If nothing else, a rather embarrassing display of Brand's new age proclivities. If it was that alone, it would be best to pass over in silence. I But, "love the police", what's that about?
I've made my feelings about our constabulary known before. I'm more interested in Brand's politics of love. The four-letter word only gets a mention at the end of his video, but was integral to the subsequent rough and tumble on Twitter under the #lovethepolice hashtag. And love has been a recurrent theme in Brand's political pronouncements and writings.
Love, for Brand, is a warm fuzzy feeling. It is antithetical to anger: witness his deplorable commentary on an enraged woman, rounded off with an amateur psychiatric diagnosis. He is not alone in this: love is - by common popular consensus - a feeling. It makes one happy, and therefore causes thoughts of conflict or dissatisfaction to recede. This is only good news in a certain sense: if the state we take to be characteristic of our most intimate relationships is an emotion, then it inherits all the uncertainties and fluctuations of emotions: alien creatures that they often are. Nor is there any prospect for a politics of love that is anything other than deeply reactionary, reconciling us to our lot, at best encouraging us to win round our oppressors with fine words and coy smiles. The problem here is that, at the end of the day, when you have put a flower in the policeman's gun, he still has a gun.
For good reason then, a lot of left-wingers regard any use of the 'l' word in politics with suspicion. It speaks of patronising demands for the cooling of anger and the seeing of reason. Thus, for instance, one of Christie Moore's better covers:
Interestingly, there's an older understanding of love (what it is about the modern age that causes it to be de-emphasised is an interesting question). For Aquinas, as for an entire classical tradition, love is the willing of another's good. This is not simply a matter of feeling; love might render certain feelings appropriate, but then again the warm fuzzies might stop me being sufficiently clear sighted to see how to promote your good. It is certainly less fickle than is love on a purely emotive understanding. Nor is it a matter of doing whatever will make you immediately happy, or of treading the path of least resistance. Indeed, Aquinas - who considers himself bound to love his neighbours - takes this love to be compatible in some cases (a just war, for instance) with fighting them. If you are damaging yourself by oppressing and exploiting then I should stop you. And that might not be a pretty affair. Such is love.
This older politics of love, I would argue, finds its modern continuation in Marxism. For Marx, the bourgeoisie are alienated - they fail to flourish as human beings (or to realise their species-being, in the slightly less poetic terminology of the 1844 Manuscripts) because of the very social relations which consist in their exploitation of the working class. It's just that, tragically, this alienation can only be overcome by the victorious struggle of the working class against that same bourgeoisie. Appeals for social peace simply prolong the mutual agony.
The hard work of love involves a disillusioned confrontation with dehumanising power - yes, even when it is wearing a police uniform. Only on the other side of that will we be able to indulge the Brands of this world, for whom presently there is seemingly no structural injustice so great that matters can't be improved by a hug.
Talking to people about the Labour leadership election, a recurrent theme can be summed up as follows: "I'd love to support Jeremy; he's a great guy and I agree with his ideas. But realistically Labour won't win with him in charge, and the most important thing is beating the Tories in 2020". The heart says Corbyn, the head says Kendall.
The thought here seems to be that 'the public' won't accept a Labour Party led from the left. Raymond Williams once observed that there are no such things as masses, only ways of viewing people as masses, and much the same could be said about publics. The public -- this seething undifferentiated mass of reaction -- only exists in the minds of commentators and second-rate sociologists. Utterly staid in its thinking it selects between election candidates like a cliched British tourist abroad choosing from a menu. Unmoved by the prospect of exotic dishes, it maintains a studied indifference between egg and chips and ham and chips. For this way of looking at things, Jeremy Corbyn is the tabbouleh of the leadership context. Activists are not part of the public, on this account, nor are the five million voters lost by Labour since 1997. For that matter, the entire Scottish nation is dubiously public. In fact, the public turns out to look very much like a Progress intern's stereotype of a swing voter in a southern English marginal. It's a rather deflating take on the British population.
Crucial to the head versus heart move is an image of the electorate as passive consumers of political programmes. They are not capable of being convinced, persuaded by argument, inspired by campaigns, or transformed by struggle. If 'the public' thinks x then the only response of a serious politician is to find ways of delivering x to the public. Electoral politics becomes a perpetual sales pitch, a transformation describable in two words: 'New Labour'. Of course, the customer is always right only within limits. To misquote a misquotation of Henry Ford, she can have any colour she likes as long as it's blue. Should she have the audacity to believe in the nationalisation of the railways, as a majority of the British electorate do, she should be kindly ignored and directed towards other political wares. The politics of appeal to 'the public' has always been in fact about the creation of the public, their desires and their perception of political posibilities, by a nexus of media and politicians. It is like a worked example in the theory of ideology.
