Amid the left post-mortems, certain tendencies are emerging.
Perhaps most clear is a cluster of takes from proponents of Left Brexit – ‘Lexiters’ ranging from supporters for leave in principle under all circumstances, those who thought Labour should have campaigned to leave in the first place, to the heavy-hearted remain-supporters who advocated a pro-democratic stance after the referendum. Ian Lavery has suggested that Labour should have tactically voted through May’s deal as a least-bad option when it was offered. As Ronan Burtenshaw puts it in Tribune, one of the strategic mistakes, if not the key, was to stand ‘against the democratic mandate on Brexit’ – the party’s shift between 2017 and 2019 to a second-referendum position. Whatever its particulars, such a shift did not honour the 2016 referendum, and could be understood and depicted as anti-democratic, and in any case would always have been seen as far closer to Remain than Leave. Given the losses in Leave seats, and given that Labour’s Brexit position gave Johnson space to audaciously position himself as pro-democracy, working in the interests of the people, and to position Corbyn as their enemy, there is a clear intuitive sense to this position.
Seeming to countervail it is the fact that, according to Datapraxis’s recent breakdown of voting patterns, ‘a larger number of Labour’s 2017 voters seem to have switched to other Remain parties’ than switched to the Conservatives – 1.1 million Labour Remainers to the Liberal Democrats, Greens and SNP, and as many as 250,000 Labour Leavers thereto, also, as compared to up to 1 million Labour Leavers to the Conservatives, by some way the majority in the heartlands. On this basis, some Labour Remainers, again, from left and right, and with varying degrees of criticisms of the actually-existing EU, are suggesting that an earlier decision by the leadership to support a second referendum much sooner would have been more effective electorally in 2019.
But unaccounted for in the Datapraxis report, as it readily admits, are the abstainers in the 2019 election: ‘[h]undreds of thousands more may have stayed at home’. Indeed, according to the latest Lord Ashcroft poll, the number of 2017 Labour voters who did not vote in this election dwarfs the switch to any other party. Pro-Leavers can very reasonably infer that the sum of those who switched allegiance and those who abstained due to Labour’s move to a second referendum likely exceeds those Labour Remainers who voted Lib Dem. That thus, allowing that this is all least-bad-options territory, the first referendum should indeed have been honoured.
The fact is that there are serious limitations to all such hindsight wisdom, on all sides.
One is confirmation bias. Grace Blakeley in Jacobin rightly criticises the Labour leadership for ‘vacillating’ over Brexit, but – admirably, given the inadequacy of data yet available – notably restrains herself from extrapolating from that to suggesting that sticking with a left Leave, a position she has articulated elsewhere, would ‘therefore’ have been electorally preferable. Not all commentators, however, are so restrained or rigorous about ‘deriving’ their already-held retrospective ‘solution’ – on either side – from the contested and incomplete data. But if the task is to analyse why Labour lost, and how it did so, then as far as possible not only points of principle but pre-existing druthers must be bracketed.
Salvage has always agree with the Lexiters that the EU is a neoliberal organisation, but contested that it follows that we should automatically always have been pro-Leave. Going into the referendum, our position – shared, we believe, with many on the left – was that it made little sense to be pro- or anti-Brexit in principle, because what was on offer was not an abstract Brexit but a Brexit in a particular political conjuncture overwhelmingly controlled by the hard right. Conversely, we were suspicious of the room for radical manoeuvre within the EU that the Remain-and-Reformers held would be available, and given the EU’s border barbarity and crushing of Greece – hence our plague-on-both-houses position in the referendum. Of course this by no means guarantees objectivity or rigour now: we have been wrong about much, and will be wrong again. But in terms of post-factum analysis of this appalling result, we can at least be confident that with regard to the party’s – clearly flawed – Brexit position, we are not falling prey to confirmation bias in one or the other direction.
Everyone can agree with Blakeley that the vacillation, the late decision-making, the palpable uneasiness with which Brexit policy was decided, Corbyn’s reluctance to commit to campaigning for one side or another in a future referendum, hurt the party badly. There were, of course, reasons for such hesitation, and it would be unfair to ignore them: the schism was very real and deeply divisive and destructive to the party. But the leadership’s ambiguity now looks pretty clearly not to have been constructive at all – rather the opposite. The least-bad of those bad options would surely have been to decide on a position earlier, to defend it full-throatedly.
But the fact that Brexit was the key variable and problem does not mean that it had a solution. Decide the policy earlier, certainly: but either way you decide it and no matter how early and how nimbly and how aggressively you defend it, there would have been cascading effects all the way down. In every case there is at least a reasonable argument that the cons would have outweighed the pros.
Retain Labour Remainers by supporting a second referendum much earlier, and make an impassioned and articulate case to Labour Leavers to stay with you on the grounds that the Leave on the table is in fact a wedge for Trumpian neoliberalism, a sizeable proportion of the latter might come on-side, perhaps enough to avoid this electoral melt-down. But given the long-term systemic collapse of Labour in the heartlands, which was already articulating in Brexit terms, there is every reason to be suspicious of this.
Retain those Leavers by accepting the referendum result early, and argue with passion to Remainers that as democrats we have no choice but to do so, and that the task now is to forge policies as radical as possible and a Brexit as positive and anti-racist as possible, perhaps large enough numbers of remain-supporting Labour voters, particularly in London and the south, would be persuaded. This seems at this point, with the clear-sightedness of hindsight, to have been probably the least bad-option. But even campaigning for a ‘progressive’ and anti-racist Brexit from the day of the referendum result is not without its own risks, particularly given the relative weakness of Labour tribalism among young metropolitan Remain voters offered the options of other pro-Remain parties, and given that floating signification of ‘Europe’ among many in that cohort. And bearing in mind that we could not take the Leavers for granted either – as Meadway points out, ‘[w]e were losing leave-voting seats like Mansfield already in 2017’, before the turn away from the referendum result.
And let us not forget that such a position would only have provoked even more attacks from the pro-Remain Labour centrists, causing chaos,possibly the further loss of MPs for Corbyn in the interim, if not another leadership challenge that would have done even more damage to the project. And even with such a position it would still have been possible for the Conservatives to paint Corbyn as an obstacle to democracy if his party had still voted down May’s dreadful deal.
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