SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
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The battle for post-Brexit Britain can be won
A new book underlines why there are grounds for left optimism now we have left the EU, says ANDREW MURRAY
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
The Left Case for Brexit
by Richard Tuck
(Polity Books £14.99)
JUST about the most dismal moment of a grim general election campaign must have been Boris Johnson announcing that he would take advantage of the freedoms Britain would acquire upon leaving the European Union to adopt a more proactive state aid to industry regime and implement a domestic-preference public-procurement policy.
Johnson’s sincerity should of course be doubted. But the fact that it was a Tory leader advocating for the state playing a bigger economic role outside the EU than would be permitted within it, rather than Labour doing so, was a measure of how far Labour had lost the Brexit plot.
A Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn would undoubtedly have tried to do the same and more. But this would have been compromised by its desire to seek close alignment with the EU’s single-market rules. Furthermore, it had become politically impossible for Labour to admit to there being any potential benefits to Brexit, so hegemonic had “remain” become in the party’s counsels.
More from this author
Just as German Social Democrats joined the Nazis in singing Deutschland Uber Alles, ANDREW MURRAY observes how Starmer tries to out-Farage Farage with anti-migrant policies — but evidence shows Reform voters come from Tories, not Labour, making this ploy morally bankrupt and politically pointless
