted a critical approach to the European Union. In both our scholarship and teaching we had pointed to its increasingly neoliberal character, which was nascent in a 1980s European single market project that was so enthusiastically embraced in Britain by Margaret Thatcher, and starkly exposed with the EU’s tough approach to Greece and other member states in the context of the eurozone crisis of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

And yet, during the 2016 referendum, we all actively campaigned for continued UK membership of the EU and its single market. As collaborators, we were not always in agreement, but we certainly agreed on the fundamental Europe question. Put simply, the UK is better off inside, rather than outside, and we aligned ideologically with what we call in the book a soft left position. This is one that advocates a market-interventionist, internationalist and pro-European agenda. Before and after 2016 we defended our views on Brexit in the media and at a variety of events and debates with, among others, politicians and members of the public, trade unionists and the Fabians. In large part, this book is the outcome of a long exercise in tracing, articulating, refining and defending those perspectives.

In formulating our collective argument over the past several years we have, in addition to reading widely and speaking to each other at length, spoken to numerous political actors and scholars. Among many others, we spoke to the self-styled Keynesian Eurosceptic former Labour shadow cabinet minister Bryan Gould, now resident in his native New Zealand. He explained his steadfast opposition to membership of the European Communities, even as his party drifted towards a more pro-European position in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Former trade union leader Lord John Monks recalled the thinking behind the TUC’s historical shift to a pro-European position following Delors’ famous speech in the late 1980s. Tony Blair’s former Europe advisor, Lord Roger Liddle, who has himself written extensively on the Labour Party’s European policy, spoke at length with us about New Labour’s attempts to build closer ties with Brussels. He broadly defended its positive approach to the single market while lamenting its inability to forge a closer relationship with the EU, pointing, in particular, to the perceived constraints imposed by the Murdoch press. A former advisor to Ed Miliband, Lord Stewart Wood of Anfield, contextualized for us, among other things, New Labour’s decision to ultimately not join the euro, Ed Miliband’s approach to the EU as leader and why, for now, the left should probably keep quiet on Europe.

We understand this sentiment, but we respectfully take a different view. We believe that the British left owes it to the public – both within the UK and outside, including in Europe – to advocate strongly for sustained engagement in constructing a better, more social Europe. In developing this argument, we owe a particular debt of gratitude to the economist and former Labour politician and advisor Stuart Holland, whose role in shaping the British left’s position on Europe has spanned several decades. He gave up hours of his time, colourfully describing to us the ways in which he sought to shape Harold Wilson’s approach to the second British application for membership in the late 1960s; outlining his attempts, along with others on the European left, to push Commission President Jacques Delors to adopt a more interventionist European industrial policy in the 1980s; and explaining the ways in which he worked to shape Neil Kinnock’s European policy in the early 1990s. We also talked about his more recent work with, among others, Yanis Varoufakis, on imagining a more social Europe in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis. Surely no other figure on the British left has been so active in championing a vision of a specifically social Europe and a vision of Britain driving it forward.

We are enormously grateful to each of these individuals for making the time to share with us their recollections of, and perspectives on, the British left’s engagements with the Europe question. Each conversation helped us to provide important historical context for, and shape, our argument. Many of those discussions challenged us to alter, or at least nuance, our thinking in important respects.

The book has also benefited hugely from engagement with many academics. In 2020, via an event organized through the auspices of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI), we engaged in friendly and generous debate with a prominent left-wing critic of the EU, the SOAS academic and former Syriza politician, Costas Lapavitsas. Costas has, in contrast to our own position, passionately and cogently argued for a number of years that the European left, including the British left, ought to turn its back on the neoliberal EU.

SPERI has been a vital institutional support for our work for over a decade: many of the arguments in the book were rehearsed in embryonic form during the late 2010s and early 2020s on its well-read blog, SPERI Comment. A number of SPERI colleagues or affiliates (past and present) have also discussed and challenged us on various iterations of the book (and/or its various chapters), whether in written or verbal form, including Tony Payne, Andrew Gamble, Charlotte Burns, Andy Hindmoor, Peter Verovsek, Michael Jacobs, Liam Stanley, Colin Hay, Scott Lavery, Simon Bulmer, Bojan Bugaric and Helen Thompson. Thanks also to the British and Comparative Political Economy specialist group of the Political Studies Association for inviting us to present different iterations of the book; in particular, thanks are owed to Craig Berry and Sean McDaniel.

