I may be missing something here, I often am, but as far as I can see Mr Corbyns calls to remain in the EU to protect workers rights is basically an admission that Labour are useless, will never be in power again or won’t protect workers rights if they are. some of you may think I’ve lost the plot here, but bear with me. The day after a Leave vote not a single UK law will be repealed or changed, in fact not a single UK law will be repealed or changed without the say so of Parliament. Now that being the case, unless action is taken to change things all of the legal protection that workers currently have under UK law we’ll still have after we leave the EU until such a time as Parliament changes things. Currently the Tories don’t have a huge majority so can be defeated, and there’s no reason why the next government will also be Tory. Now obviously Mr Corbyn is worried about the Conservatives undoing all of the good things that he feels the EU has done. However that can only happen if the Conservatives are in power and get the relevant acts passed, and even if they get the relevant acts passed a future Labour government could just put the statutes back (yeah I know they’ve got a terrible track record at that). So lets assume that we leave the EU, and the current government starts trying to remove workers rights a few things have to happen. Firstly obviously the current government would have to get such changes through both houses subject to the usual processes and opposition, Mr Corbyn’s statements indicate that he doesn’t feel that the current opposition would be able to prevent this.
Now the current government having got rid of all these wonderful EU inspired workers rights, as well as handling all of the hassle that leaving the EU has caused, will be up for election in 2020. At that point Labour could quite easily stand on a platform of reinstating all of the wonderful EU legislation that the previous government had repealed/changed. That this doesn’t seem to be presented as a possibility by Mr Corbyn, no talk of fights to keep these rights or future fights to restore them just “if we leave the EU these are lost” – so one must assume that he doesn’t imagine that there will be a Labour government soon or that if there is one it won’t see reinstating such rights as a priority. Surely promising to fight to restore any lost rights in the event of a Brexit would be a vote winner? Or is it more the case that he thinks that the British public don’t actually support these rights as much as he does, and wouldn’t vote to restore them so he requires the EU to override the democratically expressed wishes of the people?
This also holds true for pretty much any rights, protections etc. that people will claim we’ll lose by leaving the EU, we can only lose them if the UK government removes them despite opposition and if no future government restores them. So vote remain if you think the policies you want to implement are so unpopular the British populace will never vote for them.