bog standard, gold standard

Is this thing still on? Apparently so

Anyway, i'm making a flying visit to talk Corbyn and Euroscepticism. Was he really a Brexiteer all along? There seem to be some shall we say hyper-extended theories based loosely on his voting record but mainly on the desire of those who dislike him to indulge in supervillain fantasies.

Between 1998 and 2002 I worked part time as a media aide for Mick Hindley a Labour MEP affiliated with the Campaign Group, Corbyn's parliamentary faction. So while I never had the pleasure of hearing Corbyn's views firsthand I did get a grounding how that group within Labour thought.

So were they Brexiters? No. The thing is, up until very recently support for Brexit generally and Lexit in particular was an absolutely bonkers position, such was the political consensus around membership. It would have been like campaigning against the weather.

In fact, it would have been like campaigning against the weather full time, because Brexit is a classic single issue position. Brexit itself is supposed to solve all our problems, with a little tidying up. Hence the abject failure of the post Brexit government to come up with any kind of serious negotiating position. They're just dicking around waiting for the magic beans to fertilise.

This is also why the handful of actual pro-Brexit Labour MP's don't represent any particular tradition within the PLP; they're just eccentrics. From the nineties onwards Labour as a whole embraced the EU, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm or reluctance.

To paraphrase Lenin, to the Labour left Brexit was 'to the Left of common sense'. This isn't to claim them as Euro-enthusiasts. There was a great deal they dislike about the institutional architecture, most notably it's pro-market bias and its tendency to expand beyond it's democratic remit. At the same time, there was a lot that people liked about it - its ability to provide embedded international co-operation for instance. Oh, and also, the whole Freedom of movement thing.

So it's a mixed bag. Taken together I think it demonstrates that the Corbyn was secret Brexiteer all along stuff is nonsense. But there's no way the things the old Campaign Group did like about the EU would induce one of its members to overturn the result of a referendum. He and they have this in common with the vast majority of MPs from both parties. Talk of 'respecting the will of the people' is so much flatulence, but it is a basic expectation that elected politicians will go along with a popular vote. It's kind of basic to the whole political contract in fact.

So we are where we are not because Corbyn is some secret Brexity mastermind but because bog standard politicians in a bog standard democracy are hardwired to behave in particular ways in response to electoral stimuli, even when this is inadequate to cope with a massive shock to the whole political economy of the country.

And what we've seen over the past few days is Corbyn behaving in a pretty bog-standard politician way. He goes on a bog-standard Sunday morning politics gabfest. In response to a bog standard gotcha question over FoM he does the bog standard thing of replying to a different question about the Posted Workers Directive. It's the bog standard gold standard way of dodging the question of a bog standard underbriefed star interviewer.

And Corbyn abandoned Freedom of Movement – which he explicitly campaigned for during the referendum - for the completely bog standard political motive of keeping his party together. Having said that, answering a question from an interviewer about X with an answer about Y normally means that you don't want to talk about X. As for why, my personal guess – and it is just that – is the Corbyn would accept the single market and its strictures if he could have FoM back. But try getting that through the PLP right now.

Since I think we have to assume that most MPs will go along with a referendum result more or less automatically, this leaves the remain campaign with two alternatives: the first was to place sufficient external pressure on MPs of all parties to change their assumptions. There has been a campaign of sorts but this objective had clearly not been reached.

The second objective is to force a governance crisis of such magnitude that Brexit simply becomes impossible to deliver. This is still possible in large part because Corbyn and Labour stopped May's original triumphal progress towards nationalist consolidation around Brexit dead in its tracks. We now have a weak government with a discredited leader presiding over MPs unsure whether they hate her more than they hate each other. Viewed in this light, the tactical role of the Opposition is not so much to take any particular stance on Brexit, but to make it impossible for the Conservative Party to take any coherent approach to the issue. Labour's success or failure in doing this is the initial benchmark by which to judge them.

Comments

[bert]

Looking at the archives in an attempt to check something I half remembered, I found this - a perfect B&T post.