In any case, it's not as though an alternative way of doing things weren't staring us all in the face; if only mainstream political geography didn't stop at Alnwick. The fact that the SNP won an election in Scotland on the basis of an anti-austerity ticket whilst refusing to join in the mainstream assault on migrants (supposedly a practically inevitable bowing to the 'legitimate concerns' of the public), cannot be explained by Scots being somehow magically more left-wing than the rest of the UK's population (even though some Scottish nationalists and the odd jaded English leftist seem to think this is the case). There is racism in Scotland just as there is England. It's just that a party decided to say something different, to challenge that racism. It didn't, it is fair to say, obviously suffer at the polls as a consequence. And - who knows - some of the public may have changed their minds as a result of exposure to an alternative narrative.
But what if the nay-sayers are right? What if a Corbyn-led Labour Party would be un-electable? I'm reminded here of some words of Tony Benn's,
In Labour Governments we did our best to make capitalism work in a
civilised way. And we failed. It never can work. It will always exploit
and oppress people.
Those who think that the programme of a Cooper, a Burnham, or -- heaven forbid -- a Kendall could ever be a sufficient balm for humanity's wound could remedy this by watching the news, or even by leaving their house occasionally. The homeless on our streets, to whom we have disgustingly become accustomed as though they were part of the scenery, as natural as the trees; the lives eeked out in poverty; the migrants dying in the sea; the creativity and talent sucked dry in jobs with no social purpose beyond the production of profit; the accelerating destruction of the environment -- these are not ills that can be set right by a little tinkering with the system here and there. The only strategy that stands a chance of addressing them -- let alone the context of international injustice and inequality within which they sit -- is a socialist and internationalist one. Jeremy Corbyn at least begins to understand this.
For that reason alone -- for the hard-nosed pragmatic reason that only Corbyn sees the world as it is and recognises the immensity of transformation we need -- Jeremy deserves your vote. He is, contrary to the received wisdom, the only realist amongst the line-up. Because this is about so much more than 2020. This is about the future, about hope, and about socialism. It is the politics of the heart and of the head.
This blog has taken a bit of a gloomy turn of late. I make no apologies for that. Things are rubbish, and a first step towards changing that is to see things clearly as they are. There's too much facile optimism on the left.
That said, it's nice to have something political to feel enthusiastic about. Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy for the leadership of the Labour Party is just this. It deserves your wholehearted support.
As I've said before, what we need is a counter-hegemony, challenging the austerity mindset that pervades our society. Jeremy's campaign is a chance to get alternative ideas out there and to challenge the consensus across all the main parties in favour of neo-liberalism. This is about much more than the leadership of the Labour Party, it is about our capacity to imagine another world.
It would obviously be very good indeed if Jeremy's name ended up on the ballot paper. For this to happen he needs nominations from Labour MPs. With this in mind - please pick a few MPs to email. Even people who are not natural left-wingers are worth targeting; argue that it would be good for the Party to have a proper debate about its future direction, and that this requires that Jeremy be on the ballot. An MP nominating him doesn't commit that MP to voting for him. Numerous MPs, including David Miliband, nominated Diane Abbott for the leadership in 2010 but didn't go on to vote for her.
If you're stuck about what to write, here's a sample letter from the excellent Red Labour.
Dear ___________
I am writing to you
regarding Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to seek nomination for the
Labour Party leadership. Jeremy’s announcement has undoubtedly
electrified the leadership race. In the first 24 hours, he managed to
secure the nominations of ten MPs, 2,800 people signed an online
petition asking Labour MPs to nominate him and an incredible 10,000
people ‘liked’ the Facebook group ‘Jeremy Corbyn for Labour
Leader’, more than all the other candidates put together. This is a
clear indication that there is a thirst for a real debate amongst
grassroots Labour Party members. It is now in Labour MP’s hands
whether that debate takes place, or whether we have a leadership
election where large swathes of our membership feels unrepresented
and ignored.
