Jeremy Corbyn

After a still unexplained period of silence on Brexit following the 29 January parliamentary votes on the subject, the Morning Star has found its pro-Brexit voice again.

Seven right-wing Labour MPs quit on Monday 18 February. They did not join another party or form a new one. They did not call on their rank-and-file supporters within Labour to quit.

Two Tory MPs sceptical about Brexit, Nick Boles and Sarah Wollaston, face deselection by their local Tory parties in coming weeks, and a Government minister has openly said that the hard-right Tory MPs “are not Conservatives” and should join the new “Brexit party” being launched by former Ukip leader Nigel Farage.

Labour right-wingers have chosen this moment to help out the hard-pressed Tory government. They have turned up the volume on the murmured speculations about a right-wing split from Labour just as the Tory impasse worsens. Labour and trade union activists want unity to maximise the chances of using the Tories’ thrashing-round to oust them from office, to force an early general election, and to get a new public vote to stop Brexit.

Four union leaders, including Len McCluskey of Unite, had one-on-one talks with the Prime Minister in Downing Street late in January. According to usually well-informed sources like Robert Peston and the Financial Times, McCluskey played a key role.

Brexit can still stopped. The first step, though, is to halt an emerging mood of retreat among anti-Brexit people.

“People switch off from responding to every depressing political twist and turn of Brexit”, one activist wrote to us this week. Another: “people in my local [anti-Brexit] group feel down after Jeremy Corbyn’s responses on 28 and 29 January”. Yet others have said: “Face facts. Brexit is going to go through. No amount of agitation now will make much difference. The task now is to prepare the left for after Brexit”.

Steve Richards is a routine political pundit, probably (in his 2017 book The Rise of the Outsiders, for example) a bit less hostile to Jeremy Corbyn than most of his type. In the Financial Times on 1 February, however, he was acid about Corbyn, and with some justice.

“Like Mrs May, [Jeremy Corbyn] asserts rather than explains, repeatedly declaring that he supports ‘a customs union’, ‘a close alignment with the single market’ and ‘workers’ rights’. Why is this his position? What does he mean by these terms?”

Fifty Labour activists from ten boroughs across London attended a 4 February emergency meeting in Lewisham to discuss the Labour Party’s stance on migrants’ rights.

The meeting was called by Labour for a Socialist Europe, Labour Campaign for Free Movement and Another Europe is Possible, in cooperation with local left activists, in response to Labour’s fiasco over the Tory Immigration Bill. In Parliament on 28 January, the Labour front bench at first recommended abstention on the Tory bill. It swung to voting against only under pressure and at the last minute.

Conspiracy theories are on the rise in politics these days. Traditionally conspiracism has tended to be associated with the right but – increasingly in the UK – it’s coming to characterise sections of the left.

As Solidarity goes to press on 22 January, Labour has put down an amendment in Parliament which at first sight seems to call for a new public vote on Brexit.

Last week Solidarity published an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn from Sacha Ismail, an organiser of the new Labour stop-Brexit campaign Labour for a Socialist Europe.

The conclusion of that letter becomes even more urgent after the parliamentary vote on 15 January. We say again to Corbyn:

Now you should campaign boldly for a “People’s Vote”, and advocate a vote against Brexit.