Mandelson’s very short memory
A CLAIM by Lord Mandelson that Brexit could be cancelled because voters were not told the truth about leaving the EU was exposed as a sham last night.
The former EU commissioner, who is in line to receive an annual pension of £35,000 from Brussels, yesterday said ‘nobody’ had warned before the referendum that Britain would leave the single market.
But his argument immediately unravelled as it emerged he himself had warned, just days ahead of the June 2016 vote, that Britain would have to leave the single market.
On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, he said: ‘As the Brexit process continues, new facts are coming to light about all this that no one could have known at the time of the referendum.
‘We now know there will be a very big divorce bill to pay, no one talked about that at the time of the referendum. The Government has announced since the referendum that we would leave the single market, nobody said that at the time.’
Asked whether he would back a second referendum, Lord Mandelson said: ‘I’m not going that far this morning.’ But he added: ‘I want to listen to the public … I think they are viewing this whole situation with a growing alarm because they are now waking up to things and learning things, finding facts that are at last being revealed.
‘I think as the evidence mounts we should rethink our approach to leaving the European Union and how we’re going to implement the referendum decision. And if the public chooses to take a different view then we in Parliament should listen to them.’
A fortnight before the referendum, Lord Mandelson argued that the UK would leave the single market if it backed Brexit.
After German’s then finance minister Wolfgang Schauble said remaining in the single market ‘won’t work’, the Labour grandee said the comments ‘knock on the head the Leave campaign’s claim that we can leave the EU and still enjoy the benefits of the single market’. He added: ‘We cannot leave the club and continue to use its facilities.’
Lord Mandelson yesterday warned it would be a ‘national humiliation’ if the Government fails to negotiate a free trade deal with the EU.