As has been
witnessed already, an election where the candidates broadly agree on
the main issues only increases the public’s cynicism for the
political process. It casts the Labour Party in a bad light after the
shock of the general election not to be seriously discussing the
issues raised by that defeat. For that honest, serious debate to
happen, it is vital that Labour Party members, supporters and
affiliates are be able to pick from a broad range of candidates
representing the full range of opinion within our party. Jeremy will
stand on a platform against austerity and in favour of a democratic
economy which provides housing and services for all, while arguing
for a fair immigration system and in favour of nuclear disarmament
and humanitarian foreign policy. On those issues, Jeremy speaks for a
substantial section of the grassroots of the party. If Jeremy is
unable to overcome the substantial barrier to entry and make it on to
the ballot, then we will not get that choice and the quality of the
debate will suffer as a result.
It is in all of our
interests to have an open and extensive leadership debate, one which
is about the future of our party and how we move forward, stronger
together towards the next General Election in 2020. Whether Jeremy is
your preferred candidate or not, there is an overwhelming case for
including a voice like his in this leadership contest. At this stage,
it is not necessarily about who you are voting for - and we saw in
the 2010 race how many MPs ‘lent’ their nominations to candidates
in order to ensure a proper debate. That can be explained to both the
candidate you intended to nominate and the wider electorate. In doing
so, you will be putting the future of the party at the top of your
list of priorities.
If you agree with me
that a serious debate is needed and are able to offer your support to
Jeremy’s campaign, I would very much appreciate it if you could let
me know and cc in info@jeremyforlabour.com
Yours sincerely,
And if you want to be able to vote in the leadership election, become a Labour member or supporter. It only costs a few quid.
I received the text from David Lammy just as the protestors broke through the police line.
At that moment, I was standing opposite the gates of Downing Street on Whitehall. The group of protestors, who had marched from Trafalgar Square to join a demonstration against the Queen's Speech, were young and angry. David Lammy, meanwhile, was on the scrounge for nominations to be Labour's candidate for Mayor of London. "London needs leadership", his text acclaimed, leaving the reader in little doubt that it was Lammy's leadershipthe capital was lacking. The banner-waving crowd forcing their way down Whitehall didn't give the impression of needing leadership. And if they did, they weren't going to be looking to the MP for Tottenham to provide it.
The disconnect between a parliamentary Labour Party largely resigned to austerity and the ongoing movement against the attacks on public services deserves reflection. One thing is clear, however: the anger of those protestors was fully justified. Today's Queen's Speech was the most reactionary for a generation, and it laid bare the anti-democratic nature of austerity.
Austerity, as I like to think of it, is neo-liberalism in crisis mode, ever more frantically proposing the marketisation of society as the solution to the all too evident ills we face. As such, like neo-liberalism in general, it is a strategy to strengthen the power of capital against labour; in other words, to protect profit against the vast majority of people. When stated in those terms, neo-liberalism sounds like it is on a collision course with democracy - as indeed it is.
The self-denying approach to fiscal measures, asking parliament to tie its own hands by blocking tax rises for five years, already signals a commitment to a society where the market reigns supreme. More serious is the all-out attack on trade unions, the organisations through which working people begin to take control of their working lives. A double wammy of an assault on strike ballots and the legalisation of the use of agency scabs has the potential to paralyse unions' effectiveness so long as they remain within the bounds of the law. Proposals around subscriptions and political funds will also make life difficult for the union movement.
Beyond industrial democracy, political organisation is under attack. A draconian bill aimed at that slipperiest of characters, the extremist, promises to increase the state's power of surveillance and to allow it control over the activities of individuals considered extremist. Left-wing activists who do not fear for their freedoms are naive. Yet a democracy that does not allow fundamental questions to be asked about its nature, does not permit people to organise with the aim of transforming society, is a hollow sham.
Today the government declated an all-out war on democracy. And to add insult to injury, they propose to substitute a pastiche of the real thing, a vote with no good options. If we do want a future where our control of our own lives extends beyond the supermarket, now would be a good time to fight back.
In April a judge ruled that 'undue spiritual influence' was exerted by imams in Tower Hamlets in supporting then mayor Lutfur Rahman. The legislation in which this concept appears has its origins in British rule in Ireland and concern about the influence of Catholic clergy. In the latter case racism was absolutely central to the rationale of the law. Many of us feel that it was not absent in Tower Hamlets.
