Why does the Labour Party not support Brexit?

[FlatulentStarfish]

Forgive me, I am not brilliantly knowledgeable about politics. But what I can't understand is why are the Labour Party not supporting Brexit? I always understood that Labour supported the British poor and working classes. Surely these are the very people who are being most hurt by remaining in the EU. One newspaper described the referendum as a battle between the Haves and the Have Nots. Why are Labour abandoning their people? The old Labour politicians such as Tony Benn were always anti EU.

'We have a skills vacuum in trades. There are jobs a plenty. Filling those jobs is only bad for those workers, and trades get paid incredibly well. Employers and ordinary working families like mine who have to hire those workers win.'

We can train our own 1.7 million unemployed to learn those trades and take those jobs which will give them skills for life and reduce our benefits bill.

'But everyone who uses those services loves competition.'

Tony Blair and the gang loved "competition", but we have a duty to our people and our society to give them skills and employment and a good life with a good wage.

'exacerbating the problem helps... who exactly?'

It won't exacerbate the problem because not all our companies leave and our low skilled and unemployed will be able to gain skills and work.

'is this really the best way to help low skilled people? '

The best way to help low skilled workers is to provide jobs with rising wages and new skills which will be necessary for employers to provide if they face staff shortages due to the 80% of newly created jobs no longer being taken by people born outside the UK.

To state that Commissioners are unelected is a half-truth. they are not directly elected but are appointed by democratically elected governments (our government included!). And as you correctly point out, they only draft legislation, which must be voted for and passed by a directly elected parliament to become laws.

they are all Oxbridge, all in it together

What if they went to Bristol, or Durham.. or didn't go to university at all (or made it up IDS...) can we assume they're fifth columnists?

'What if they went to Bristol, or Durham'

Then they usually do not reach the top levels unlike Blair, Mandelson, Miliband, Ed Brawls, Cameron, Cooper, Kendall, Burnham, Osborne, Johnson etc etc

"Then they usually do not reach the top levels unlike Blair, Mandelson, Miliband, Ed Brawls, Cameron, Cooper, Kendall, Burnham, Osborne, Johnson etc etc"

Funny, John Prescott was deputy PM - didn't realise he was Oxbridge. Selective data claigie. Tut tut - you are slipping.

Prescott is definitely a 5th columnist

Interesting that neither the labour leader or deputy went to oxford or cambridge. i presume they fall under the 'stooge' category rather then the 'establishment'?

bubbathebuilder, that was public school Oxbridge Blair and the gang throwing a sop to the working class Labour movement to add some credibility when Blair, Nadelsona and the gang turned up at Working Mens' clubs and ordered a latte macchiato to go go, but if I remember rightly Prezza wasn't keen on Blair, and probably vice versa, and was not part of Blair and the gang's "sofa government".

'Interesting that neither the labour leader or deputy went to oxford or cambridge.'

Are you referring to the Terrible Two, Corbyn and McDonnell?

That is precisely why the Establishment don't want them anywhere near power and are using all the stooges they can muster to sabotage their chances.

Ultimately, under the system we still just about have, faith is placed not in a government but in the people who elect them. Power rests ultimately with the people, not with the politicians. If we lose the ability to elect our politicians in and out, as will be the case if we join the ratchet towards an anti-democratic European superstate, we are declaring not that we have lost faith in a government but that we have lost faith in electorates as the ultimate repository of power.

If we

Slightly off-topic but I worry, looking at various developments within and beyond UK politics, that democracy has more or less had its day and people in general have lost faith in the rightness of the idea that the franchise should be universal and politicians accountable to the people. I see this on both left and right, though oddly more on the left perhaps. The popularity of the idea that we need an unelected supranational civil service and judiciary to rein in the excesses of democratically elected and accountable politicians makes me extremely worried for the future health of democratic politics.

i actually meant watson and corbyn, but i see mcdonnell didn't either!

Good article on that subject by Oxford PPE, Jonathan Freedland, in the Guardian.

"Welcome to the age of Trump

Whether he wins the US presidency or not, his rise reveals a growing attraction to political demagogues – and points to a wider crisis of democracy
...
He understands that people have lost faith in the system, but being part of the system, doesn't understand that it is the system's fault and not the people's.

"What does it look like, this new landscape? It is a place where the core institutions of liberal democracy – parliament, the universities, the civil service, the media – are regarded with deep scepticism, if not outright cynicism. Where once the public conversation might have agreed that some media organisations, say, could be trusted to tell the truth, more or less, now there is no such assumption. The word of the BBC or the New York Times will not just be contested but presumed to be false and mendacious, serving some other agenda just like the rest of the hated mainstream media, the “MSM”. That suspicion is voiced as hotly on the left as on the right, but the effect is on the middle."

