It’s time to end the UK’s divisions: Labour is for everyone

Every day the prime minister wastes pursuing culture wars and pitting one group against another not only perpetuates division but is hard evidence of a government not focused on the challenges of the people it was elected to serve.

Labour is on the starting line, ­raring to go and itching to implement our plan for a decade of national renewal. These elections showed more people are joining our mission to change the country as well.

The Tories face electoral oblivion because of their disastrous embrace of Brexit. But if Labour waits until it is in office to work out how to reduce the damage, it may already be too late.

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Labour thus find itself on the cusp of power, an outcome unthinkable when the Tories won a landslide victory in the 2019 election. But if Labour owes the transformation of its fortunes to Brexit, what is striking is how little it has to say about it.

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But how this pact might deliver the improved trade and investment relationship or lower trade barriers that Labour says it wants, the party is unable to say.

In many respects, this vagueness is understandable. The party is conscious that despite its 20 point-plus lead in the polls, there are still many undecided voters. It doesn’t want to scare Leave voters whose support it needs in target seats. Nor does it want to antagonise the right-wing press which remains dominated by editors and commentators who were complicit in the Brexit disaster. Besides the one lesson Labour learned from Ed Miliband’s doomed leadership, it is that opposition is no place to conduct a policy seminar, to open up a debate about finely-balanced trade-offs. This is not a conversation that the party wants or needs.

A more important reason for Labour’s lack of detail on European policy is that it doesn’t know what it wants. Out of office for 14 years, its small team of shadow ministers and policy advisers lack the detailed understanding of EU issues to assess what is negotiable and the associated trade-offs.

(...) EU’s response to geopolitical tensions looks likely to prioritise its own integration as the key to strengthening its economy and enhancing it’s strategic autonomy, rather than cutting deals with third countries such as Britain that could undermine single market cohesion. The EU-commissioned report by Enrico Letta, the former Italian prime minister, published last month called for the EU to deepen the single market in capital markets, digital services, energy and defence. The EU’s proposed new European Defence Industry Programme, which aims to strengthen the European defence industry by incentivising common procurement, is restricted to suppliers based in the single market and would therefore exclude British contractors.

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If Labour waits until it is in office to work out what it wants to do on EU trade, let alone defers any reappraisal to a putative second term, it may already be too late to cap the Brexit well. The toxic tide that has engulfed the Tories will then threaten to overwhelm Labour too.