Between 2016 and 2019, Brexit allowed the Conservative Party to win over parts of the country it had previously found almost impossible to conquer. Boris Johnson’s pledge to “Get Brexit Done” appealed to enough people in traditional Labour areas to flip scores of seats blue. Today, though the effect itself has flipped. Brexit has been done and most people have concluded it was a mistake. Swing areas in northern England, Wales and the Midlands have turned against Brexit more strongly than traditional Tory areas.

The problem for the Tories is that all those voters who regret Brexit also see it as synonymous with the Conservative Party. Labour, on the other hand, has become associated with Remain — even though it rejects the idea of rejoining the EU and has vowed to “make Brexit work”. Labour, then, finds itself in the enviable position of benefiting from the Tory party’s association with Brexit, but without having to actually risk reopening the old wounds of the referendum by pledging to rejoin the EU. “Making Brexit Work” is smart politics — for now.

We have been here before. Look at what happened in Scotland after the independence referendum. There, the No campaign saw off the independence movement in 2014, but the parties associated with its victory became unpopular shortly after. The same thing didn’t happen immediately after the Brexit referendum, but the effect might just have been delayed by parliament’s failure to deliver on that result until 2020. So, we may now be witnessing the “loser’s premium” that couldn’t kick in until Brexit had actually been delivered.

This could be potentially transformative, but is not without some peril for Labour — and the country. The more voters declare their regret over Brexit, the more pressure there will be from Remainers to re-open the constitutional question over Europe — in the same way that the issue of independence has not gone away in Scotland. It is at this point that the difference between believing that Britain should not have left the EU, and believing it should open negotiations (and almost certainly hold another referendum) to rejoin will also emerge. The old conditions of British membership, remember, have gone and so “Rejoin” is not “reverse Brexit”; it now means creating something new. Would this mean, then, even higher budget contributions than before, the adoption of the euro and accession to Schengen? It seems impossible that David Cameron’s renegotiated membership plan (remember that?) could somehow be resurrected. The history of Britain’s entry — and exit — negotiations suggests very strongly that it will not be Britain who sets the terms, but the EU.

Starmer is therefore right to conclude that “Making Brexit Work” is a far surer bet than Rejoin: he could capitalise on the public’s disappointment with Brexit. However, there is another challenge for Starmer and the Labour Party. Just as Franklin Roosevelt was said to have saved capitalism from itself in the Thirties (a disputed claim, of course) by deploying the full power of the state to wrench the country out of its great depression, it may fall to Starmer — the man who called for a second referendum — to save Brexit from itself. There are plenty of people, of course, who think it is simply not possible to make it work, who believe that the only option is ever more close alignment with the EU — thereby undermining the very purpose of Brexit in the first place. If the only way to make Brexit work is to give up control by adopting whatever laws are passed in Brussels, this, to put it mildly, does not seem a very sensible place to be.

Labour, though, insists this is not its plan — or, at least, not the entirety of its plan. It does want to reduce “unnecessary” trade barriers, seek more “equivalence” and “cooperation”, but it has pledged to “use our flexibility outside of the EU to ensure British regulation is adapted to suit British needs”. As it pushes this, the more Labour will create a record which it will, logically, want to defend but which would be impossible inside the EU and would have to be abandoned if the country rejoined. In other words, the more Starmer succeeds on his own terms by making Brexit work, the more he will have created a new status quo, embedding the very project more and more of his voters believe was a fundamental mistake. Fate is a funny thing.

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Where are the Young England radicals?

By Tom McTague

Just because the Labour party is currently committed to making it work doesn’t guarantee the security of the Brexiteer project. In 20 years, Britain went from voting for Tony Blair to voting for Brexit. And it was only 25 years before Blair that Britain joined the Common Market. Nothing is set in stone: over time, attitudes and positions shift. What we now see as marginal, politically impossible propositions can suddenly become possible and then popular and then, after being adopted, apparently inevitable. Just think of monetarism and floating currencies, for example, both marginal policies in the Seventies that became government policy in the Eighties. The idea of leaving the EU itself was once considered too extreme for all but the most hardline eurosceptics as well. Then it became the majority view in the country. There’s nothing to say the same can’t happen to Rejoin.

This current shift in public mood against Brexit isn’t just a Labour victory — it is very much a Tory defeat. The referendum in 2016 revealed a pent-up frustration with the status quo. Taken literally, it was a vote, according to the Leave manifesto, to control immigration, spend more money (and by implication, improve) public services  particularly the NHS — and change the basic economic settlement to improve more people’s living standards which had stagnated. Those who voted Leave did so for lots of different reasons, of course. For some it was a vote in favour of dramatic changes to the economy and the country; for others to slow or stop the dramatic changes they felt were already happening and for which they blamed EU membership. Sevenoaks voted to leave, as did Sunderland.

