How did Labour end up on the wrong side in the Brexit culture war?

The main purpose of Brexit has always been to roll back employment law and environmental standards: to create an ultra-capitalist state along lines that Ayn Rand would recognise and applaud, but dressed up in nationalistic and nostalgic language. Brexit is, and always has been, a culture war. That is why there is not going to be a deal.

And where is the UK Labour movement in all this? Not just the Labour Party but the Trade Union movement, whose members will be hurt so badly by this?

Keir Starmer talks of “moving on” and Len McCluskey argues that Labour must back even the denuded deal that appeared to be on the table up until a few days ago. Of course it is true that the people who will be hit hardest are those who are not unionised but didn’t the Labour and Trade Union movement once believe in solidarity, rather than just using warm and fuzzy words about it?

Labour has forgotten how to oppose. Its leadership appears to lurch between allowing Tories to set the agenda (Miliband, Starmer) and the privilege-laden intellectual Onanism of the Corbyn years. It has not understood the sociological and political changes that underpin Brexit and led to a resurgence of the nationalist Right, and more importantly does not seem to want to. It does not understand that chasing the Red Wall vote by acts of moral appeasement of the Right is doomed to failure — not least because it is a declining demographic, while the educated, liberal- and diversity-minded demographic is younger and growing.

It has failed to understand that the future of progressive politics in the UK lies with harnessing the energy and idealism of the anti-Brexit tribe; of re-embracing and reasserting the liberal and social democratic values that the movement to stop Brexit expressed. Over Europe, Labour has repeatedly let down the people who could and should have been at its heart.

But the fact that Trade Union leaders have been prepared to back this assault on everything they ought to stand for will be seen by historians as perhaps the most astonishing outcome of the Brexit era. How the Labour movement ended up on the wrong side of a culture war will be the thing that will amaze future generations.