We are especially grateful to the series editors, Matthew Watson and Ben Rosamond, who offered invaluable feedback on initial drafts. Last, but certainly not least, a huge debt of thanks is due to Alison Howson at Agenda, who has been far more patient with us than we really deserved as this project slipped ever further behind the promised delivery date. We hope that the wait has been worth it, and we hope, especially, that it will help to contribute in some way to an important debate that the left should be openly having as election fever heats up in the UK in 2024 and the very real prospect of a Labour government is in sight.

Finally, we give our heartfelt thanks to our families, without whose sacrifices, compromises and kindnesses projects like this would never come to fruition: to Mireia, Teo and Lola, for Owen; to Merisa and Phoenix, for Matt; and to Tim and Henry, for Nicole. We sadly and tragically lost Tim – a wonderful partner and father and brilliant political economist – during this book’s journey. We dedicate it to his memory.

Needless to say, the argument here is entirely our own, as are any errors or omissions.

Owen Parker, Matthew Louis Bishop and Nicole Lindstrom

Sheffield and York

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Most of the British left, broadly conceived, supported UK membership of the European Union (EU). During the 2016 referendum, a significant majority of Labour MPs, as well as their Green, Liberal Democrat, Scottish Nationalist and Plaid Cymru counterparts, campaigned for the Remain position. Polls suggested that this was generally in line with the aspirations of much of their voting base, especially younger, university-educated professionals concentrated in the major cities. The 2019 general election subsequently marked a turning point, especially in Labour’s approach to Europe. In its worst election result since 1935 (in terms of seats) the party lost many traditionally solid red wall constituencies in England’s post-industrial north, the West Midlands, and Wales, where majorities had, by and large, voted for Leave in the plebiscite. Many on the left questioned whether continuing implicitly to support Remain, explicitly advocating a second referendum position or even simply favouring a soft Brexit that kept the UK inside the European single market was an electorally sustainable position. It appeared to be so in the ongoing tumult of the immediate post-referendum period, when, on either side of the indecisive 2017 election, different Brexits could be envisaged and parliament was deadlocked. Nevertheless, traumatized by the referendum, its aftermath and then the 2019 election, Labour, along with much of the wider left, fell largely silent on the Europe question as the country exited and politics became consumed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Calls for rejoining the EU, or even strengthening ties, had become, at least among prominent left politicians, few and far between.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government, meanwhile, used its landslide 2019 victory to rapidly reorder the British economy and its relations with Europe. Having been elected on a promise to get Brexit done, Johnson concentrated power in the executive and deployed it assertively, and dysfunctionally, to take the UK out of the EU on 31 January 2020. In a narrow sense, Brexit was indeed done. However, it would be a further year, coinciding with the peak of the pandemic-induced emergency restrictions, until the transition period ended and Britain (but not the UK in its entirety) withdrew fully from the single market and customs union on 1 January 2021, just days after agreement was finally reached with Brussels on a new relationship. This, in itself, was remarkable: as we discuss in Chapter 4, there are few, if any, examples in modern history of advanced economies leaving a single regulatory space in which they are deeply enmeshed or negotiating less favourable trading terms with their largest and most proximate partner, and none that seek to implement a complex new trading architecture overnight. Free trade agreements (FTAs) are disruptive: it takes many months (or longer) for them to enter into force once signed, and full implementation takes years, sometimes decades, of careful sequencing, even for relatively shallow accords. Brexit involved moving a globally open and highly complex economy from an advanced state of full integration far beyond that envisaged in any conventional FTA to some of the thinnest trade terms that the EU has with any country in its neighbourhood – thinner than Turkey, broadly similar to Ukraine – and replete with daunting new barriers, in barely a week, over Christmas, while the country was effectively locked down.

