What are Labour’s options on Brexit?

One of the many perversities of Brexit is that while the House of Commons will have to vote on any new EU trade deal, if there is no deal then there will be no opportunity for the Commons to approve or reject that particular future, short of re-opening the existing laws enacting Brexit. So even if they wanted to, Labour would not be able to instruct the government to reach a deal. This is in stark contrast to the situation before the last election when the Commons did that very thing, with a bill sponsored by Hilary Benn, which became the Benn Act. That was then swept away when Boris Johnson won his large majority a year ago.    

Sir Keir Starmer only has the option of voting on any new trade deal that is reached. As ever, he has a choice. The indications are that he will ask his MPs to vote for the deal irrespective of its terms similar my because it is inherently preferable to no deal, even if it’s a scrawny and sorry affair. They argument there is compelling to him.  

If he wanted to cause trouble for the government and add to the pressure on Johnson in a rather bloody-minded way he could whip Labour to reject the deal because it is flawed and tell ministers to go back and get a better deal and extend the transition period. This is what sometimes happened to Theresa May, when her rebels sided with the opposition. But now there is no time and Johnson has purged virtually all of the Europhiles on the Tory benches. The result would very likely be no deal, with the Labour partly responsible. Such a prospect would prompt a huge rebellion and chaos in his own party. It was never a possibility.

The third option is abstention. This would preserve Labour’s basically pro-EU credentials and could be presented as act of “principled abstention”. The more Europhile members of Starmer’s team favour this, because the resent Brexit, and also because it signals to the still large constituency of “Remainers” that Labour still represents them. Abstention is a tactic that Labour recently deployed in the votes on the Covid regulations. It was also used during previous Brexit votes in Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. However some political experts, such as Deborah Mattinson of BritainThinks, point out that the public equate it with copping out and dithering, “sitting on the fence”, an essentially weak stance whatever the logic or tactical motives for it. 

Voting for a deal of some sort helps Starmer put Brexit behind him and is a signal to disaffected pro-Brexit voters that he, the archetypal north London “elitist” is listening to them and he too wants to “get Brexit done”. As it happens, the fact that Labour votes would guarantee the passage of the deal would probably encourage more Tories to rebel symbolically, safe in the knowledge that the “Boris Deal” will stick in any case. By the same token a small number of performative pro-EU Labour MPs may also vote against the trade deal to signal their personal virtue, especially in heavily pro-Remain seats. Such calculations would weigh heavily on Liberal Democrat, SNP and other opposition MPs; but if there’s a deal it will pass, and the details of the voting swiftly forgotten.