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/19/welcome-to-the-age-of-trump

Everyone knows the system is a stitchup, everyone knows the EU is a stitchup, everyone knows they are all in it together. The more elite mates Cameron calls on in desperation to convince the people, the worse it gets for him. Even Boris says "it is the biggest stitchup since the Bayeux Tapestry".

The only solution is real prepresntative doemocracy and a voice for the people via proportional representation. Without it, the elites wull panic as they lose the affection of the people and will resort to Hobsbawmian solutions to quell the democratic will of the people. But even that will collapse, just like the Soviet Union and communism collapsed.

We will get real democracy in the end. The sooner the better and the Referendum is the start.

As Paul Mason, who is all over the place, rightly said

"The EU is not – and cannot become – a democracy"

That is why it doesn't and can't work. Blair and the gang like it, but the people don't.

i like it and i'm a people!

OTheHugeManatee
interesting points, but i would argue that a strong judiciary has a very important role as a check and balance within a democratic system. Just because a government is democratically elected, does not mean they always act democratically ; a strong system of law checks that.

'i like it and i'm a people! '

Blair and Cameron like it too and they are people by all accounts too. We will have to wait and see the result of the real poll on Jun 23rd.

But the OP's questions was

"Why does the Labour Party not support Brexit?"

and that is the questin that Labour's Frank Field asks himself as he said on the Daily Politics today because he worries about the future of the Labour Party. He said that 1 million Labour voters have already been lost to UKIP and he fears that now another million will feel that Labour does not speak for or represent them.

Labour have hitched their wagon to the Establishment train. the curmudgeon Corbyn has been forced into it by the circle of Establishment stooges (a high proportion of whom emanate from the university of you know where) and Frank Field fears what the consequence will be for the entire Labour party.

Even if the stooges win the referendum, their victory will be Pyrrhic and short-lived as the people will always remain while the stooges are voted out.

I've no gripes with there being a judiciary. Completely agree with you on the principle. But the devil is in the detail.

I'm happy for a judiciary to be appointed. But I'd prefer it to be interpreting laws proposed by an elected chamber that remains accountable to the electorate, and which passes laws can subsequently be repealed by that same chamber in response to pressure from said electorate.

I would prefer an elected upper chamber too, to the godawful mix of cronyism and aristocracy we currently have. I don't think our system is perfect. But at least we elect the people who propose our laws and who retain the power to repeal them - those laws which don't originate in EU directives at least.

Conversely the EU's version of democracy is roughly equivalent to a system where we elect the House of Lords but the lower chamber, which holds the actual power, is made up of permanent appointees who are not accountable to the electorate. The surprisingly popular idea that this setup is well placed to act as a moderating influence on our - with all its flaws - far more democratic system speaks to me of a deep disaffection with democracy and indeed a fear of electorates. 'Oh no, if we leave the plebs to their own devices they might elect a party whose views I dislike, best to make sure all politicians are kept on the centrist straight and narrow by regulations emanating from a bunch of unelected bureaucrats. That will surely help to save us from ourselves.'.

If Jeremy Corbyn were ever actually to become Prime Minister he would have to try and implement his political ideas in the teeth of EU resistance on all fronts. Numerous areas for which the away us claimed sole competence - competition, for example - render classic socialism effectively illegal at treaty level.

It would actually be a pretty reasonable right-wing stance to be in favour of the EU as a way of ensuring that austerity is permanent, corporate and banking interests remain supreme and genuinely left-wing politics are crushed before they can take hold. (I suspect in fact that this is Cameron's and Osborne's actual view on the subject). Those on the right who disagree with this view generally say they do so because democratic accountability is more important than bureaucratically imposed pro-capitalist political centrism.

I find it very strange how few voices there are on the left making the same argument, especially as I always saw left-wing politics - the kind that stirs me anyway - as a fight for popular representation and against vested interests. The only explanation I have been able to come up with for this strange lack of left-wing voices challenging the stifling centrist consensus enforced by EU regulation, and advocating for a democratic mandate to enact policies for the UK people as demanded by the UK people, is that the left has at some level given up on democracy and sees supranational bureaucracy as a more effective means of achieving its ends. I hope I'm wrong on this, as if it's true it's deeply worrying and depressing.

Sorry, just catching up with this, but winterbiscuit wtaf? "The UK has a proud history of human rights, as far back as the Magna Carta."

Can you point out what human rights were given in the Magna Carta. Just copying and pasting stuff without understanding it isn't debate.

Nice to see The Guardian allows a piece which criticises the EU for a change.

Larry Elliott Staying in the EU means hitching ourselves to an undemocratic project run by and for a remote elite says it all for me. I am still flummoxed by the left-of-centre support for the EU.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/20/brexit-best-answer-to-dying-eurozone-eu-undemocratic-elite

Very good article by Larry Elliot

“I can think of no body of men outside the Kremlin who have so much power without a shred of accountability for what they do,” Benn said.

