The Labour Party has the potential to mobilise progressives from both LEAVE and REMAIN camps to challenge Tory orthodoxy.

Dear Comrades & Friends,

Here’s what I think we should do in light of Brexit:

• Oppose membership of the EEA, EU Single Market and European Customs Union and their free market fundamentalism.
• Reject any transitional arrangements with the EU which prolong rule by the EU and its institutions.
• Join the WTO and trade with the world, including the EU, on mutually beneficial terms.
• Continue all possible cooperation with the EU in such fields as travel, education, science, security and the environment.
• Grant permanent residency rights to all EU citizens who have settled in Britain before March 2019 – no deportations.
• Negotiate an agreement with the EU in consultation with the Dublin and Belfast governments, which does not require customs or immigration posts along the North-South border.
• Repeal all sections of EU law which restrict government powers to pursue left or progressive economic, financial, environmental and social policies.
• Resist any attempt to repeal progressive provisions in transferred EU law.
• Replace the free movement of labour by legislation to enforce equal terms for migrant workers within a framework of collective bargaining.
• Repeal Britain’s racist immigration, residency and citizenship laws which discriminate against non-Europeans.
• Devolve powers repatriated from the EU to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh National Assembly and local government wherever possible.
• Replace the Common Agricultural Policy with a system of direct support for production, investment and conservation.

I believe that the labour movement which now, thanks to Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn includes the Labour Party, should campaign for these policies. They have the potential of mobilising progressives from both LEAVE and REMAIN camps to challenge Tory orthodoxy.

Britain was taken into “Europe” by the snobbish, vindictive, perverted Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath. To prepare for this his government of very odd people first enacted the disgustingly racist Commonwealth Immigration Act and then gave away British fishing rights which a previous Labour Government had rightly or wrongly gone to war over.

During the referendum campaign I deliberately did not share a platform with UKIP and I only got the one chance to speak publicly. I ask the local Labour Party to revisit the discussions held at Labour Party conferences prior to the 1975 referendum, to read the treaties of the EU and to take note of what I have been saying for the past four decades.

Yours in comradeship

Gerrard Sables