Thank God for John McDonnell’s bold Brexit strategy for Labour

The Labour Party’s position on Brexit is of course of crucial importance. After all, if Theresa May thinks she has even the remotest chance of losing a snap election – which she doesn’t – she will not call one

Britain's shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, delivers his keynote speech the annual Labour Party conference in Liverpool (Reuters)

With the old politics broken, and the old media too, borne down in a torrent of mid-life crisis Marxism-Leninism and truth-to-power spoken one little pay-per-click at a time, it is only really with a sense of dewy-eyed nostalgia for the old days that I, a biased MSM journalist of the so-called Independent, go through the conference speech of a Labour shadow chancellor and reflect upon what it might mean, should that Labour shadow chancellor be returned to office via victory at a general election.

Forgive me the indulgence but back in my day, ie, right up until September 2015, that was how things used to work.

John McDonnell had told Today programme listeners that Brexit would be “the first item in my speech” and on this and this alone he did not disappoint.

He was, he said, setting out “a programme for government”. Theresa May says she doesn’t want a snap election “but when can anyone trust a Tory leader?” he joked. Not a great gag, but certainly better than the one about threatening to lynch a Tory minister, or assassinating Margaret Thatcher, or cheering the arrival of the 2008 financial crash, or calling 80 per cent of his own MPs “f****** useless”.

The Labour Party’s position on Brexit is of course of crucial importance. After all, if Theresa May thinks she has even the remotest chance of losing a snap election – which she doesn’t – she will not call one. If she waits until 2020, it will be a year and a half after the expiration of the two-year deadline on Article 50 and the country will be long out of the EU anyway.

It’s possible it was in service of this utter futility that the shadow chancellor veered between wonderfully vague and downright meaningless.

“Let’s get it straight, we have to protect jobs here,” he said, some little mood music in the direction of his leader’s repeated arguments in the referendum campaign. That the unelected undemocratic bureaucracy that is the European Union, is Britain’s only hope against its own elected, democratic government. He continued: “So we will seek to preserve access to the single market for goods and services.”

As well he might. And given everyone from the United States to China to North Korea, should it ever choose to do so, has access to (but not membership of) the single market, this was not the clearest or boldest promise going.

“But,” he promised. But, at the same time as ensuring we do not lose this entirely nebulous thing we are at no risk of losing, “we will address the concerns that people have raised in the undercutting of wages and conditions, and the pressure on local public services”.

So, we either will or won’t stay as members of the single market, and if we do or don’t, we’ll do something about immigrants stealing jobs and taking primary school places, which either will or won’t involve restricting immigration, depending on whether we do or don’t do what I said we either would or wouldn’t do.

Clear? Well, no. The only thing that is clear is that none of it matters, and that should come as some comfort.