There is a terrible Adam Sandler movie called 50 First Dates. There are many terrible Adam Sandler movies, but this one is a right honker. Sandler falls in love with Drew Barrymore, who suffers from anterograde amnesia — an inability to retain new memories. He tries to help her remember but she keeps forgetting. Eventually, he makes a video explaining everything, shows her it each morning, and they live happily ever after. This, I kid you not, made $200 million.
Someone needs to make a video for Labour supporters to combat their Corbynesia. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Theresa May talked up the many areas where she and Jeremy Corbyn agree on Brexit, ahead of a meeting to reach a cross-party consensus and get her withdrawal agreement passed. ‘We both want to protect jobs,’ she told the House. ‘We both want to ensure that we end free movement’. Corbyn’s spokesperson confirmed the latter point in a post-PMQs briefing to journalists, who then reported it, to the astonishment of Labour members and left-wing commentators on social media.
Corbynesia wipes the memory of all sorts of things. Sufferers are blissfully unaware, as they inveigh against austerity, that Labour committed to carrying out £7 billion (or 78 per cent) of planned Tory welfare cuts. They stare at you blankly when you mention that Corbyn flip-flopped on shoot-to-kill or that he led Labour into an election pledging to renew the independent nuclear deterrent he has spent decades campaigning against. But nothing shocks them quite so much as learning that longtime Eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn is a Eurosceptic and has been for a long time.
Labour has deliberately dissembled on Corbyn’s views and the party’s positions on Brexit for strategic reasons. Given how regularly Labour members are startled to learn about the policy they are voting and campaigning for, this strategy has been quite the success. Allow delegates to pass whatever composite motions they want at conference and just press on with the leadership’s policy regardless.
But on freedom of movement, Labour has been largely upfront. The party’s 2017 manifesto was explicit: ‘Freedom of movement will end when we leave the European Union.’ That document also promised ‘a new system which is based on our economic needs, balancing controls and existing entitlements’ and gave, as potential examples, ’employer sponsorship, work permits, visa regulations’ or a mixture of all three.
Corbyn has repeatedly stated Labour’s opposition to freedom of movement, albeit not always explicitly. In a July 23, 2017 sit-down with Andrew Marr, he said: ‘The single market is dependent on membership of the EU. What we have said all along is that we want a tariff-free trade access to the European market and a partnership with Europe in the future.’
Now, that isn’t true. The single market isn’t dependent on EU membership, unless Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and (on goods) Switzerland have joined and kept it on the quiet. However, Corbyn’s distant relationship with actuality aside, he made clear his hostility to the single market, of which one of the four freedoms is free movement of workers. In the same interview he added that a Labour Brexit would end ‘the wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions, particularly in the construction industry’.
Corbyn was taking a long road for a shortcut when it came to the facts. The Migration Advisory Committee found some evidence to suggest EEA migration has slightly reduced wages for the bottom 10 per cent of workers but, when real wage increases are take into account, it has ‘a relatively small impact on overall wage growth’. In fact, migrants are more likely than native-born workers to be remuneratively disadvantaged by migration. The point, though, is that Corbyn again expressed his opposition to free movement, and did so on national television. People may have been spun but no one was lied to.
There are plenty more examples. John McDonnell said one week after the EU referendum: ‘Let’s be absolutely clear on the immigration issue. If Britain leaves the European Union, the free movement of people, of labour, will then come to an end.’ The following week, Corbyn wrote in the Guardian: ‘If freedom of movement means the freedom to exploit cheap labour in a race to the bottom, it will never be accepted in any future relationship with Europe.’ Shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer said in December 2017: ‘The end of free movement doesn’t mean no movement.’ That last one is an accomplished piece of doublespeak, both explicit and ambiguous at the same time. Of course, that’s to be expected with Starmer, a man with strongly held principles for every news cycle.
Perhaps Labour supporters simply suppress this and all the other horrors of Corbynism. Perhaps they proceed from the belief that Labour are the angels, the Tories the Devil, and so Labour must be for free movement because the Devil is against it. Perhaps Corbyn Labour is even more skilled at triangulating than New Labour dared dream of. Whatever the answer, Corbynesia is a self-inflicted condition. Labour members start every day afresh, oblivious to the signature policies of their own party. Even Adam Sandler would have given up on them by now.
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