Once Johnson finally defined and crystallized Brexit – after five tortuous years of politicking – in the shape of the EU‒UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), all of the problems that had been, for a time, held in suspended animation necessarily returned to view. Some problems arose with great immediacy as unprepared firms were faced with insurmountable regulatory hurdles that they had neither the expertise nor capacity to overcome. The magical thinking pervading the post-referendum period instantly became subject to Brexit’s unavoidable real-world effects. This was temporarily masked by the ongoing upheaval wrought by the pandemic – at least in the Westminster political and media bubble – until vaccines arrived and the pandemic began to abate throughout 2021. At this point, the economic damage in terms of foregone trade and investment, long anticipated by many academics and business experts, gradually became obvious to a wider constituency, as did the re-emergence of simmering resentments in Northern Ireland and elevated support for Scottish independence. Put simply, the problems posed by actually existing Brexit, which had animated earlier nuanced conversations about different kinds of Brexit, did not, and indeed could not, go away. They remained at the centre of British political life as the implantation of the TCA, and the new UK‒EU relations it implied, became a source of sustained economic stagnation and political contestation.

Labour’s silence on these issues was electorally explicable and comprehensible after 2019. Its conscious decision to avoid the Europe question in order to recover the Leave-supporting red wall constituencies appeared, in early 2024, as if it would prove successful in those narrow terms (although we could not know, amid the drastic collapse in support for both the Conservative government and Brexit, whether it was necessary in order to regain those seats). Either way, Labour’s strategy risked losing pro-EU votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens in other strategically important constituencies, particularly in the south-east and southwest.

More importantly for our purposes, Labour and the British left will not be able to avoid the Europe question indefinitely, however electorally expedient it may have appeared to do so in the short term. They will certainly not, we argue, be able to effectively sustain an enduring position in favour of a hard Brexit – or, that is, exclude any substantively closer economic relationship with the EU – while pursuing a pragmatic but radical progressive policy agenda. These tensions pervaded the embryonic approach taken by Sir Keir Starmer in advance of the 2024 election as the party – albeit rather diffidently – broke its silence on Europe, advocating closer ties that were either insufficiently close to meaningfully assuage the turmoil caused by leaving, or demanded significant concessions that were incompatible with the hard Brexit settlement to which Labour had acquiesced (and that, by placing the UK outside the EU as a supplicant, had inherently weakened its negotiating position).

The UK requires a seat at the European table to effectively address the polycrisis (Tooze 2021) of intersecting geopolitical challenges (e.g. the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other simmering conflicts such as Israel‒ Palestine), political destabilization (i.e. post-truth politics and hard right authoritarian populism in the liberal West), a changing economic distribution of power (as reflected in the rise of China alongside aggressive European and American protectionist interventionism) and, of course, accelerating climate change and the imperative of alleviating the stark developmental consequences for the most vulnerable parts of the world while making rapid energy transitions (see Bishop et al. 2021). These are all global cross-border challenges with distinctly continental implications that require shared action, through collective institutions, at that specific level of governance. Labour, and the wider British left beyond it, must consider how to shape the future relationship between the UK and the EU to address these and other challenges, even if it decides, tactically, not to broadcast that thinking too widely. This book seeks to contribute to that important work by focusing on Europe – and the UK’s post-Brexit place outside of the EU – as a problem of long-term strategic statecraft rather than short-term electoral positioning.

Its starting point is our assessment that both pro-European and anti-European (or Eurosceptic) variants of British leftism have, in their own ways, long held an overly simplistic, and sometimes even rather glib, understanding of the EU and its antecedent organizations, as well as its relevance to British political economy in general and British left politics in particular. We seek to show the limitations of thinking on different sides of the left’s debate on Europe, while offering a clear political and normative vision for the British (and wider European) left, grounded in a more nuanced understanding of what Europe is and why it matters. The core questions of this book are both analytical and political. The first that we pose is: how and why has the in Europe question divided the British left historically and particularly in the context of Brexit? We consider this by offering an in-depth analysis of debates on the left in the 1960s and 1970s that echo, and provide important lessons for, analogous debates five decades later. Our second question is: how should the contemporary British left seek to navigate the Europe question in the post-Brexit context? Here, we apply our expertise as both scholars of the EU and the broader global political economy (GPE) in which it plays such a central role, to inject analyses of the politics of Europe with a much-needed discussion of policy.

