Hope is born from the hell of Brexit
THE Raft of the Medusa, a massive oil painting in the Louvre gallery in Paris, shows a barely seaworthy, rope-lashed craft riding the deep waves, while the men aboard are rendered broken and in utter despair.
It is a recreation of a real-life disaster that shocked 19th-century France, already reeling from losing the Napoleonic wars.
Aboard the raft, men were reduced to cannibalism while they drifted hopelessly off the coast of west Africa.
In the lifesize picture, one old man holds the corpse of his son, others tear their hair out in frustration and defeat. Bodies litter the planking, waiting to be thrown overboard. All in all the painting is a fairly accurate representation of the mood of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and much of the EU Remain camp, since they were cast adrift on the ocean of despair after the Brexit vote.
The focal point of the picture is the moment when, cresting a wave, the survivors of the famous shipwreck spot a vessel on the horizon. A hankerchief is being waved, hope is born from hell.
That is the what it must have felt like last Sunday morning when Keir Starmer, Labour’s Brexit guru, hove into view with the relevation that Labour now favour staying in the EU single market and customs union after March 2019, the official point of departure.
This period, to make sure we do not become too poor too quickly after leaving the EU, would be “as short as possible, as long as necessary”.
As a political slogan that’s as good as you can expect at this stage and that Starmer said “a” customs union, not the customs union as Labour moves crab-like towards a soft Brexit that may not mean Brexit at all, Starmer has put the light on in the distant harbour. Now he needs to make some Scottish friends to get the raft to shore.