Brexit deal’s a busted flush
AS IF we needed Donald Tusk to remind us that it’s been a hell of a week. They all are in Brexitland.
It is now 5am in the casino and unless the UK comes up with a good hand soon, we will be leaving the table with nothing, and this country, our closest neighbour Ireland and the continental economies of Europe will come staggering out into the light of a no-deal Brexit to the mercy of a mugging by the financial markets.
The Bank of England’s croupier, Mark Carney, one of the licensed dealers in the gambling establishment of international finance, has just lowered the odds, cutting the UK’s growth forecast to its lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis. It really it that serious.
The Brexit phoney war is nearly over, the baloney being stripped away.
First, we must say goodbye to a second referendum, both of them.
It looks very much like a people’s vote on the Brexit deal is now dead and that a second Scottish independence vote will not transpire any time soon. (More on that later).
Corbyn’s letter to Theresa May offering Labour support (or capitulation according to your prejudice) could be the gamechanger in the arithmetic of the Commons Brexit vote.
There might be an attempt to revive Yvette Cooper’s motion for an Article 50 extension, a second referendum by another name, but no one is optimistic.
The very appearance of the Corbyn letter shows how the leader’s office has grappled the Brexit agenda away from Keir Starmer, who was trying, step by careful step, to take the party to drink at the remain river.
Corbyn’s late night demands for the UK to be in the customs union and to be “closely aligned” to the single market are for the birds
Other red lines, on workers and environmental rights and co-operation with Euro agencies, are the kind of waffle May has already offered Labour MPs from pro-Brexit constituencies.
Corbyn’s letter is the clearest signal these MPs can have. While he might not vote for it himself, this cassette tape socialist, whose thinking on Europe has not developed from the 80s, has granted pro-Brexit Labour MPs a passport out of the EU and out of the economic and social union that has defined our lives.
I don’t think we’ll really miss the EU until it is gone, and what is missing from the Corbyn letter is more notable than what is included.
There’s nothing about a second referendum, far less a general election, on which score someone must have told Corbyn to be careful what he wishes for.
It is a letter that makes Labour Remain MPs furious, could split the party, and betrays a young generation who invested misplaced hope in the Islington messiah.
By posing as an honest broker, Corbyn hopes to sidle out of owning Brexit but he could still pay a high price for doing nothing.
A leaked report from the TSSA union spells it out for Labour: “If it fails to oppose Brexit there is every indication that it will be far more damaging to the party’s electoral fortunes than the Iraq war.”
In Scotland, that would mean Labour being reduced to one seat, ironically the very one where the Labour left is licking its lips at the prospect of pulling a re-selection trigger on the sitting MP, Ian Murray.
That would mean, post-Brexit, there might be no Labour MPs in Scotland. Has anyone at the top of the party even woken up to this?
The Commons mood music is there will not be a meaningful vote on Brexit next week, or in the next few weeks, while May runs laps around European capitals trying to get some kind of deal.
But May ruled out a people’s vote weeks ago, so effectively has Jeremy Corbyn. Both of them are counting on that feeling that at dawn in the casino, any deal looks good.