If I were a Reform UK operative running a mole at the top of the Labour Party, I would give him or her one simple instruction: restart the Brexit wars!
For nothing would be more likely to inflict electoral damage on Labour, and play right into the hands of Nigel Farage, than the reopening of the rancorous EU referendum debate.
Many will therefore be utterly perplexed that Labour appears to be embarking on that destructive course. After Wes Streeting told a Blairite thinktank that Brexit had been a “catastrophic mistake”, an under-pressure Andy Burnham quickly declared that he would not be advocating a return to the EU in the upcoming by-election in Leave-supporting Makerfield – only for footage of him doing exactly that at last year’s Labour conference to immediately resurface.
We’ve since seen other senior Labour figures pressed in interviews to reassure Leave voters that there would be no attempt in the future to reverse Brexit – and in some cases conspicuously failing to do so.
All of which means that, having previously proclaimed the debate dead, Labour is fighting the battle all over again – and is suspected by many of secretly organising to force Britain back into bed with Brussels. Reform UK must think that all its Christmases have come at once.
I happen to be that rare thing in politics: a pro-Brexit Labour Party member. People like me were once commonplace inside the party. But that was back in the days when a rich Eurosceptic seam ran through Labour, rooted in the principles of sovereignty and democracy, and articulated by titans such as Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Barbara Castle and Peter Shore. Nowadays, any Eurosceptic is about as welcome inside the party as a hedgehog would be at a nudist colony.
But the Left-wing case for Brexit is as strong as it ever was. The EU is, after all, an explicitly anti-socialist institution which has always been hostile to concepts such as public ownership, state aid to industry, capital controls and national economic planning.
Free movement – seen as a uniquely good thing by most modern Leftists – was always a bosses’ dream, allowing them to shift workers en masse from lower-wage to higher-wage economies and, in doing so, to drive down labour costs.
For well-heeled progressives living in our fashionable cities, this was perhaps not much of a problem. For manual workers living in places such as Mansfield, it certainly was.
The old Labour Eurosceptics understood all this. They grasped, too, that it was wrong to trade national democracy for the technocracy of supranational institutions. For them, having the right to elect and remove those who governed them was a fundamental democratic principle.
Has a Reform UK spy infiltrated Labour HQ? It's the only explanation for restarting the Brexit wars | Getty Images
But the leaders of modern Labour had different ideas. Scarred by years of Tory rule, they bought the promise of a “workers’ Europe” and decided to throw their lot in with Brussels, hoping that the EU elites would act as a bulwark against Right-wing governments in Westminster. But the promise was a lie.
Worse, many Labour politicians and activists began to sneer at anyone who didn’t share their enthusiasm for the EU project. Thus, when the referendum came, Leave voters were dismissed as low-information dupes who didn’t understand the issues.
And then, after Leave triumphed, the party tried to force the country to do it all over again.
I was present in the hall when Labour adopted its second referendum policy at its annual conference in 2018. I knew immediately that the party had committed electoral suicide. The proof of that came just a year later with its annihilation in the general election.
Why would anyone on the Left wish to relitigate this debate, particularly given that Brexit was – and still is – so well supported in the nation’s traditional working-class heartlands?
And it’s not even as if the EU is thriving economically. On the contrary, the bloc’s economy is largely stagnant and commands an ever-decreasing share of global trade.
And for all the talk of Brexit being a “disaster”, Britain’s growth rate, sluggish as it is, has, since the referendum, outstripped that of France, Germany and Italy. Meanwhile, our export figures are holding up well.
In the end, Brexit represented – and continues to represent – a revolt, not just against the EU, but against the entire status quo. Angered by years of the tin-eared political elites ignoring their legitimate grievances – over deindustrialisation, rapid demographic change, and a failed economic model which drove down their living standards – voters across small-town, blue-collar Britain decided to hit back.
Instead of embracing them, Labour set about alienating them. And some in the party now seem determined to drive them away forever.
But the reality is that there is no victory for Labour at the next election that does not win the support of the nation’s pro-Brexit working-class provinces. The good people of Makerfield will, in less than a month, be going to the polls in a by-election that may prove to be the most pivotal in British political history.
The last thing voters here and in similar Red Wall constituencies want is for the country to be plunged headlong back into a fresh round of political infighting over the European Union – or to be told that, even now, a decade on, their democratic decision is still liable to be reversed.
Many of these voters will not forgive Labour again if it heads down such a path. The party restarts the Brexit wars at its peril.