IS Brexit in danger of being reversed? The question is slyly insinuating itself back onto the political agenda. The last thing most people want, regardless of how they may have voted in the 2016 referendum, is a reopening of a raucously divisive debate — not least on the left.
 
Nevertheless, it is a feature of capitalist democracy that what most people want is not necessarily what they get.
 
So senior Tory ministers have floated the idea of Britain embracing “Swiss-style” arrangements with the European Union, which would mean returning to a Brussels-regulated economy.
 
Other senior Tories shot down the idea. But business leaders gathered at the CBI conference spent some time complaining about how the trade barriers erected by Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal have inconvenienced them, unprofitably so.
 
On cue, many of the liberal newspaper pundits, who spent years deploying every metaphor and mobilising every scary simile to obstruct the decision to leave, have come back to life. It is time to stop regarding Britain’s separation from the EU as finished business, they argue.
 
According to opinion polls, this cacophony is getting a hearing. A big majority of people is now telling the pollsters that leaving the EU was a mistake.
 
This is not in the least surprising. A Tory Brexit was never going to be of benefit to most of the people who voted to leave.  
 
It left the same class in charge — a class which had imposed bitter austerity on the country without any assistance from Brussels at all. Brexit’s opportunities would remain no more than flickering lights in the distance while the Conservatives dominated Westminster.
 
That is why those on the left who campaigned for Brexit insisted that it could only deliver real gains if leaving the EU was matched by the election of at least a radical social democratic government here in Britain.
 
The problems of a Brexit in the hands of the Conservative Party were only compounded by that party’s internal incoherence as to what leaving the EU was supposed to deliver.
 
Some claimed that it was a mandate for a Singapore-on-Thames, with a deregulated, low-tax, uber-neoliberal economy free of Brussels’ rules. Very few of the 17 million who voted to leave actually signed up for that, and the fiasco of the Liz Truss premiership has probably aborted that agenda for now.
 
Other Tories essentially embraced a national-populist narrative, focusing on radically reducing migration into the country, a perspective which may have had more support in 2016.
 
However, by now everyone has noticed that it has led to major labour shortages in many parts of the economy.
 
Since labour is the principal source of value in a capitalist economy, less labour power ultimately means less profit, unless the rate of profit can be raised through intensified exploitation of one sort or another.
 
Hence the disquiet at the CBI conference. Johnson said that bosses should increase wages to attract more of the workers already here into vacant jobs. But who is going to pay for that, and does it not lead to increasing wages all round, as labour flows from one sector to another — or just move the shortages elsewhere?
 
For many working-class voters, leaving the EU was linked closely with Johnson’s claims that he would “level up” the country. He pledged in 2019 to use the absence of EU restrictions to deploy state resources to disadvantaged regions.
 
The government’s clear failure to do any such thing — indeed, even to attempt to do so — has not only discredited the Tory Party. It will also reflect on Brexit itself.
 
It can be pointed out that Keir Starmer is showing no interest in reopening the issue of the EU, even in terms of the free movement of people (which he was once passionately committed to) or closer economic alignment, let alone actually rejoining.
 
This may be prudent in terms of his ambition to win back those industrial constituencies which were lost in 2019 over precisely Labour’s efforts, energetically promoted by Starmer himself, to obstruct and reverse the 2016 Brexit vote.
 
However, his carefully crafted non-position suffers from a double handicap. Firstly, he is a notorious liar who adopts and discards positions with abandon. Given his previous history as an insidious and persistent Remainer, who can trust him on this matter?
 
Secondly, he no more sets out to utilise the potential of leaving the EU for progressive purposes than Rishi Sunak does. There is not the merest hint of a positive programme for exploiting the possibilities of being out of the capitalist club run from Brussels — only a dogged refusal to discuss the issue.
 
That leaves the field wide open for the considerable faction of the establishment which has regarded Brexit with horror from the outset to manoeuvre towards an incremental reversal.
 
But it is also wide open for those wanting to make a progressive case for staying outside the EU, given Starmer has ruled out rejoining. Time for the Lexit left to step up.
 
China’s lockdown: crunch the numbers
 
When following the news from China, it would be well to keep one fact in mind: since the start of the pandemic, China has lost around 6,000 people to Covid, or three for every million of its population.
For Britain, the equivalent figures are more than 211,000, or 3,138 deaths per million. A thousand times worse in other words.
 
Is that what Rishi Sunak means by “a systemic challenge to our values and interests?”
 
World Cup hypocrisy: it’s not coming home
 
Of course, there should be full rights for gay people in Qatar, as there should be everywhere, and as there were not when England last hosted the World Cup in 1966.
 
And we should all stand in solidarity with those fighting for their freedom in Iran.
 
But we should also condemn the sanctimonious hypocrisy of Western powers occasioned by the first holding of the World Cup in an Arab country.
 
Will the US and Britain close the military bases in Qatar from which they seek to dominate the region, in support of labour and human rights? Far easier to fuss over Harry Kane’s armband it seems.