Thread by @jonworth

Working out what the Labour Party's Brexit position should be is not complicated

It just requires a little ability to understand politics and communication, and a basic grasp of the UK electoral system

Oh and a little ability to see beyond what you, as an individual, want

🧵

In the halcyon days of UK politics (sure, quibble if these existed, but for our sakes here assume they do), it was a left-right two party game

Labour was left
Tories were right

Where you stood on that answered where you voted

First Past the Post meant that - nationally anyway - any other parties did not really get a look in

Whether you like it or not, two party politics, left-right, under first past the post was comparatively predictable

Then along comes Brexit

And drives a completely different cleavage through UK politics

The Tories position themselves increasingly on the Leave side, the Lib Dems and Greens on the Remain side, and Labour astride *both camps*

This then explains Labour's predicament - be too much of a Leave party, and it haemorrhages votes to Lib Dems and Greens

Be too much of a Remain party, and the voters that switched from it to the Tories in 2019 probably never come back

Up until December 2020, Labour faced the possibly legitimate critique that it wanted to "reverse Brexit". Whether it did or not is disputed, but it that critique stuck

But now that critique is *no longer relevant*

The UK is legally out of the EU

The EU would not want to the UK back in

And the impacts of being out of the EU are being felt

Labour does not - with regard to Britain's exit from the EU - need to prove its case any further. Only the wilder fringes of the Tory Party will keep flogging the dead horse that Labour wants Britain to Rejoin

On the other side, concern that the UK's exit from the EU is causing real practical damage to the economy and to people's livelihoods is real and is legitimate, and is even *starting* to be felt be Leave voters as well as Remain ones

And - as stated above - Labour faces the danger that it loses Remain voters to the Lib Dems and Greens

Labour cannot out-Brexit the Tories, and becoming a Rejoin party is likewise a dead end just now

(a small tangent: I'm not sure Labour ought to even be using the word Brexit any more, as the word is bundled up with Tories' way of carrying out the exit process - what the Tories did cannot be separated from the word - more on this comms point here: jonworth.eu/labour-a-new-r… )

Labour's position instead has to be based on a pragmatic normalisation of relations with the EU, *but with the UK still outside the EU*

To calm relations. To seek practical solutions to the many problems Brexit has thrown up

A new relationship between the UK and the EU in other words

Not Tory Brexit

And not Rejoin

But to put UK-EU relations on a calm and sensible footing. To see the EU as partners, not enemies

Attempting this up until December 2020 might well have been impossible. Now I do not think it is. Labour can safely brush off any accusation that it is a Remain/Rejoin party - it has adequately shown it is not

/ends