And some background and context for the US readers around the history of Lexit.
Most people wear their politics lightly, like favourite items of clothing to be adjusted slightly in colour and trim as the fashions alter. They don’t really understand those who keep their ideologies like old Mormon underwear: unchanged, close to the skin and on at all times.
So it is with many bright new Labour members, who sunnily signed up to the Corbyn project and today find themselves wondering why he doesn’t share their view of Brexit. But now it’s crucial: what, exactly, does Labour want?
The most popular explanation in Labour circles for Jeremy Corbyn’s vagueness on the issue has been “constructive ambiguity”. I never liked it but cleverer people than me said it was a canny strategy, borne out by the polls.
In this twilit vacuum, various Labour politicians have grown their own positions and, as Mao nearly said, a thousand mushrooms have bloomed. Now, however, Mrs May is prepared to talk to other people about what to do next and so, we are assured, “Jeremy’s door is always open”.
And this is where the puzzle begins. Mr Corbyn, of course, sort of promised his party that, unlike in the bad old New Labour days, members were now the boss and he was their servant. And it could not be clearer what his members want. Recent polling shows more than 70 per cent of them believe that Mr Corbyn should support a second referendum, in which 88 per cent of them would then vote to Remain. Polling among Labour voters shows a similar pattern. When the shadow Brexit secretary, Sir Keir Starmer, kept open the prospect of a second referendum in his speech to last year’s Labour conference, he got the biggest ovation of the week.
There are some Labour MPs who argue that the membership should be resisted over this. Some genuinely believe that their constituents badly want Brexit, or that the referendum result amounts to a contract and they fear the consequences of a breach of promise. These are respectable views, even if I disagree with them.
But I don’t think Mr Corbyn’s disinclination to do what his members want stems from such scruples. And nor do I think that these are the calculations of those who now form his inner circle. Which brings us back to Mr Corbyn’s door. He may say it’s open, but it is guarded by a veritable Cerberus. Some have called this beast the 4Ms. They are Corbyn’s strategy and communications director Seumas Milne, his chief of staff Karie Murphy, her friend Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union, and Andrew Murray, adviser to Mr Corbyn and chief of staff to Mr McCluskey. All of whom have argued recently against a second referendum.
At least two of these people, Mr Milne and Mr Murray, have belonged almost throughout their political lives to a tendency both beleaguered and stubborn. Mr Milne, though never a member of any communist party, was associated with a hardline pro-Soviet faction inside the now-defunct Communist Party of Great Britain. Until 2016 Mr Murray was a leading member of the party that this faction set up when it left the CPGB. For both men the struggle against “imperialism”, ie the American form of capitalism, is the most consistent part of their ideology. When I was a young communist, I knew quite a few people like this.
Until the mid-1980s, another of their beliefs was widely held in the Labour movement. This was hostility to the Common Market and its successors. To be on the left was to be anti-Brussels and the 1983 Labour manifesto included a pledge to leave Europe, despite Britain having voted to remain in a referendum eight years earlier.
In the 1975 referendum, the leading voices of the No campaign were Tony Benn for the left and Enoch Powell for the right. Back then, when almost all the Tory party including Mrs Thatcher were happy Europeans, the Bennites, the Trots and the unionists were the original and unbending Brexiteers. No one can lay greater claim to be the inheritors of the anti-EU tradition than Arlene Foster of the DUP and Jeremy Corbyn.
Some of it was about lost sovereignty, some about Europe thwarting socialist planning. The first thing that really stands out, though, was the belief on the far left, including the communists, that, in the words of one campaign leaflet, “The Common Market was set up by International Monopoly Capital for International Monopoly Capital.”
The second was about imperialism. Or, as a CND “No” leaflet put it: “Since its inception the EEC has been viewed by its supporters both as an economic union and as a weapon against Eastern Europe.” In other words, communists opposed the Common Market because they saw it as anti-Soviet and pro-American.
Nearly 40 years later, the same arguments were being deployed by the same kind of people with regard to Russia and Ukraine. In 2014 Andrew Murray posted an article on the Stop The War Campaign website blaming America and the EU for the war in Ukraine. The campaign itself issued a statement sub-headed: “The expansion of the EU and Nato eastwards has led to the growth of a neoliberal and militarised agenda in the region.” A year later the same website reprinted an article by Seumas Milne pinning responsibility for the Ukraine crisis on the EU and America. At the time, the chairman of Stop the War was Jeremy Corbyn.
Earlier this month, the Momentum supporter and former BBC journalist Paul Mason criticised an article in the far-left Morning Star that had opposed a second referendum. Citing polls of Labour members, he wrote in the New Statesman: “If they’d wanted to work with a bunch of musty old bureaucrats quoting Lenin and manoeuvring against the membership, they’d have joined the Communist Party of Britain, not Labour.”
Mason’s target was nothing like as arcane as one obscure piece in an unread newspaper. It was the 4Ms he was blasting. Not, of course, Mr Corbyn. Like the Japanese emperor, the Labour leader is now mostly ornamental and symbolic, but still an object of veneration. He is going nowhere.
Labour’s anti-Brexit majority now has the problem of how to win him over or neutralise him. Probably by doing what the hard left would do in such circumstances, and, as Mr Mason recommends, holding an emergency conference to commit Labour to a second referendum.