Jamie, you might be able to get away with just reposting old content that's acquired a new resonance with Brexit.

[Dan Hardie]

I don’t remember seeing that post the first time round. It does seem rather apt as a metaphor.

Otherwise, this is my traditional B&T comment saying that I have just given first aid to a stranger in the street (a food delivery guy knocked off his moped by a car; suspected fractured femur). Which needs to be followed by the traditional B&T comment from ajay expressing disbelief that I should happen to be present at the scene of so many accidents.

[lvlld]

Reading the internet's most fearsome schlactbummlers tear strips off each other and rub in the salt underneath Jamie's wry, understated offerings was part of the charm.

[Barry Freed]

Great to see the best blog back and so many of the old regulars here. Strategist, do you have a twitter or a way to get in touch?

[Guano]

Dan Hardie - I agree with you, more or less, when you say this

" He and they have found out that this (promising diametrically opposed things to different groups) is a great strategy for winning a referendum, but they may just be realising that it creates one or two problems for governing. "

I actually think that the UK faces a full-blown crisis because of people like Hannan promising diametrically opposed things to different groups, yet the UK hasn't woken up to that yet. The vast majority of reporting on Brexit is fantasy stuff that doesn't take into account the fact that most of the assurances made before the referendum were quickly disproved: the promise to negotiate a trade deal with the UK was an empty one because none of those who made that promise had given the slightest thought to what negotiating a trade deal might entail.

One of the reasons why, in my view, we have this crisis but have difficulty in recognising it, is political correspondents who do more to obscure the issues than to clarify them. Chris Dillow said, a few weeks ago, that political correspondents have a tendency to treat politics like a game, and that what matters to them is who wins or loses elections or referenda, and they mainly identify with the winning side: the policy outcomes are of secondary importance.

I apologise for asking you questions about a book you had only flicked through. It was, however, leading to a point that is important, in my opinion: did Shipman highlight the consequences of the way Leave campaigned and won the referendum? My guess (prejudice) is that he did not because the nature of political correspondents is to identify with the political winners without pointing out the consequences of the dirty tricks that are often involved. It would be good to know for sure, though, because it is part of the story of how the UK is supposedly trying to implement "the will of the people" that is open to dozens of different interpretations.

Being of a similar demographic to Jeremy Corbyn (grey beard, bicycle, jam, allotment) I might come back to the question of the possible trajectories of those of use who voted "Out" in 1975. Like Jamie, I think that a lot of was is written is "hyper-extended theories based loosely on his voting record but mainly on the desire of those who dislike him to indulge in super-villain fantasies."

[ajay]

Which needs to be followed by the traditional B&T comment from ajay expressing disbelief that I should happen to be present at the scene of so many accidents.

Actually over the last couple of years people have also been dropping around me like autumn leaves in Vallombrosa, so I no longer regard Dan H the Injury Magnet as a statistical outlier but just as an example of what it's like living in the big city.

[ajay]

And I think it was generally surprise rather than disbelief. Disbelief makes it sound like I either thought you were making them up or suspected you of causing them yourself.

[Alex]

The only people we know for a fact to have done anything like hacking the voting process were of course Vote Leave, who ran Google ads for "register to vote" that actually pointed to the signup for their mailing list.

This makes me utterly furious, because one thing you very very must not do as a bog standard canvasser is handle voter registration forms in any way. Obviously, if you were to offer to post them you could alter them to sign up for postal or proxy votes, or just throw them over a hedge. So this is ferociously illegal.

VL found a way to do this on a bulk scale, which would mean serious police trouble for Alex The Canvasser, but the Electoral Commission's response was literally "sorry mate we don't do websites".

[bert]

CommentIsFree nutpick:
Brexit will be catastrophic. Yet I still support Jeremy Corbyn
(Tl,dr: hot off the press and still steaming, the latest thinking from Islington)

9th September. Jeremy won't be there, of course.
So this woman has a tricky decision to make. Participate, or follow.
Often comes down to that on the left, doesn't it.