Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn appeared to channel U.S. President Donald Trump in a speech on the path Britain should chart after Brexit, with British industry and British workers prioritised over cheap imports made by cheap foreign labour.
Corbyn was a Brexit supporter for decades but adopted a ‘reform from within’ stance after becoming Labour leader — though Brussels loyalists have questioned the sincerity of his conversion, with party Remainers accusing his inner circle of sabotaging them after the referendum.
The 69-year-old socialist accused Remain-supporting Theresa May of “kowtowing and skewing policy to [suit] the narrowest interests in the City of London” — the centre of Britain’s financial sector — in her “bungled” negotiations with the EU, ignoring the “needs of the vast majority”.
“We’ve been told that it’s good, even advanced, for our country to manufacture less and less and to rely instead on cheap labour abroad to produce imports while we focus on the City of London and the financial sector,” he complained in the speech, headlined with the decidedly Trumpesque slogan ‘Build It In Britain Again’.
He argued Britain should “build things here again that for too long have been built abroad” — a move which would likely mean breaking with EU rules on competition, tendering, and possibly state aid — as this would “allow us to have greater control over the economy, giving us the chance to boost people’s pay and to limit the power of the unearned wealth of the super-rich in our society.”
He cited the Government’s decision to outsource the construction of a number of ships for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary to South Korea as an example of the globalist short-termism currently undercutting the British working class.
He also took the Tories to task for outsourcing the production of Britain’s blue passports — a symbolic return to the style in use before the country submitted to the EU-recommended burgundy standard in use today — with a wry observation that “Unsurprisingly, the French aren’t queuing up to have their French passports made in Britain.”
Corbyn suggested much more could be done under the existing EU regime to support British industry and bring contracts “in-house” than at present, but conceded that the bloc’s diktats were an issue by outlining how he would “seek exemptions or clarifications from EU state aid and procurement rules where necessary as part of the Brexit negotiations to take further steps to support cutting-edge industries and local businesses”.
The Prime Minister’s ultra-soft Chequers proposals for Brexit would not appear to allow for this, however, committing the United Kingdom to continued submission to EU regulations on state aid and a wide range of other economic activity in an effort to win a deal of some description.
Standing up to corporate interests and the “false song of globalism” to bring jobs back to the United States and and revitalise blue-collar industries was a key feature of the Trump campaign in 2016 — providing a curious point of overlap between Corbyn’s old-fashioned brand of socialism and the pro-sovereignty populist right, in opposition to both the liberal left and free trade ideologues on the right.