Starmer vs the workers: the real Brexit betrayal

Keir Starmer looked blank. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, seemed confused. Only the old Stalinist Seumas Milne seemed really to understand.

It was 2019. Labour’s front bench team, and their leader Jeremy Corbyn’s close advisers, were being upbraided – from the left. Why were they putting the interests of international capital ahead of our workers? Why were they abandoning the chance to implement a meaningful industrial policy? Why were they giving up on the chance to save British steel, to give all support necessary to our manufacturing sector, to make a stand against neo-liberalism?

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The person in the room making the challenge, over ginger beer and sandwiches, was not Owen Jones, James O’Brien or Mick Lynch. It was me.

The occasion was one of the ill-fated talks between Labour and the government in the last days of Theresa May’s premiership. Our failure to command enough Conservative votes to get a Brexit deal through parliament had driven the cabinet to see if compromise was possible with the opposition. It was never likely to be. But the government was running out of time, opportunities and indeed ministers, so one last throw was attempted.

Most of the time I kept uncharacteristically schtum, except for one moment when the tragically limited, anaemically timid, intellectually impoverished, morally pusill-animous, pre-emptively cringing nature of Labour’s position provoked me.

Starmer was once again laying down Labour’s ‘red lines’. To nods from his colleagues, he stressed how important it was to be in the European Union’s single market. In other words, to accept that a newly sovereign Britain could not control its borders, could not direct investment to infant enterprises, could not alter regulations, could not change procurement rules to favour British business, and in all these and thousands of other areas would have to accept foreign jurisdiction.