If Labour were mad about Lexit, then why would it appoint Starmer?Writing in the Financial Times, Philip Stephens, asserts this week of Corbyn’s Labour that they hail “from a small far left sect that views Brussels as a capitalist plot”. Close and long-suffering watchers of Brexit will know this position, affectionately, as “lexit”, and “the left-wing version of Brexit” is its clunkier title for those already past caring.
Despite the logical-seeming simplicity of Stephens’s argument, as the Brexit process gets ever more critical and remainers seek a new ‘Will of the people', the provenance of lexit needs scrutiny if it is not to be found, all too late, to have been only a misleading trope.
Firstly it is important to recognise that "lexit" in the popular imagination and vocabulary, does not really exist. Devout politicos know to what it refers, but the concept only registers any clout in Google trends on a few days of 2016 when the Guardian ran one article successfully outlining what lexit might be. Perhaps that is not a problem; the idea does not need not be popular currency to have hold in the minds of Corbyn and McDonnell, but even this is to succumb to the centrist’s other laziness of thought by which Corbyn’s Labour is compulsively to be regarded as homogeneous. It is to ignore that Diane Abbott avoided the Article 50 vote, Clive Lewis resigned as shadow business secretary so as to disobey the whip on it, and the entire Labour project on Brexit is under the stewardship of heart-on-sleeve Europhile and open remain-backer, Keir Starmer QC.
