The Vote on Article 50 Gives Labour a Chance to Make Brexit Less Terrible

Britain's hot steamy summer of politics has left so many victims in its wake – migrants, ethnic minorities, people whose holidays in Europe were turned into a piece of aristocratic excess by the exchange rate – that it's hard to remember to feel sorry for the poor old Labour Party.

Its internal tumult hasn't much helped, but this was only a symptom: during the Brexit referendum, for instance, many Labour voters appeared to be entirely unaware of where their party officially stood on the issue. It might be the case that this was the fault of an insecure pipsqueak leadership, but the terms of the campaign were drafted to exclude the left and its constituencies from the debate as much as possible, pitting instead a nasty backwards little-Englandism against the ruthless cosmopolitan will of big business. And Labour, for its part, seemed content to seethe in obscurity.

Not any more. What the court ruling on Article 50 – mandating (until the inevitable appeal case) that Parliament be able to vote on any move to leave the European Union – means is that finally, at long last, Labour's 231 MPs actually matter. They can't just sit around fruitlessly opposing the government and each other; now, they have to actually do something. Really, this is awful news, and it's probably not something that they themselves are best pleased about – the main job of a Labour MP seems to be writing snippy opinion pieces in the Guardian or the New Statesman, and then having the occasional sex scandal; the actual business of government is something they grudgingly tolerate at best.

The PLP is generally an intellectually-malnourished lot, and it's not very heartening to have our future in the hands of a group of people who think that political battles are won and lost on the terrain of rhyming slogans and what burgers you choose to eat. But with the Tories bitterly divided (one faction wants to send all Britain's migrants out to sea on rafts shaped like giant poppies, another wants to keep them chained up in the attic to ensure our future economic wellbeing) the Labour party might actually hold the balance of power if and when Parliament finally votes to authorise our exit from the EU. Theresa May is intent on recasting the country into a ghastly Victorian funfair, and in true buddy-comedy style, the dopiest dregs of political rejectamenta need to band together to stop her.

What this doesn't mean is that Parliament can or should cancel out the referendum result entirely, in the manner suggested by Owen Smith and some of his coterie. Many Labour MPs represent constituencies that voted strongly for Brexit. If they attempt to overturn the vote the only real result will be their replacement next election with whichever gargoyles Ukip can dredge up from the bottom of their list; using legal means to subvert the referendum wouldn't shut the far-right back in their box, but cause them to explode with grievances far more reasonable than before.

The high court's judgement won't stop Brexit happening, but the type of Brexit we end up with is now an open question. At the start of the referendum campaign, there was a brief discussion over the possibility of a Lexit or progressive Brexit; aside from a few diehards, it quickly fell silent as the referendum turned into a vote on how racist we wanted to be. Lexit was stupid then, because the left was only a bystander, but it's absolutely essential now. Whether or not it wants to be, Labour is now an active participant in the realisation of the Brexit vote: it needs to find its voice, urgently.

Political writers often have this grim habit of speaking to politicians and the public in the imperative case, insisting from on high that voters must do this or the government should do that, as if anyone without a resident colony of brain-eating worms really cares what they think. But times are desperate and opportunities are slim. The Labour party needs, first of all, to think about what it wants rather than what it opposes. Instead of handwringing over the result, worrying how to bring Brexit voters back to the fold, and impotently muttering about how bad Theresa May's stance is going to be for everyone, it needs to formulate its own Brexit strategy: a model for relations with Europe, a plan for routes the country could take outside the EU that it couldn't before (public ownership of utilities would be nice), and a negotiating strategy for getting there. Instead of totting up the numbers to see if it could vote down an Article 50 notification in the Commons, Labour should start thinking about what demands it could make that, if fulfilled, would let them vote for an authorisation to exit the EU.

Labour needs to present the government with a list of preconditions for their assent to Brexit, and unfortunately this means they need to be demands that can be agreed on by not just the entire parliamentary party, but also a few straggling Tories. The most important of these should be maintaining freedom of movement. The Labour right has a strange and persistent tic here: Tom Watson and John Mann pledged to end it while the referendum campaign was still ongoing; Chuka Umunna said the same thing last month; even Keir Starmer, Corbyn's shadow Brexit secretary, joined in the idiocy. This is moronic, and they need to learn to shut up about it.

The (sometimes implicit, sometimes not) excuse is that if politicians appease a public conceived of as essentially racist and small-minded, they can make gains elsewhere; that people would vote to stay in the EU if they were assured that it's sufficiently racist. It's a triangulation, a form of compromise with the right. But there are plenty of Tory MPs who have come to realise that ending free movement would cause a financial catastrophe, and who might be ready to join with Labour in demanding that free movement be maintained as a precondition to voting for Article 50 to be triggered. Anyone in Labour who keeps on gibbering about ending free movement would be putting the lie to any claim that they're just being pragmatic, and instead position themselves to the right of not just Labour but much of the Conservative party, plopping down squarely in the middle of Theresa May's embattled fascoid camp.

Of course, all this is easier said than done; the problem with opinion pieces written in the imperative is that they assume the actions of politicians are governed by pragmatic but well-meaning calculation, rather than psychosexual neuroses, the grim hand of class power and the fear of death. What Labour needs to do is to stop being so gutless and stupid, just for a moment, and see if it can actually help them do something good. Whether they're capable of doing that is another question.

@sam_kriss

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