We also engage with a much broader third question, with relevance not only to literature on the EU but also to wider debates in political economy, international relations and legal and political theory: can and should the European left support a return to the sovereign nation-state – as implied by Brexit – or work through the extant institutions of the EU in pursuit of progressive goals? Britain actually serves as an ideal case study for engaging this question, which relates to what we call the "progressive policy dilemma". Some regard the EU as inherently and irredeemably neoliberal and/or as corrosive of a precious national sovereignty and the social settlements associated with it. In turn, they advocate, albeit in different ways, a shift towards the re-empowerment of the European nation-state (see Streeck 2014; Bickerton 2012; Auer 2022). Others on the left reject the idea of the EU as inherently neoliberal and advocate, more or less, the EU status quo, a position most closely associated with social democrats across Europe, including New Labour. This kind of complacency is, though, undoubtedly rarer today than it was prior to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Finally, some view the EU as neoliberal but also both necessary and reformable, and champion, in various ways, some kind of EU reform, whether liberal or more radical (see Habermas 2001; Varoufakis et al. 2013; GNDE 2019; Piketty et al. 2019). Our argument in this book falls closest to this final position. We argue, via the case of Brexit Britain, that a return to the nation-state is a non-starter, as is a return (for Britain at least) to the status quo ante, and that progressive goals would be best pursued via a reformed EU. Indeed, for all of its undeniable faults and problems, the EU has already transformed itself since Brexit, and will continue to do so, evincing both that it can be reformed and that this can occur (not, of course, that it always does) in progressive ways attendant with the demands of the time.

The progressive electoral dilemma

We seek to make sense of the challenges that the British left faces in trying to reconcile conflicting positions on Europe by analysing them through the prism of the progressive dilemma. David Marquand (1991) coined this concept to describe the Labour Party’s historic difficulty in establishing a successful progressive electoral coalition. Marquand’s concern was how such a political party could reach beyond its core constituency – primarily industrial workers linked to the trade union movement – to form a large enough electoral coalition to govern in a Britain typified by a first-past-the-post (FPTP), winner takes all political system. That is, he considered whether and how Labour could expand its mandate to address liberal progressive issues that had been growing in importance since the 1960s without jeopardizing the support of its traditional, socially conservative working-class base. Not long after Marquand developed this idea, New Labour appeared to have discovered the recipe, and for a time … to have resolved the progressive dilemma (Gamble 2017: 142). Tony Blair’s landslide 1997 victory captured votes from a new liberal progressive coalition while maintaining the support of working-class heartlands.

Almost three decades later, the contemporary progressive dilemma can be understood as the reverse. The party has won the support of many referred to today, often pejoratively, as cosmopolitan liberals or educated bourgeois socialists, largely concentrated in London and university cities, attracted to Labour’s socially liberal, progressive policies of the 1990s and 2000s (and, increasingly, also the Green Party). However, throughout the New Labour period, and particularly following the GFC, Labour’s core constituencies in the now de-industrialized and mostly deunionized former heartlands began to desert the party. Indeed, links between work, trade unions and party were already eroding throughout the Thatcher years, with many within the working class moving into self-employment and non-unionized service sector work. For many in these heartlands, their emotional and historical attachment to Labour was long gone by the time of the 2007–8 crisis. For others, the GFC was the final straw. Its fallout further entrenched yawning regional and class inequalities and rendered the anti-EU and anti-migration messages of nationalist populists, including the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and an increasingly populist Conservative Party, particularly appealing. Electorally, this predicament for Labour was compounded by the nationalist turn away from Labour in Scotland towards the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), which was clear in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections (see Sobolewska & Ford 2020).

An important contemporary electoral dilemma for Labour, and the British left more broadly, is whether it can win back parts of the electorate, namely those in post-industrial towns, that appeared in 2019 to have deserted it without losing the support of cosmopolitan liberals in London and larger cities. This challenge is seriously complicated by the fact that inequality cuts across and undermines Labour’s traditional conception of class politics. In many of the supposedly left behind northern red wall towns, for example, relatively prosperous and expanding commuter suburbs often sit adjacent to serious urban deprivation. One can also observe high levels of home, asset and business ownership among upwardly mobile yet often socially conservative working- and lower-middle-class communities. In cities, and especially London, by contrast, huge numbers of highly educated and socially liberal graduates work in advanced, globally integrated sectors, but they are effectively proletarianized by a toxic combination of student loans, unconscionable housing costs and an attendant inability to accumulate assets, living alongside a wider range of poor, racially and ethnically diverse groups who experience increasingly insecure work. Moreover, FPTP means small increases in Conservative support in provincial English towns can translate into substantial gains, whereas the continued concentration of Labour (and Green) votes in cities, alongside the enduring fragmentation of non-conservative voters between multiple parties, has the opposite effect, only serving to reinforce the dilemma facing progressives. This, at least, seemed to be the case in 2019. But British politics has long been in such a pronounced state of flux that new fissures are constantly emerging, whereby voters themselves carry a range of complex views and identities that cannot simply be reduced to place, class, age, race, gender, occupation, level of education or degree of asset ownership.

