How will the culmination of Brexit trade talks affect the Labour Party?

Sean O'Grady explores the tricky issue of Europe for the opposition

Sir Keir Starmer packs food parcels with volunteers for residents during a visit last week to Lightwaves Leisure Centre in Wakefield (PA)

However Brexit eventually pans out, it should mean the end of the Tories’ three-decade-long civil war on Europe. No doubt the “Spartan” warriors of the European Research Group will engage in some guerrilla tactics from time to time, but, for the Conservatives, the battle should be done. The “party of Europe”, which took the UK in under Ted Heath in 1973, and which pioneered the single market under Margaret Thatcher in 1986, is now the “party of Brexit”. The pro-Europeans have either been purged or quietened by the 2019 election result. '

However, Brexit is now looking to become a much more tricky issue for Her Majesty’s Opposition.

The most immediate tactical issue is whether to support a “deal” or mini-deals to avoid chaos. The likelihood, supported by the bulk of the parliamentary party, is a pragmatic vote for anything that avoids leaving with no deal. This would avoid the government losing the vote because of its own rebels, and thus avoiding what Labour regard as a catastrophe. It would also help to appease those who fret that Labour is perceived by Leave voters as contemptuous of the 2016 result and indeed of the needs of “left behind” constituencies. Against them are those such as shadow chancellor (and ex MEP) Anneliese Dodds, who prefer to stick to their principles and send a different kind of signal to the country.

The longer-term questions for Labour are still more intractable and divisive. Would they attempt to renegotiate Brexit? Do they advocate rejoining the EU? If so, on what terms? Joining the euro? Should there be a referendum? What about the fish?

The split in the Labour Party was already apparent under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. In 2017 Labour made much of the May government’s obvious problems and the open dissent among her own nominal supporters, as she appealed for a mandate for a Brexit deal that was vague at best and, like all compromises, had few friends anywhere.

By the 2019 election, fatigue, brutal party management by the Conservatives and Boris Johnson’s “oven ready deal” posed a much tougher challenge. Last December convoluted formulas were concocted by Labour to reconcile the irreconcilable; the referendum result of 2016; the devout Europhilia of most of the membership and the MPs; the mild Euroscepticism of the leader and the old left; the enthusiasts for the second referendum, led by Keir Starmer; and the “soft Brexit” faction.

Labour has united behind opposition to “no deal”, but what of the future? For Starmer it would probably best if the Europe issue just went away, but it may not, because there are so many “Remainers” represented in the higher echelons of the party and its middle class membership, especially in London and other big cities. Emily Thornberry might be considered the epitome of the Europhile tendency. Against them are those who claim that Labour can never win back its “red wall” seats and traditional working class supporters in towns and suburbs – archetypally represented by Lisa Nandy.

Before the EU embraced the “social dimension” to the European project in about 1988, Labour was the more divided and Eurosceptic of the two parties, having campaigned to leave the EU (without a referendum) in 1983 and launched the first referendum. Nor was it in those days purely a left-right issue. As far back as 1962 the leader of the party, Hugh Gaitskell, a reformist social democrat, disappointed his allies when he famously cited “the end of a thousand years of history”, Commonwealth loyalties and parliamentary democracy as reasons enough to oppose the Tory government’s application to join the forerunner of the EU. Indeed the constitutional innovation of a referendum was in part a successful attempt by the party to end the schism. It seems some of those old arguments are about to return. If so, then expect the Conservatives, from the novel position of party unity, to make the most of the spectacle.