Either way, it was a vote against the old system. Yet for most people, nothing has changed — or if it has, it has got noticeably worse. And so is it any wonder people believe it was a mistake? Britain has erected a trade border within its own country without bothering to enforce its own borders. It has signed trade deals which seem to make it harder for British producers to export without making it harder for foreign competitors to import into Britain. It has allowed immigration to increase, failed to stop the small boat crossings, let the health service fall to bits and begun a new round of austerity. The Tories couldn’t have designed a set of outcomes less in keeping with the spirit of the Leave vote. The truth is, the Tory party lost its grip on the revolution — and is now paying the price.

The ‘No’ campaign was obviously heading for defeat. But that didn’t stop Shore arguing with all the passion of someone who believed things to be on a knife-edge. Millions watched live on television as this Labour cabinet minister implored them to resist the prophecies of the doomsayers and have confidence in their ability to manage their own affairs.

“The message that comes out is fear, fear, fear,” he said, gesturing towards Heath, the ardent Europhile. “Fear because you won’t have any food. Fear of unemployment … A constant attrition of our morale … A constant attempt to tell us that what we have — and what we have is not only our own achievements, but what generations of Englishmen have helped us to achieve — is not worth a damn.” Now, asserted Shore, that the fraudulent arguments of the Marketeers were exposed, “What it’s about is basically the confidence and morale of our people. We can shape our future … We are 55 million people … I urge you to say ‘no’ to this motion.”

It is one thing to be a fine platform orator; it’s another to have the intellectual heft to back it up. Shore had both gifts. Born in 1924 to middle-class hoteliers, he spent his early years on the Norfolk coast. When the depression forced the sale of the family business, they relocated to Liverpool, with Shore’s father returning to his previous career in the Merchant Navy. After Cambridge, wartime service in India with the RAF and several years as a Labour Party staffer, Shore was elected in 1964 as the member of parliament for Stepney in East London. Within three years, he was inside the Cabinet.

Peter Shore was the kind of politician you rarely see today: an unashamed interventionist who believed that the proper role of government was to use all the levers at its disposal to manage the economy in the interests of the people. Shore saw government as a force for good and understood that, in its relationship with the market, it must act as master and not servant. This meant regulating markets and not allowing them to let rip. It meant speaking the language of competitiveness, exchange rates and industrial strategies. It meant, ultimately, the elevation of the needs of the real economy — where goods were produced and wealth created — over those of finance capitalism; the prioritisation of full employment, growth and living standards over monetary targets as macroeconomic policy goals.

It was this driving philosophy which ensured, during the IMF crisis of 1976, that Shore was not seduced by the arguments of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan or Chancellor Denis Healey — they, along with others in the Cabinet, suggested that if Britain couldn’t spend her way out of recession, she had no choice but to embrace the precepts of Friedman-style monetarism. And it was Shore’s deep-seated belief in the capacity of the state to improve people’s lives — and the duty of democratically-elected politicians to drive such improvements — that informed his opposition to Euro-federalism. Like many who stood in that rich tradition of Left-wing Euroscepticism, Shore’s antipathy was not to Europe, the continent; he simply objected to an arrangement that served the interests of bankers and the multinationals over ordinary working people.

He thought it wrong to give primacy to the views of technocrats over those of elected representatives. Shore saw the objectives of those driving political and economic integration across Europe as antithetical to not only the aims of the British labour movement but the concept of democracy itself.

Oh, to have had Shore and other big beasts of the Eurosceptic labour movement — Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Hugh Gaitskell, Bob Crow and Barbara Castle — around in 2016, to articulate the entirely rational Left-wing case against the EU, and to act as an antidote to the cynicism and hysteria that infected so much of the Left during that period.

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Brexit: was it worth it?

By Ed West

Peter Shore stood for the Labour leadership twice: in 1980 and 1983. What might have been if he’d won, and then become Prime Minister? Labour would not have retreated from its historical economic radicalism. By the early 1990s — just as it had done for the second part of the 1970s — the party had come to broadly accept the argument that “There is no alternative” to market fundamentalism, and that elected governments must be no more than minor actors in the operation of the economy. A Labour Party — and country — led by Peter Shore would not have succumbed to such pessimism. Nor, most likely, would the party have developed the infatuation with the EU which has done so much to alienate millions of its once-loyal supporters over recent years.

The driving philosophy of this government would have been that democratic socialism was possible only if politicians of the Left were willing to step up to the plate and take control of the nation’s economic destiny rather than hive off responsibility to markets and technocrats.

As a Labour PM, Shore would have led from the front in opposing the Single European Act and Maastricht Treaty. Britain would not have entered the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and the ignominy of Black Wednesday would have been avoided. Shore would have resisted, too, the drive towards the internationalisation of capital which has facilitated a global market where power and wealth are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and multinationals have the whip hand over elected governments.

He would not have hesitated to prioritise the interests of the productive sector over the City. His Keynesian interventionism and his focus on competitiveness would have ensured Britain did not experience the decimation of her manufacturing base that came to pass under Margaret Thatcher and her successors. Hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs would not have been lost to overseas competitors.

Shore — like so many Labour heavyweights from yesteryear — was a patriot to his fingertips. A Labour Party shaped in his image and following his credo would not have lost touch with working-class communities, a drift that began three decades ago, around the time Shore stepped down from the front bench. And our nation as a whole would have been much the better for it.