In the years subsequent to independence there has certainly been no shortage of attempts by clergy in southern Ireland to exert influence politically. Past referenda over divorce and abortion have in the past been occasions for church-led campaigns opposing change.
The run-up to last Friday's referendum on same-sex marriage was subtly different. The institutional role of the Church in Ireland having taken a battering over the abuse scandal, the leading role in the 'No' campaign fell to groups of conservative lay Catholics. The extent of the change here has been exaggerated (as here, for example). In a very helpful article on the Irish Church, Jon Anderson notes the high level of lay leadership of 1980s campaigns over divorce and abortion. Either way, it was hardly unclear what the hierarchy thought about same-sex marriage. Each diocesan bishop wrote a pastoral letter, read out in churches, urging a No vote. Some priests added their own thoughts; in at least one case this led to congregants walking out of Mass.
Voters in large numbers ignored the pleas from the pulpit. 62% of those voting voted 'Yes'. In some urban areas this percentage was in the seventies and eighties, with only one consituency voting against. It's fair to say, then, that the bishops did not have decisive influence. An easy inference, and one made by pretty much every British broadsheet commentator (and not a few Irish ones), is that this is evidence of an accelerating process of secularisation.
How much one ought to believe this turns a lot on what is meant by 'secularisation'. Certainly the institutional power of the Catholic Church in the southern state is much declined. No longer can fearful unionists in the north (where, incidentally, same-sex marriage remains illegal) claim with any plausibility that the Republic is a confessional state. Yet the rejection of a certain political role for the Church co-exists with a substantial ongoing commitment to Catholicism on the part of much of the population. 84.16% of the population declared themselves Catholic in the 2011 census; the figure being well over 50% even in many urban areas. In 2013 Mass attendance was 34%. The use of the word 'secular' to describe this population should proceed with caution.
It is undoubtedly true that modern capitalist societies place great pressure on traditional understandings of religious belonging and ecclesiastical authority. (For some thoughts on why this might be, see a forthcoming book!) Attendance figures at religious services decline, and the ethical views of religious believers, particularly on sexual ethics, move closer to those of their atheist and agnostic contemporaries. For confirmation from the UK of this, see Linda Woodhead's useful research. Yet all of this is compatible with an ongoing attachment to a religious tradition, as the Irish case shows.
Many Irish Catholics voted 'yes', and it would be utterly wrong to write them off as duplicitous, confused, or insufficiently modernised, clinging to their religious belonging whilst rejecting it in practice - a judgement shared, interestingly, by liberal commentators and religious conservatives alike. Some voters cited their Catholicism whilst advocating a 'yes' vote, attracting the ire of conservative groups. For a genuinely moving case, look at this video by an elderly Catholic couple.
Tokenistic religious belonging is one possible way of negotiating religious identity in modern society, but it is not the only one. People are capable of relating their faith to the experience of life in modern society in sophisticated ways, exercising levels of political autonomy and modifying their ideas, even whilst remaining firmly within traditions. Last week's result demonstrates this.
And, to return to where we began, if this is true of Irish Catholics, might it be true of London Muslims also? The Bengali Muslim community are certainly not, in the succinct patrician phrase of Richard Mawrey QC, an "agnostic metropolitan elite". But then neither are the population of the Republic of Ireland.
...so argued Jean-Paul Sartre. He may very well have been right. But I want to advocate something slightly different from not choosing. I want to make a case that in the biggest political debate that the UK will witness in the next five years, the radical left should actively refuse to choose. That is to say, we should go out of our way to broadcast the fact that we reject either of the options we will be presented with, and use this as the opportunity to engage people in debates about political possibilities beyond the bounds of official sanction.
Rewind. What the hell am I talking about? The EU referendum - the returning of a Conservative majority government in last week's orgy of electoral masochism means that we will see one by 2017. I've been thinking about this question since then: neither of the options seem very attractive, yet many on the left feel will undoubtedly feel obliged to pitch their red flags behind either the 'Yes' or 'No' camps. By inclination, no doubt nurtured by reading a lot of Tony Benn at an impressionable age, I feel the pull of the 'No' brigade more. Yet I'm troubled, not least by the prospect of a debate dominated by the jingoistic right. A very helpful session on the issue at today's They Don't Represent Us conference (organised by rs21) concretised my train of thought on this - the left should actively abstain in an EU referendum.
I'll explain what I mean by active abstention in a bit; but first, the cases against 'Yes' and 'No' votes respectively.