Benn’s dystopian vision proved entirely accurate.
...
The eurozone is economically moribund, persists with policies that have demonstrably failed, is indifferent to democracy, is run by and for a small, self-perpetuating elite, and is slowing dying. The wrong comparison is being made. This is not the US without the electric chair; it is the USSR without the gulag."

unexpsoc no, I did not "copy and paste" the information

If you're asking whether the Magna Carta is identical to modern-day rights then no, of course it isn't. But it's certainly considered one of the predecessors of modern rights.

The Magna Carta was signed in 1215 and established various principles. Just for example, every "free man" was entitled to justice and a fair trial (this was a precursor to habeus corpus, where no-one can be imprisoned unlawfully); widows could not be forced to remarry; fines had to relate in amount to the severity of an offence, (which helped to not put people out of business); and the right of all free citizens to own and inherit property.

It gives obligations to the State for the first time, and accountability where there are failings.

Rather than it all being spelled out in 1215(!) The Magna Carta, along with the Bill of Rights (1689) was interpreted to support many further positive developments in its future generations, and other nations, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

As recently as January this year, the UK government launched The Magna Carta Fund for Human Rights and Democracy.

Apologies winterbiscuit but you posted an almost identical bit about the magna carta about 250 posts ago. Although not the same word for word, it was bloody close enough and sounding like a verbatim reading from a prepared spiel.

The Magna Carta ONLY gave rights to protect the Barons of the day. Anything else came later. Ascribing those rights to the Magna Carta is quite frankly revisionist to serve our need to see ourselves as a great people.

I realise of course this is massively off topic.

I think it comes down to a fairly simp,e question..

Do you trust an Eton educated Millionaire with his fingers in the pie
Or an Eton educated Millionaire who would like to have his finger in the pie?

We can train our own 1.7 million unemployed to learn those trades and take those jobs which will give them skills for life and reduce our benefits bill.

you don't have to be in or out to support that. The trouble is we aren't doing it fast enough to fill the void, if at all. That's not me saying that, that's many companies looking for people with trades skills.

Tony Blair and the gang loved "competition", but we have a duty to our people and our society to give them skills and employment and a good life with a good wage.

no. It's not only them. When you don't pay prices that are 10-20% higher, everyone loves it. I love it. I am not some BTL landlord with multiple homes. Both DP and I work full time and we are a working family who owns one home. If you have tried to hire people to do any house work you will quickly get the impression that there is more work than people to do it. That hurts the many people who need work done.

It won't exacerbate the problem because not all our companies leave and our low skilled and unemployed will be able to gain skills and work.

so, you concede that some will leave, so I am not sure why that won't make the problem of companies leaving worse. Do you know how many will leave? And how precisely or those who have lost their jobs going to get skills?

The best way to help low skilled workers is to provide jobs with rising wages and new skills which will be necessary for employers to provide if they face staff shortages due to the 80% of newly created jobs no longer being taken by people born outside the UK.

except the ones who have lost their jobs. Now they have nothing.

higher should be lower of course.

Not RTFT but there are several reasons. Most of our employment rights come from EU legislation. Although we have had a couple of governments who've added to them (while also taking away from them eg increasing the period for unfair dismissal protection, applying high fees to employment tribunals) the fact remains that a lot of Tory MPs would love to remove them altogether. EU membership requires a certain level of social justice (which is why a lot of Tory MPs want us to leave - plebs with employment rights - that will never do). So the Labour party recognises that.

What surprises me more is that the Labour "heartlands" are more anti-EU. I'd have thought it would be the opposite as there is a lot of EU money in regeneration projects etc. Northern Powerhouse? Well something may come of it, but there has actually been a lot of EU money ploughed into poorer areas. And into Northern Ireland.

"The EU is getting poorer and needs our trade."

what gives you that idea? 27 countries needing one? I don't think so somehow.

I appreciate that immigration is a concern. But really, would you rather have other Europeans living here with a similar outlook on life, or people from elsewhere who have a very different view (especially on the role of women in society)? People could have a few less babies as well, we have one of the highest birth rates in Europe.

We do not have that option for those in power in the EU

yes we do, parliamentary elections every 5 years which I bet a lot of the Brexiters don't even bother to vote in. And laws are NOT made by unelected officials. The parliament has to be involved and makes a lot of changes. And the UK has a say, but we don't always get our own way.

As for other countries demanding referendums, do you think they'll get them? Once they see the crap deal the UK gets (and the breakup of the UK) they won't dare.

It scares me that people want to pull Europe apart. The EU is NOT our enemy. ISIL (and Putin) are the enemies. The Brexiters need to get their priorities straight.