What Labour Should Do to Help Ensure Brexit, and Win the Next General Election

As the Labour conference ends with a party seemingly more united and optimistic than it has been in many a long year, what should Labour do about the pressing issue of Brexit?

The question was, of course, rhetorical, and Labour should do nothing at all. In fact, it should keep its collective mouth shut and leave the government to continue making mistakes. Let the Tories take us out of the European Union, which is what most Labour voters want, and suffer as much internal damage in the process as possible, which is what Labour as a party should want.

Once we are free of the EU, Labour can then put forward some policy or other at the next general election that aims at closer links with the EU. The aim here would be to keep the Metropolitan, Guardian-reading, wankerati element happy and voting Labour.  Given that politically it is impossible for Labour to ever agree to free movement, the EU can be expected to reject those overtures. For its part, Labour can tell the wankerati that at least it tried and the failure can be placed at the door of Brussels.

Before doing that, of course, Labour will have tiptoed into office over the twitching corpse of the Tory Party, and with a bit of political luck, that corpse will not be able to crawl out of its coffin for many years to come. Labour could be in power for two or even three elections, which is time enough to wrench the political centre of gravity back to 1970s levels - especially if there is no real opposition.

Jeremy Corbyn seems to be following the say nothing much line, certainly if his leader's speech to the 2017 party conference was to be believed. He told the delegates that Labour wanted "unimpeded access to the single market" which is fine as that is also what the Tories want, so there is a broad consensus there.

 Earlier in the conference he had said: “I would also say that we need to look very carefully at the terms of our trade relationship, because at the moment we are a part of the single market and that has within it restrictions on state aid and state spending and pressures on it, through the European Union, to privatise rail and other services.”

In other words, there is plenty of Brexiteering wriggle room in Corbyn's statements and it is all a far cry from what the party's Federast element want which is full membership of the single market. The devil, as always is in those details.

So long as those details remain suitably vague, Labour can remain a Brexit party with a newish membership who are too thick to realise that they are being pulled by the short and curlies towards the exit. By the time that parasitic shower of local government placeholders who now infest the local Labour branches wake up to that fact we should be out of the EU. Then, as I said earlier,  Labour can toss them a bone or two with a pledge to try and improve relations with Brussels, and by the time they discover that Brussels is not interested it will be too late to do anything about it.

The polyocracy will feel like something that a dog has spewed up, but with any luck, by then Labour should have recreated its links to the workers who produce wealth by their labours and the buffoons with their crappy little poly degrees and puerile desire for status can be safely ignored.