Should I stay?
People younger than myself, a distressingly growing proportion of the population, tend to associate support for EU membership with left-of-centre politics. Those older than myself recall clearly a time when opposition to the EEC, as then was, indicated a suspiciously socialist orientation. We'll return to this latter group presently; for the more youthful, the EU is associated with an outward-looking, metropolitan confidence, an internationalist retort to the Little Englandism of Ukippers. It is upwardly mobile and forward looking, an upmarket brunch in the face of Nigel Farage's beans-on-toast. It stands as the Guardian to the Daily Express. You get the idea.
All of this is so much ideology, and like any successful ideology, contains a good deal of truth (albeit partial and one-sided). The EU certainly is a dynamic, relentlessly modernising, entity - and as such appeals to those liberal-minded bourgeois who have little to lose and everything to gain from change - and in this it reflects the capital whose creature it is. Neo-liberal capitalist accumulation is nothing if not international, generously cosmopolitan in its preparedness to exploit anyone regardless of nationality. It is also a regime of accumulation that is characteristically imposed by international institutions. The World Trade Organisation, the G20, the IMF, and the World Bank are the better known amongst these. The EU is another: from its free-trade origins, it has gravitated towards more explicitly liberalising constraints on member economies, passing competition legislation that renders nationalisation difficult, and imposing tight budgetary constraints within the Eurozone. The organisation is utterly institutionally bound up with liberalisation in the cause of its constitutive capitals, the latest manifestation of this being the TTIP treaty proposed with the US. The EU is no economic friend of the left. It is a unity of states in the cause of big capital. This is not our internationalism; we look for an internationalism of workers.
Nor is it, whatever impression the bigoted denizens of UKIP-land might imagine, a soft touch on immigration. Whilst treaties guarantee free movement within the EU (although this can be, and has been, suspended), for migrants from outside the EU, that is - almost universally - from poorer parts of the world, very often ones affected by wars waged by EU member states (and adversely affected by non-preferential trade arrangements with the EU), the story is very different. Hence the term 'Fortress Europe', which doesn't begin to catch the horror of people drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach a Promised Land that doesn't want them. The EU's response to this relentless human misery has primarily been to increase funding to Frontex, a border agency. Let's be clear, this is not a pro-migrant institution; it simply wants to draw the boundaries of exclusion in different places, and on a different basis, from UKIP and the Tory right.
Yes, but, the left advocate of a 'Yes' vote might urge, doesn't the EU offer benefits in terms of human rights, and in particular workers' rights? Wouldn't exit threaten these? In part, this line of response is based on the misapprehension that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a creature of the EU. It isn't; the UK is a signatory in virtue of its membership of the Council of Europe, a body to which states can belong without being EU members, as indeed several do. The EU Social Chapter certainly does afford workers certain minimal rights, as does the Working Time Directive. The UK, however, already permits an opt-out from the maximum 48h-hour working week of the latter legislation, and it would be naive to suppose that workers aren't put under considerable pressure in some industries to do just this. Meanwhile, increased international competition in a capitalism still struggling to restore profitability combined with the marked core-periphery development of the EU (and especially Eurozone) economy will create intense pressure from government and business to revoke, modify, or ignore social legislation. In the face of this workers will only be protected by our capacity to organise to fight these attacks. Yet, if we had the strength to do that, the EU would no longer appear as a beneficent safeguard against unscrupulous employers. "No saviours from on high deliver".
Regardless of all this, forget the suggestion that the 'Yes' campaign will be some kind of internationalist counterpart to the xenophobic right. Enthusiasm about the EU is perfectly compatible with member-state nationalism, and Cameron -- having negotiated some no doubt deeply reactionary concessions on migration from the Commission -- will go to the electorate claiming to have 'won a good deal for Britain'. He will line up alongside the Labour front bench and the CBI in a union-jack wrapped Better Together revival, promoting 'Britain's interest in Europe'. It is likely to be as much a poisoned chalice for Labour as its Caledonian forebear. The left should have none of it.
Or should I go?
