Noooooo Lexit!

Weird and revealing artidcel form O Smith (Labour MP) in el Graun

The old socialist view of the EU 'as an obstacle to the socialist transformation of the UK...undemocratic, a proxy for elitist neoliberal globalisation through alliances with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and others' has been refuted, because of 'the EU’s emergence as a defender of workers, human rights and the environment that made Boris Johnson boil with rage, first as a journalist and then as a Tory politician.' That the two might be combined seems to have escaped Smith -- and Johnson's rage as a test of liberal commitment?

But: 

There was a grey area in the law about whether EU competition laws and state aid rules would prevent us from renationalising the railways or subsidising other key industries. Even though most legal experts thought this was surmountable, it was a point that lingered in the public debate. Not any more. In supporting a customs union and a single market alignment, our party leadership is saying it would bind the UK to the very rules the Lexiters are against. And, if we’re outside the political structures of the EU, we will have very limited say in how those rules are made or how they will operate.

 Very strange. These EU laws might indeed prevent renationalisation,but that is irrelevant because the Labour Leadership has prioritised common customs union [and not told its supprters that it will not be able to renationalise]. There is more:

As George Peretz QC, co-chair of the UK State Aid Law Association, has said: “In a customs union, we are asking the EU to give up the weapon that WTO rules (countervailing measures) give it against UK subsidies. There were always going to have to be cast-iron state-aid rules in consequence.” The EU has already imposed a state-aid clause in the proposed withdrawal agreement for this very reason.

Good reasons to abandon both policies then.

Strangest of all:

The truth is there can be no leftwing Brexit. It is an oxymoron. It’s irreconcilable with those values of freedom and equality that are at the heart of what we stand for....If we stay in the EU, we can work with other socialist parties to build a fairer and more democratic Europe. [That went well in the 1980s with the French and Italian CP and Socialist Parties]

and, unsurprisingly:

whatever the outcome of this calamitously ill-managed Brexit process, it must be put to the people. [unless the people vote for Brexit again, of course]