Nonetheless, three questions have encapsulated the progressive dilemma since 2019. Can the British left appeal to both its cosmopolitan, mostly urban, professional and younger base and to its supposedly traditional heartlands? Can such a position be coherent in theoretical and practical policy terms? And, most important for our purposes, what do the answers to these questions imply for the left’s approach towards Europe? With respect to the first two questions, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015 promised to overcome the dilemma by uniting the party around an anti-austerity agenda situated within a broader critique of post-crisis neoliberal capitalism. Many on the left supported the (relative) social liberalism of New Labour. But the GFC exposed the limitations of its active embrace of finance capital and economic globalization, and its reticence to radically intervene in markets (see Chapter 1). The crisis created an opportunity for renewed radicalism on the British left within and beyond the Labour Party. Mounting anger over the government’s decision to bail out banks while imposing painful austerity measures appeared to unite much of the left. The working class was hit by declining real wages and cuts to social programmes, while younger sections of the British population saw tuition fees rise and the possibility of owning their own homes become a more distant possibility (see Berry & McDaniel 2020).

Corbyn, alongside outrider organizations such as Momentum, believed that their anti-austerity message – with an appeal to the many, not the few – would provide a new solution to the progressive dilemma. This was a view encouraged by Labour’s relatively strong (albeit losing) performance in the 2017 election where it achieved, by some distance, its best result, in terms of popular vote share, since 2001: Corbyn’s 40 per cent was considerably higher than the 35.2 per cent that won Tony Blair the 2005 election, and far higher than either Gordon Brown (29 per cent) or Ed Miliband (30.4 per cent) achieved in 2010 and 2015 respectively. If some of Corbynism’s more radical critiques of capitalism held less appeal to many heartland voters, practical policy proposals, such as the nationalization of rail or mail, attracted broad support. Yet the issue of Europe was deployed, especially by the British right, to exploit and reinforce once more the aforementioned divides between the left’s sought-after cosmopolitan and communitarian, or socially liberal and socially conservative, constituencies (Sobolewska & Ford 2020).

For the left, though, the progressive dilemma relates directly to the European question because EU membership is often closely associated with a progressive orientation in the cosmopolitan, liberal sense of the term. From such a perspective, the EU has, inter alia, permitted and fostered a permissive migration regime of free movement (within its own boundaries at least) and reinforced policies and principles of non-discrimination, the rule of law and human rights. Former French Minister of Finance and European Commissioner Jacques Delors, a key architect of the deep integration that saw the EU come into being in 1993, famously advocated for a social dimension to the process alongside the economic and financial dimensions such as completion of the single market and monetary union. But this never transpired in the way that either he anticipated or the British and wider European left hoped. Nevertheless, membership offered guarantees on many core workers’ rights, from limits on working hours to paternity leave, and from the late 1980s it was recognized by most on the British left as an important constraint on Thatcherism.

Still, Labour’s support for the EU has always been ambivalent. Labour and the EU came into close alignment with their understanding of a modern progressive agenda beginning in the 1990s. Such an agenda is perceived to be at odds, however, with an important strand of socially conservative communitarianism, which unites many, but certainly not all, voters in Labour’s traditional heartlands with traditional Conservative voters in the middle-England shires. The 2016 Leave campaign’s mantra of take back control effectively crystallized the compelling, but ideologically non-committal in economic terms, appeal of national sovereignty to both these constituencies. That appeal had, by then, long been made by Eurosceptic populists, particularly leaders of UKIP, but also fringe elements in the Conservative Party associated with the European Research Group. Indeed, well before the referendum, many Labour heartland voters had already shifted to either not voting in elections, voting Conservative (Evans & Mellon 2015) or supporting anti-system parties such as UKIP (Ford & Goodwin 2014; Hopkin 2020; Sobolewska & Ford 2020).