Nor, of course, should the left line up alongside the other union-jack clad campaign we will have the dubious pleasure of witnessing two years hence. Farage and the Tory right will fight a deeply reactionary front in referendum battle, focused in immigration and a populist anti-bureaucracy directed against the modest provisions of the Social Chapter and similar legislation. It is likely to drag the centre of political gravity further to the right, and may well succeed in cementing UKIP's electoral constituency, winning them new seats in 2020. All the while the hard right will be lurking in the wings; racial attacks will increase, as they always do when the 'threat' of immigration is talked up. In no way can the left do anything other than condemn utterly this coming carnival of reaction; there can be no repeat of the 1975 referendum campaign, which saw left-wingers share platforms with the likes of Enoch Powell. Groups like Stand Up to UKIP will need our support in the run-up to the referendum.
But, hang on, you might say: surely nobody on the left is advocating arguing for a 'no' vote on the basis of the xenophobic and socially reactionary positions of UKIP and the Tory right? We remember the days when the most prominent opponents of EEC membership were figures on the Labour left. Tony Benn, Peter Shore, and their ilk argued that the EEC would make it impossible for a radical Labour government to nationalise industries, and impose controls on capital and trade, in accordance with the kind of programme laid out in the Alternative Economic Strategy. As indeed it would*. Be in no doubt, the kind of reformism espoused in Labour manifestos within easy living memory is incompatible with EU membership. Syriza and Podemos may yet discover this if they ride out the immediate impact of the Eurozone crisis with their principles intact.
Allow me at this point to draw my readers' attention to reality, a region the left sometimes has difficulty inhabiting. The UK is not Greece, nor is it Spain, nor do we live in the early 1980s. We cannot argue that EU membership is all that stands between a radical Labour programme and its social democratic fruition. The most left-wing scenario for Labour in the next few years has Andy Burnham as leader - pause and think about that, Andy Burnham. A vote to exit the EU would not be followed by a latter-day Michael Foot imposing controls on capital and inflating the welfare state, but rather by a right-wing Tory closing borders to people whilst welcoming their openness to money, asa revival of the City of London casino combines with further attacks on social provision. This would bring in its wake a further shift to the right in political discourse and popular ideas, from which only UKIP and the further right would gain. In the current British political context a 'No' vote will only fuel the flames of reaction.
For this reason it is also foolish to propose a left 'No' campaign, separate from the official one. This suggestion fails to recognise with due humility the weakness of the left and the hegemonic state of neo-liberalism, combined with a worrying rightward shift on immigration. We could only run a distinct campaign that didn't simply feed the reactionary whirlwind on the basis of significant pre-existing strength. We do not have that; and we can only do politics in the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. In any case, the nature of those elements most likely to push for such a campaign - those behind NO2EU and various Stalinists - does not fill me with confidence that it would be free from chauvinism.
If I go, there will be trouble, and if I stay, it will be double
So I don't think the left should support either the 'Yes' or 'No' campaign. This does not mean I think we should say or do nothing for the length of the referendum debate, tempting though it will undoubtedly be to leave the country as the day draws near. In fact, there's an important message to get out - the inadequacy of these two options: transnational neo-liberalism matched with state-level nationalism, versus Little Englandist reaction married to a more Atlanticist capitalism - points the way towards what I think that message should be, these terms of debate are utterly bankrupt, and this is so because they are dictated by capital. We could argue creatively for active abstention - spoiling ballots, or whatever, the details aren't important - but use the conversations we have and the material we distribute in doing so to argue for a different kind of politics. Against both campaigns, we should argue unabashedly in favour of immigration. Against both campaigns, we should argue in defence of the welfare state, and in favour of orientating the economy to people rather than profit.
Neither is revolutionary. But both are considerably better than anything we'll hear from mainstream politicians, and I think this is probably the best way the left can make a positive contribution to what will be an otherwise absolutely toxic political atmosphere.
-- [ETA] I should add, the above is directed at the English debate, partly because this will dominate the UK polity, and partly because, since I live in England, it's the context in which I have to reach a decision. But let me predict now that the SNP, Plaid, and Sinn Fein - all of whom favour EU membership with varying degrees of calls for reform (about which I'm sceptical, but there we are) find a way to stand back from the fray and thus avoid a Better Together style complicity ('we can't decide for the UK as whole'/ 'we will run a separate Scottish/ Welsh/ Irish' campaign or whatever), I assume that the SDLP will fall behind the Labour leadership.
---
*I don't think the AES-style strategy was perfect in its day, prone as it undoubtedly was to degenerating into fortress-economy nationalism. What a future radical left programme (if that doesn't already sound too utopian) would need to build in would be international alliances (with the likes of Syriza and Podemos, for instance).
