Labour's attitude towards Brexit is both puzzling and wrong. A report in The Economist reveals that the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves is another senior Labour politician who is said to be hostile to a closer relationship with the EU. We are told that she 'surprises' visitors with her coldness towards Europe, something she defends because workers in her Leeds constituency a few years ago saw companies advertising for workers in Poland. She said that life-long Labour voters had come out for Brexit in their droves. It's hard to know if this is simply an electoral ploy which both she and Kier Starmer have temporarily adopted or what they seriously think.
Whatever it is, Labour is just helping the Tories and the crazed Eurosceptics to gaslight voters.
I know what Reeves' is saying is true but it isn't because of the reasons she implies. Let me explain. Back in the early 2000s around 2004-5 after Poland acceded to the EU, I visited a factory in Yorkshire (I won’t identify it here) engaged in manufacturing with perhaps around a hundred employees, maybe more. The MD told me - a visiting rep and on my first visit - quite openly that he preferred to advertise for workers in Poland. This wasn’t a question of money though, he paid the same wages regardless of where the workers were from.
No, it wasn’t to get an advantage by employing cheap labour as she seems to hint at.
What he found in Polish workers that he couldn’t find in British ones was a willingness to work, and to do what they were told.
This MD said that if he employed a British worker and trained them to perform a certain task on a particular machine, he couldn’t be sure the worker would turn up on time (or at all) and even if they did, he would find them doing the job differently to the way they had been instructed. The usual excuse was, “I thought it was easier/better/quicker” and often it was, for the worker, but the parts produced weren’t right and had to be scrapped, or resulted in sub-standard products being shipped which resulted in warranty claims.
Polish workers on the other hand would be perfectly happy to arrive on time and do the work consistently to the letter. After training, he would go down onto the shop floor to check everything was right and find his new employee doing exactly as he had been instructed. This is what he liked about his Polish workers.
In other words, it was the attitude of Polish workers. They took the job seriously while British workers weren't necessarily lazy but were very sloppy in timekeeping and always thought they knew better than the instructor how a task should be done.
The article suggests Reeves and Starmer's attitude to the EU is rather more deep-seated and claims the "Labour Party is proposing only modest tweaks to Britain’s EU trade deal. If elected later this year, will they not yearn for Brussels’s embrace?"
"The short answer is 'no'. Ms Reeves represents the dominant strand of thinking in the Labour Party: not Europhilia, but Euro-agnosticism. The binary choice demanded by the Brexit referendum masked older Labour instincts on Europe: ambivalence, indifference and suspicion. In government, these instincts will prevail."
The piece talks of "euro-agnosticism" as if Labour plans to ignore Brexit altogether and with it the whole idea of globalisation. Instead, the policy agenda will focus on industrial subsidies, shortened supply chains and a “Buy British” approach with a rhetoric of resilience, security and a “home-grown” economy. This vision, the author says rightly, is not incompatible with EU membership.
If true, Labour is going down the same stupid path as the Tories, ignoring the real problems and even public opinion to try and pick winners. We are going back to 1964 when Harold Wilson came in with the same sort of policy platform.
Just to be clear, I am not arguing that what Labour is proposing is wholly wrong but that it is almost irrelevant because it fails to address (or even recognise) the real problem encapsulated in Reeves' tale of the Polish workers. Anybody sceptical of this 'attitude' problem might be more convinced in 2030, just seven years away, when Poles will overtake Britain in the per-capita income stakes.
Attitudes do need to change, on the shop floor and in the boardroom. It won't be a quick fix or an easy one and it certainly won't be done by ignoring it or swapping any number of policy options. In fact, if attitudes changed, politicians wouldn't need all these policies.
On top of this, according to YoGov, 81% of 2019 Labour voters support rejoining the EU:
2019 Labour voters are incredibly clear about what they want: to rejoin the EU. No ifs, no buts. Just rejoin.The Labour leadership are having to go through more and more absurd contortions to avoid noticing a trend the size of the Grand Canyon. pic.twitter.com/bu8HGV6bt8— Edwin Hayward (@edwinhayward) January 6, 2024
OK, 2019 was a terrible result for Labour when a lot of voters in red wall seats opted for Johnson to get Brexit done, and they almost certainly don’t support rejoining at the same level or anything like it. But the response should not be to reinforce their wrong-headed anti-EU opinions but to tell the blunt truth
The Daily Mirror has a report using Best for Britain's 10,000 respondent Focaldata poll to claim that "a million undecided voters believe Brexit has made Britain’s problems worse - and want a Labour government to pursue closer ties with the EU."
More than that it suggests that in every constituency in the UK bar one, a majority of voters said they wanted Keir Starmer to seek a closer UK-EU relationship.
If the Economist article is right about Reeves, and it’s supported by my post about Starmer on Saturday, Labour is going to need some sort of epiphany - and soon.
