Keir Starmer’s anti-Brexit frontbench needs to banish their love of Brussels
There’s at least one Christmas Party the Prime Minister will enjoy remembering. On December 12, 2019, Boris Johnson celebrated in style after wrapping himself in Brexit and securing an election landslide.
It’s easy to forget now as the Prime Minister fights for his political life, but just two years ago he handed the Tories an 80-seat majority as Labour’s heartlands backed his call to get Brexit done.
It’s what makes Labour’s new Shadow Cabinet line-up all-the-more remarkable.
Labour leader Keir Starmer’s reshuffle was designed to win credibility by ousting the Corbyn crew and bringing in people with “competence and media cut-through”.
Sir Keir has done that and Labour will end the year on a high it could only have dreamt of a few weeks ago.
But the new faces on the Shadow frontbench have something else in common – they were fully signed up members of the People’s Vote campaign to derail Brexit and bag a second referendum.
Sir Keir himself was cheered to the rafters at the 2018 Labour party conference for insisting Remain was still an option. And boy, did he move the party towards a second referendum when Parliament was mired in paralysis in early 2019.
But there’s more. The new Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was the one who launched a Commons bid to take No-Deal off the table.
Peter Kyle, the new Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, led an amendment demanding a confirmatory referendum, backed by the now Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
As recently as September, David Lammy, now Shadow Foreign Secretary, was promising Labour would reopen the EU trade agreement if it got back into power.
Yvette Cooper insisted post-reshuffle that Labour is now a party “ready for Government”. But are voters ready to put a bunch of Remainers in charge?
People may argue Labour’s “old” stance on Europe doesn’t matter. Sir Keir himself talks about wanting to turn a page and “making Brexit work”. Yet there is scant detail and a very wide range of possibilities.
And, critically, he will have to clear this up before he can measure up the curtains in No10.
Best for Britain certainly feels the tide could be turning on Europe.
The Rejoin pressure group made a splash themselves earlier this month, hiring former US ambassador Kim Darroch to champion its cause.
It believes Boris is so damaged that enough Leave voters will feel they were duped on Brexit and regret their choice.
Senior figures talk about how the public could eventually be nudged into accepting something like a customs union with the EU (imagine the irony if we end up with Theresa May’s deal).
Sir Keir’s team would undoubtedly love this – privately.
But polls suggest it would be electoral suicide for them to talk about it – however much Boris Johnson is drowning in incompetence and ineptitude.
Voters are definitely furious with the Tories – the Lib Dems are tipped to overturn a mammoth gap and win North Shropshire on Thursday.
A recent study by pollsters Redfield & Wilton found that despite everything this year, 53 per cent of voters still believe Britain should stay out of the EU. Remain only “wins” in Scotland and London.
Even more intriguing was a recent study by the British Election Survey, which highlights how the Leave-Remain divide goes far deeper than people think.
According to BES, we’ve almost moved beyond party politics and into a cultural divide of Leave and remain blocs.
A Leave voter, regardless of political persuasion, will typically have more authoritarian social values. The Remain voter is likely to be more liberal. The Leave voter might back Boris on Peppa Pig; the Remain one is likely to side with Sir Keir, who labelled Peppa Pig World “dreadful”.
Wannabe PM Liz Truss played to this social divide last week, insinuating that introspection and wokeism meant we’d taken our eye off the ball and ceded ground to enemies such as Russia. “We need to believe in Britain,” she crowed.
What does that mean for Labour? Put simply, that it won’t be enough for them to talk about what a charlatan Boris Johnson is and wait to be welcomed into Downing Street with open arms.
Sir Keir will have to ensure the entire Shadow Cabinet looks as if they might now and then side with “White Van Man” when it comes to the crunch.
More importantly, he won’t have a chance unless he can convince Leavers he really has drawn a line – and there’s no going back on Europe.