Labour’s often incoherent approach to Brexit is in many ways a manifestation of its attempt to grapple with the electoral implications of this novel progressive dilemma. It formally supported Remain during the 2016 referendum, reflecting the prevalent view of its new cosmopolitan base, including the vast majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), the membership and Labour voters. However, Corbyn was, at best, lukewarm in his support for that position, reflecting his longstanding sympathies for a more communitarian Bennite anti-marketeer position (explored in greater depth in Chapter 2). Following the Leave vote, the party adopted ambiguous, even tortured, positions, partly for strategic reasons and partly because of genuine divisions in the party. The 2017 manifesto made clear that it would respect the outcome of the referendum and seek to negotiate a deal to leave the EU. Reflecting the widespread concerns emanating from, among other places, its socially conservative heartlands, it explicitly committed to ending the EU free movement of persons regime in the UK, which precluded continued single market membership (see Chapter 6). At the same time, the party and leadership supported a relatively soft version of Brexit. It gradually came around to the idea of a customs arrangement with the EU and some form of preferential single market access post-Brexit, albeit ill-defined. In its own way, this reflected the cakeist approach of many right-wing Brexiteers, who also implausibly sought many of the benefits of single market membership while simultaneously demanding to leave the regulatory architecture that, by definition, generates them (see Grey 2021: 42).

The strategic ambiguity in Labour’s position on Brexit, coupled with a desire to shift the public’s focus to other issues, notably austerity, seemed to allow it to stitch together a coalition of urban cosmopolitan and heartland communitarian support in 2017. The party’s relative success in that election – which was unanticipated by many in the commentariat if not by some Labour activists – meant that, even though it lost, it slashed the Conservative majority, forcing Theresa May into a controversial Westminster pact with the Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party. But the ambiguity could not last. The party’s positions were, like those of the Conservatives, not acceptable to the EU, whose leaders had repeatedly excluded the possibility of cherry picking. That is, they rejected the UK potentially retaining the aspects of single market membership it liked – and that are generally unavailable in conventional FTAs that differ substantively to the kind of deep integration that exists in the single market – such as frictionless goods trade, capital mobility and a high level of access for services, but eliminating others, notably free movement of people. Labour would thus need to accept all of the EU’s four freedoms to achieve the soft Brexit it desired. As we discuss further in Chapter 6, many of its MPs saw no problem with free movement or even regarded it as a positive, whether for economic and cultural reasons or retaining the right of British citizens to move freely in the EU. Others, however, particularly those with seats in the heartland areas that voted Leave, were far more circumspect. Given that it was a Labour government under Blair that opened UK labour markets to new member states in 2004, and arguably sowed the seeds of discontent on the issue (see Thompson 2017a), they considered that the party should repent and make immigration control a sine qua non of its post-referendum position.

As the Brexit saga dragged on through 2018 and 2019, the diminishing effectiveness of Labour’s ambiguous position became increasingly apparent. It was clear in the rejection of May’s deal, which was regarded by Labour as too hard even though Labour’s red lines on free movement meant that it was, at most, only marginally harder than anything it would have been able to achieve. Indeed, one common misconception during this period (which still clouds much debate today) is that there is a spectrum of options between hard and soft Brexit. In reality there are different kinds of the former, typified by either a thin, very thin or exceptionally thin conventional goods-focused FTA of the kind Brussels negotiates with distant partners. But a gulf exists between any of these variants and the latter in terms of the scale of economic integration that, in turn, requires signing up fully to EU laws and institutions. Labour’s position of renegotiation in the run-up to the May 2019 European Parliament elections – elections that only happened because May’s deal had failed to gain parliamentary assent before the initial Brexit deadline of March 2019 had been extended – also appeared unconvincing. This was reflected in significant losses to both the Liberal Democrats and Greens, as well as the Brexit Party and Conservatives. In the run-up to the December 2019 general election, though, Labour came out in support of a second referendum on the basis of a hypothetical renegotiated deal, a shift constructed by Keir