Thread by @AyoCaesar

Best of luck and all love to those on the #PeoplesVoteMarch today! While I’ve still got huge reservations about a second ref in itself (as well as the apparatchiks running the campaign), it’s the failures of the Tory Party in government driving polarisation in this country.

I’m not a Lexiter. My preference, still, is to Remain in the EU. But my priority is to see a Labour government in power which could deal with the social and economic forces which drove Brexit in the first place.

Which means thinking through certain things...

The first is that polarisation on Brexit benefits the hard nationalist right most of all. They don’t want unity - they want to exploit a narrow majority to pulverise the notion of governing by consensus. Remainers can’t play their game if ultimately they want to win.

So, if we want to depolarise the national conversation on Brexit, two things need to happen.

1) Remainers need to build a social coalition which looks very different from the one they managed to corral back in 2016.

and 2) There needs to be some awareness that Labour’s Brexit strategy and Labour’s Brexit position are, and must be, two different things.

For 1) the Revoke A50 petition shows that despite pulling in impressive numbers, there’s been a lack of strong cut-through in even Remain-voting urban constituencies in the Midlands and North. This can, however, change.

For all the talk (much of which I agree with!) on the connections between a Tory-led Brexit and the revival of white nationalism, there’s not been a particularly strong mobilisation of BAME voters outside of the South-East to make this point.

It’s not good enough for the pushback against nationalism to be led by white and/or middle class people who are operating on the assumption that racism was invented in 2016 (hello, TIG!).

A Tory Brexit, unable to deliver Leave campaign promises of increased NHS funding and the return of sovereignty to the demos, will rely on expanding present conditions of immigration precarity from (mostly black and brown) non-EU migrants to (mostly white) EU migrants.

And as long as insecure immigration conditions exist for non-EU migrants, there will be a demand from the right to see those conditions extended to EU migrants. Freedom of movement for the few will always be precarious when it’s not a freedom offered to the many.

The presence of migrants and British POC has been used as shorthand for unfeeling technocracy, the normalisation of shit pay and employment, and social change in the absence of shared social institutions. Make no mistake, this is the racist foundation of the rise in xenophobia.

So the establishment Remain campaign needs to stop positioning EU migrants as 'the good ones', and focus on building a coalition across diverse working class communities which takes on these myths and makes demands for progressive immigration policy which include non-EU migrants.

Now for 2) There needs to be some awareness that Labour’s Brexit strategy and Labour’s Brexit position are, and must be, two different things.

What I mean by this is Labour have an historic opportunity to engineer the collapse of the Conservative Party while in government.

All Labour need to do is resist the temptation to throw the Tories a lifering. Only two things could save Theresa May now - a critical mass of Labour MPs voting through her deal, or Labour becoming the red Lib Dems. Luckily, neither of those things are likely.

What's Labour's strategy? In my view, it's letting the Tories implode while keeping together their fractious 2017 electoral coalition. Which means blocking No Deal, expressing a preference for Brexit to happen, and simultaneously keeping avenues open that could lead to No Brexit.

Which means that Labour's Brexit position is in a constant state of flux. It's like Schrodinger's cat - Labour are hoping that they can leave the box unopened for as long as possible, while occasional yowling and scratching noises assure people there is definitely a cat in there.

It's frustrating, it's boring and shifty, but guess what? It's been effective so far.

Now, if May's deal finally gets the coup de grace this week, Labour must move towards a Brexit position which still delivers it's 3 strategic objectives as outlined before.

In my opinion, that means firstly pursue whichever Parliamentary option makes a General Election most likely. Secondly, put renegotiate a softer Brexit on the manifesto. And thirdly, put the renegotiated deal to a referendum with Remain on the ballot (ideally, without No Deal).

Leave won the last referendum by a tight margin. As such, I don't think it's unreasonable for the Brexit option to be a form of compromise with the 48%. However, Remainers need to take the chance that this would be a Brexit deal that they could conceivably lose against. Dicey!

In this scenario, a vocal, populous and potentially violent far-right would be emboldened - and much more of a problem than we've seen so far. Most Remainers, in my view, have been incredibly blase about this potential outcome. I'm not. I genuinely fear for people's lives.

Read my lips: stopping Brexit will not stop the far-right in its tracks. There is no going back to politics as it used to be, even if we stay within the EU. Take this seriously.

Alongside a ratification ref, Labour must lay out a plan for revived democratic institutions capable of dealing with political pluralism - no matter what the outcome of the referendum is. I want to see serious proposals for dealing with the democratic deficit in the UK!

For better or worse, Brexit has highlighted that most people in this country feel a huge amount of distance and opacity lies between themselves and sovereign decision-making institutions. And that needs to change, as it's a landscape in which the far-right can thrive.

Anyway, these thoughts might be garbled bollocks but fuck it, you're stuck with reading them and there's nowt you can do about it. Have fun!