Back to the Eighties, as Labour paints EU as a working-class hero
Labour’s enthusiastic, uncritical devotion to the EU often baffles observers. Few who opted for Remain back in 2016 did so because they were emotionally committed. Yet, listening to most (thankfully not all) Labour MPS on the subject is to get a sense of almost religious fervour.
It wasn’t always like this. Until Margaret Thatcher’s third general election victory in 1987, Labour believed it could soon return to government and undo much of the “damage” the Conservatives had wreaked without the need for the EU’S support.
As late as 1992, the Eurosceptic Bryan Gould was a serious candidate for the party leadership. But Gould was an increasingly isolated voice by the time he resigned from John Smith’s shadow cabinet in 1992. By then, Labour’s EU policy was settled.
If the British public could not be trusted to install a Labour government to protect workers’ rights and impose robust environmental measures, they believed, then Europe would. This message earned Jacques Delors a standing ovation at the TUC conference in 1988. Throughout the Nineties and Noughties, Labour never met a European treaty it didn’t like.
There were a couple of bumps along the way: Tony Blair promised, in his 2005 manifesto, to hold a referendum on the draft European Constitution.
Fortunately for Europhiles in the Cabinet (ie, all of them), by the time it was ready to be ratified Gordon Brown had found an excuse to sign the Lisbon Treaty on our behalf.
Why, then, did every single one of Labour’s current batch – including Europhiles like Hilary Benn, Keir Starmer, Tom Watson and Yvette Cooper – raise no objection when, in 2017, they stood on a platform to leave the EU?
At the start of the 2017 election campaign, most Labour candidates believed that since oblivion awaited, any promises made could easily be discarded under a new leader.
Yet when the electoral wipeout never occurred, the Europhiles shifted tactics: persuading Jeremy Corbyn to abandon his hostility to the EU. Suddenly, party political advantage and loyalty to Brussels conspired to give Labour a new lease of life.
From then on they would pretend to support some hypothetical and undefined form of Brexit while voting against any type of “Tory Brexit”.
Witness how, during the debates on Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, many Labour MPS ignored the detail, instead declaiming their opposition to a no-deal Brexit – and then pledging to defeat the only deal on offer.
Consider Jeremy Corbyn’s disavowal of Boris Johnson’s deal this week – issued even before the text of the agreement was revealed: “I don’t know what it says but I’m against it.”
The latest excuse for opposing the PM’S deal, the one that will be cited most often in the next 48 hours, is that it would erode workplace conditions and environmental standards.
Suddenly we’re back in the Eighties, with a Labour Party so unconfident of winning another election that it must rely on the EU to impose a range of measures on the electorate that are good for us if only we were clever enough to understand.
Labour’s great danger is that the voters understand far more of what’s going on than they realise.