Jeremy Corbyn tells his MPs: Labour will campaign to stay in EU
Three days after Jeremy Corbyn told Labour MPs he wouldn’t give David Cameron a blank cheque on the Europe referendum, he appears to have signed one.
In a letter to all MPs, the PLP Briefing, a message has been sent “from the offices of Jeremy Corbyn and Hilary Benn.”
It’s the product of intense negotiations that involved Mr Corbyn, Mr Benn and Pat McFadden, who Mr Corbyn decided he wanted to reappoint to the post of Shadow Europe Minister.
Mr McFadden, once an aide to Tony Blair in Downing Street, long a supporter of British membership of the EU, appears to have insisted to Mr Corbyn that the Labour Party’s position be clarified on Europe.
This week the TUC voted for a motion saying unions would back an “Out” vote in certain circumstances and the same unions were hoping to get Labour committed to that stance as well.
Under pressure from Mr McFadden, Hilary Benn and Alan Johnson (appointed by Harriet Harman to lead the Labour for In campaign), Jeremy Corbyn has conceded ground which he gave every sign of not wanting to concede earlier in the week.
The ruling from the leader says emphatically that “Labour will be campaigning in the referendum for the UK to stay in the European Union.”
The caveat is that the party will retain the right to oppose any diminution of workers’ rights that it may deem Mr Cameron to have made. It suggests there could be a sort of workers’ renegotiation under a future Labour government to unpick such a concession if it happened in what the Labour leadership clearly fears will be a Tory-led bosses’ renegotiation in the coming months.
There will still be Labour MPs campaigning on the “Out” side and free to do so, unwhipped.
MPs like Kate Hoey and Mr Corbyn’s Socialist Campaign Group ally Kelvin Hopkins are already on the steering group of an embryonic “Out” campaign. Many thought Mr Corbyn, on the basis of past utterances, would lose no sleep backing an “out” campaign and would’ve liked to keep the options open much longer.
In an article for the Financial Times tomorrow Jeremy Corbyn attacks the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership as a “race to the bottom,” attacks the appalling treatment of Greece by the EU and calls for the implementation of the financial transactions tax.
These commitments don’t appear to come from the joint offices of Hilary Benn and the Labour leader but from the Labour leader’s pen alone. They allow Mr Corbyn to vent his long-held feelings but it’s not clear they carry the same status as the joint letter to Labour MPs.
Jeremy Corbyn campaign literature came through Labour members’ letterboxes promising a new kind of politics and today points to some of the teething troubles that come with establishing it.
Here is Jeremy Corbyn decreeing a position on a major area of policy when the only people consulted have been a handful of senior Westminster politicians. He will have felt he had not choice. But as a leader proclaiming the importance of his grassroots movement it’s not how he would like to be doing things.
Jeremy Corbyn knew that his newly appointed and highly controversial Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, was going to be asked what the party’s position was on the EU when he appears on BBC1 Question Time this evening and on Marr on Sunday on BBC1.
The pressures of 21st century media age politics are bumping into the still forming shape of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and the results are not neat … but pro-Europeans will feel they are the main beneficiaries.
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