Brexit

Brexit: what the Labour front bench has said

On 9 November Jeremy Corbyn responded to the German magazine Der Spiegel: "Spiegel: If you could stop Brexit, would you? "Corbyn: We can't stop it. The referendum took place. Article 50 has been triggered. What we can do is recognize the reasons why people voted Leave". On 18 November Jeremy Corbyn told Sky News: "Brexit has been triggered... We voted for Article 50 [the formal application for Brexit]... We couldn't stop it [Brexit]... I want to say to the Government... go back now [and renegotiate]..." Pressed on whether "no Brexit" is better than "no deal", he said: "That's not an option we...

Open letter to Corbyn: fight Brexit!

“I think we need to respect the referendum. As I say, I think that there is a deal which can be struck within Parliament that brings everybody together, that respects the views and wishes of communities whether they voted Leave or Remain” —Rebecca Long-Bailey, Shadow Secretary for Business, Sky News, 16 December. Comrade Corbyn! The 2016 referendum vote that the UK should withdraw from the EU, after 45 years membership, plunged Britain into a prolonged political crisis. Today, less than three months before Britain is due to leave, that crisis has not yet been resolved. The 2016 vote plunged...

Amidst Tory Brexit crisis - push for Labour to oppose Brexit

As we write (early afternoon, 15 November), the Tory cabinet has approved May's Brexit deal (14 November). Two leading Tory ministers have resigned. There is talk of a vote of no confidence in May being triggered among Tory MPs (15 November). I am not a fly on the wall of Downing Street, or of Parliament's corridors, so I'm no more able to guess outcomes than a competent bourgeois journalist. In fact, less able. One thing for fairly sure: the next weeks and months will be a time of high turbulence over Brexit, with, almost certainly, many moments of high drama, and many twists and turns. The...

Labour can stop Brexit

On 9 November Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told the German news magazine Der Spiegel that “we can’t stop Brexit”. But Labour can. The Tories and the DUP are divided about May’s sketched-out soft-ish Brexit deal. If Labour MPs vote solidly against May’s deal, it probably can’t get through Parliament. That reflects the fact that May’s proposals are unpopular — in surveys, 73% of the think the negations are going badly. The “hard” Brexit formulas favoured by the Tory right are unpopular. A “no deal” Brexit is more unpopular still. Although a lot of people are still shrugging and saying that Brexit...

Building a left movement against Brexit

Michael Chessum is the organiser of Another Europe Is Possible. He talked with Martin Thomas from Solidarity ahead of AEIP's conference on 8 December Martin Thomas: In the June 2016 referendum, Labour was for “reform and remain”, but unenergetically. Straight after the referendum, Labour said it now agreed Brexit must go ahead; and then in November 2016 Labour dropped its support for free movement within Europe. That position has remained fixed ever since, except that over 2018 the Labour leadership has edged towards saying that a new referendum may become an option. We need to change Labour...

A liberal analysis which blames immigration

Will Hutton and Andrew Adonis’s Saving Britain: How We Must Change To Prosper In Europe has bold ambitions, which, combined with its left-of-centre slant, distinguishes it from many in the burgeoning genre of books about Brexit. The book, published less than a year before Britain is scheduled to leave the EU, argues that Brexit is part of a project to create “Thatcherism in one country”, that we can and should stop it – and make profound changes in Britain. The authors’ visions and reasoning might sometimes “persuade fatalistic Remainers, and those Leave voters growing more and more uneasy” -...

AEIP opens out

Solidarity and Workers' Liberty have worked with Another Europe is Possible since the referendum campaign in 2016. On 20 October we joined the "left bloc" organised by AEIP for the big People's Vote demonstration that day. So far, however, AEIP has operated as a sort of left NGO. It has gained philanthropic grants which pay for an office staff, supervised by a rather shadowy "board" or "steering group". On 25 October AEIP opened itself up to supporters to join. It announced that it will be holding a members' conference on 8 December in London, and that members will now have "a say in how we...

Brexiteers don't care about Ireland

“It’s entirely up to the EU if it wants to undermine the goodwill in Ireland embodied in the Good Friday Agreement by setting up a hard border. “The British and Irish governments do not want this. They have no need to create it. With a little more than irony, Brussels dominates Dublin and now wants to dominate Belfast. Its imposition of a hard border would be a new form of colonialism in itself.” Where do these extraordinary words come from? The Daily Mail? The Telegraph? Boris Johnson? Arlene Foster? No: one Doug Nicholls, writing in the Morning Star (October 10 2018). Mr Nicholls is not, it...

And why not a united Ireland?

The Border in Ireland has never made democratic sense. It was drawn to maximise the "little Orange empire" for the Protestant-Unionists of the north east in the 1921 partition of Ireland. It has been a running sore for almost a century. To this day, along almost all its length, the majority of the population on the Northern side of the Border is "Catholic", Irish-Irish rather than British-Irish in its identity. The Border makes no political or human sense now. For a long time there have been no border checks. Over 30,000 people cross the border each day to travel to work, and tens of thousands...

Immigration after Brexit

A long-awaited government White Paper on plans for post-Brexit immigration law, to be published this autumn, was heavily trailed during Tory Party conference. If the Tories have their way, it will be far from business as usual on travel and immigration between the UK, Europe and the rest of the world after January 2021. New laws would establish a single immigration system. Migrants from the EU will be treated in the exact same way as non-EU migrants. The system will favour so-called high-skills migrants, from wherever they come from in the world. The government has indicated that it will scrap...

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