There is no coalition of the 48% – Labour must make the best of Brexit

Last week’s local election results may have disabused those hoping for a Lib Dem surge driven by highly motivated Remainers. But the illusion of a movement – our own En Marche! of the extremely sensible – subsists as a small but noisy ingredient of the 2017 general election.

The anti-Brexit campaigner, Gina Miller is crowd-funding to promote Remain-friendly parliamentary candidates, and Tony Blair has advised Remain supporters to vote for whichever candidate is most hostile to a hard Brexit. Among the replies to any social media post by a Labour Party figure are a number condemning Jeremy Corbyn for ordering MPs to support the government on triggering article 50, and for refusing to make Labour the party of the 48 per cent. Corbyn is being figured as a traitor that no Remainer could reasonably support. But is there another side to this story? If you are among the conscientious Remainers, this is a word in your ear to get you to change your mind.

Brexit is going to happen. There is not going to be a second referendum. “Bregret” is not going to set in in just in time. According to YouGov’s figures for March, 69 per cent believe that we should leave the EU. Only 27 per cent want a second referendum.

As for the non-Labour MPs that could supposedly stop Brexit: the Liberal Democrats are opportunistically branded themselves as the party of Remain, but Tim Farron is unable to command party unity even on this existential issue. At the vote on triggering article 50, two of Farron’s nine MPs voted with the government. And who are the Tory Remainers Miller and Blair imply we should vote for? Anna Soubry or Nicky Morgan? Neither found in themselves even enough resources of defiance to vote in favour of an amendment to the article 50 bill that would guarantee the right to remain of EU citizens who have been living in Britain for years, many of whom have families and careers here. That they would support Theresa May in a move so callous tells us everything we need to know about these “good Tories”.

For now, the prime minister has the approval of nearly half of the country. This may be a reality that a lot of us dislike. But it is, I’m afraid to say, reality. It is May’s historical achievement to have made the party satisfactory to hard right former UKIP supporters – most of the Tory swing in the local elections was down to straightforwardly absorbing pretty much the entire UKIP vote – while retaining the coalition of supposedly moderate support established by David Cameron. There is a historical irony here. It was May who, as party chairman back in 2002, first warned the Tories that they could only hope to beat Labour again if they abandoned its right-wing Eurosceptic agenda.

The Labour Party under Corbyn campaigned for Remain, but now accepts the referendum result. This is not a question of the “will of the people” – it is an old populist wheeze to claim after a plebiscite that the losing side were never properly “of the people” in the first place – nor is it a question of what is economically wise.

It is rather a case of being realistic about what the political actors involved right now can actually achieve. Most Labour voters backed Remain, but they are over-represented in a small number of safe seats. Among Tory voters, there are Remainers, but their solidarity is with their party more than it is with being in the EU. There is no coalition of the 48 per cent. This is why Labour’s offer is based on the actually achievable approach of making the party’s support for Brexit contingent on, among other “tests”, our ongoing access to the benefits of the single market. This is a desirable and popular aim. It’s also as good as we can expect to get.

Much has been made of Corbyn’s apparently lukewarm support for Remain during the referendum, in particular his scoring his passion for remaining at seven out of  `0. It is true that Corbyn’s nuanced and critical case for Europe, updating his lifelong Euroscepticism, fell on uncongenial ground as far as the standard of discussion about Europe in Britain was concerend.

But “7/10 for the EU” appears to have been the official Tory Remain strategy too. As the memoir of Craig Oliver, the head of Downing Street communications, has revealed, under the advice of both the pollster Andrew Cooper, and the Tories’ favourite Obama strategist Jim Messina, campaigners were expressly forbidden from any pronounced statements of outright Europhilia. As Messina said of undecided voters at the time, “they aren’t going to be won over by telling them how wonderful the EU is – they want to know the cold hard economic facts. Will it hit them in the pocket or not?”

In the event these voters either didn’t believe the official Stronger In line of economic pessimism, or they didn’t consider themselves to be doing so well out of the present economic situation that a radical change wasn’t worth the gamble.

Ed Miliband alienated a significant strata of Labour’s base when he refused to back a referendum on EU membership in 2015. But he did this in part because he didn’t believe it was clearly winnable in the current climate of uncertainty about terrorism and the economy. The full-throated cultural case for Europe would need to have been started far earlier than 2015, and those in a position to make it over the past couple of decades had usually not found it politically opportune to do so. How Corbyn was to be expected to push back the tide is unclear.

Labour MPs, members, and supporters who are unhappy with the leftward shift of the party under Corbyn have often accused his supporters of “purity politics”, of ignoring electoral realities in the selfish pursuit of their own minority interests. We could argue about this, but it has to be an argument for another time. For now, the snap election has unexpectedly put the shoe on the other foot.

It is now those moderate activists who are saying they will not support Corbyn because of his stance on Brexit who are guilty of myopic purity politics and who are allowing it to further sabotage a party already made terrifyingly fragile by internal warring since 2015. Corbyn has defied the austerity consensus of our moment and argues we can create a more sustainable economy by investing in shared services that get people working and spending. If you support this position, then Corbyn’s Labour is the only place you are going to find it, and a Europe-driven protest vote for a non-Labour candidate is a luxury you can ill afford.