How Labour Could Own Brexit

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn during a cooking session at a children's holiday club in Lancashire (Danny Lawson/PA Wire/PA Images)

The day after the EU referendum Lord Ashcroft – the super rich Tory grandee and opinion poller – published the results of a 12,369-person survey into how and why the UK voted to leave the EU. Much of the data has been pored over, but there was one finding that hasn't really been commented on. It's in a section on the cultural or social beliefs of the electorate, which asks whether they think certain concepts – multiculturalism, feminism, etc – are a "force for ill" or a "force for good".

Unsurprisingly, Leave voters held the majority of negative opinions on things like immigration and environmentalism, but there was one subject that divided both Leave and Remain camps almost perfectly down the middle: capitalism. Fifty-one percent of Leave and Remain voters thought capitalism was a force for ill, and 49 percent thought it was a force for good. This illustrates one of the problems that Brexit poses for Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party: the ideal constituency for socialist politics in Britain has been split in half by the sectarian question of Europe.

This Saturday Lord Ashcroft published a new survey on the "political landscape" in Britain, and the results confirm that the past nine months have taken a serious toll on Labour. Negotiating the desires of the referendum's two sides has damaged Corbyn's leadership. (So too did the failed coup to replace him and the endless Labour in-fighting.) According to the survey, only 38 percent of people who voted Labour in 2015 think that Corbyn would make a better Prime Minister than Theresa May, and Labour voters who voted to leave the EU "were more likely to name the Conservative Leader (40 percent) than Corbyn (30 percent) as the best available PM". The Tories hold a margin of 30 points over Labour on being considered "competent and capable" – this is particularly important as Brexit is increasingly framed as a technical or administrative exercise rather than a political one. The survey's focus groups agreed that the "Labour Party was in a terrible state ("totally ineffectual", "total confusion")".

Although Corbyn should resist being beholden to the logic of opinion polling – which sees politics as a series of propositions, and voters as mere containers for those propositions – Lord Ashcroft's findings are unlikely to be ignored. They give substance to the observation that Brexit has poured fuel over Labour's long-burning fires.

Some Labour politicians have acknowledged that Brexit puts the party, more than any other, in a tight bind. When responding to the government's Article 50 Bill, Keir Starmer, the shadow secretary for leaving the European Union, admitted, "For the Labour Party, it is a very difficult bill." Ed Miliband went into more detail on The Andrew Marr Show last week: "If you're the Greens or the Liberal Democrats, you're essentially fishing in the 48 percent pool; if you're UKIP you're fishing in the 52 per cent pool… Labour is trying to do something much harder, which is speak for the entire country."

WATCH: Meeting Anti-Brexit Campaigner Gina Miller

With the party's allegiances dispersed between metropolitan liberals who voted Remain and post-industrial regions that voted Leave, and a global trend of centre-left parties declining, will Brexit mean the end of Labour as we know it? The party's death has been prophesied prematurely before, but as an institution whose grasp on power in Westminster has always been precarious – it's only been in office for 28 of the last 100 years – Brexit, as it currently stands, makes any future electoral victory seem even more marginal.

Alex Nunns, author of The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn's Improbable Path to Power and expert on all things Labour, wrote that Brexit plays to all of Labour's "long-term weaknesses and none of its strengths", so I asked him what he meant by that.

"When Labour talks about issues which affect everybody, like education and health, that's historically where it's strong," Nunns tells me. "But a constitutional issue like Brexit drives wedges into the party's fissures. It's extremely difficult to charter a path through the two-thirds of Labour voters who voted Remain and the third who voted Leave because they're not evenly distributed among the party's seats."

This became clear during the debate on how Labour was going to vote on triggering Article 50. Corbyn opted for a three-line whip in favour of it, a move that 52 of his MPs rebelled against and which led to 7,000 members quitting the party, on top of 19,000 who had left since the Brexit vote last summer. (Labour still has over half a million members.) Nunns, however, thinks that Corbyn was in a "catch-22" in that particular situation: "If he had told his MPs to vote against Article 50, the rebellion would have been more like 152 than the 52 that it was," he says. "But at the same time, the Labour membership is more overtly pro-European than the general population. That's one of the aspects where it drives a wedge into the party's fissures. It was a no-win situation."

Starmer and Corbyn's latest tactic has been announcing "six conditions" for the negotiated settlement that May's government returns with from Brussels in two years. Starmer said Labour would not support a Brexit that violated any condition, which include an arrangement that delivers, as per David Davis' implausible promise, "the 'exact same benefits' as we currently have as members of the Single Market and Customs Union". Although this might prove politically useful, it seems unlikely that Labour would follow through on its threat. Not supporting the government's negotiating deal could mean Britain floundering outside the EU without any access to the single market come 2019.

As Brexit fast takes on the appearance of a Tory coup, with leading figures in the governing party wanting to use it as an opportunity to turn Britain into a "tax haven" and "deregulate the labour market", Labour's strategy needs to be more than producing a set of reactive qualifications.

So what would a positive Brexit articulated by Corbyn look like? For Nunns, the answer might lie in the Labour Party's left-wing Euroscepticism, which dates from the 1970s when it originally opposed entering the European Common Market on the grounds that the soon-to-be EU was a "bosses' union". "What the left would say is that if we're going to leave the EU then at the very least we should be able to do things like support the steel industry and so on – things that are banned by EU law," he says. "The idea that the state can influence and shape an economy – protect communities from global markets – are left-wing ideas that are hundreds of years old that were effectively banned by the EU's Lisbon Treaty… That would be popular and it's where Labour can differentiate itself from the Tories after Brexit."

But there might not be time for Corbyn to invest Brexit with a progressive meaning. With upcoming regional elections, the sections of the Labour Party that have wanted to see Corbyn gone from the beginning may soon have a new reason to make their case (again).

That said, Brexit is, at the very least, the condition of an unstable political world: much of Theresa May's popularity is buoyed by migratory UKIP voters, who see their old party as having no more use, but equally might soon see May's withdrawal settlement as a betrayal of their vote, especially if it involves continued payments to the EU. She is yet to be tested by a dramatic change in the country's material conditions – the kind of financial shock Brexit could bring about.

Lord Ashcroft's survey also concluded that, despite Brexit, it is "improving the NHS" and "tackling the cost of living" that are voters' two highest priorities for themselves and their families – terrain on which Labour can outperform the Tories. In this uncertain context, predictions need to be chastened. It's far too soon to announce Labour's death.

@Yohannk