Labour stuck in EU muddle as leaders fail to agree on single market
LABOUR’S Brexit plans yesterday descended into chaos after Jeremy Corbyn was directly contradicted by members of his shadow cabinet over his plans to leave the single market.
Both the Labour leader and John Mcdonnell, his shadow chancellor, revealed over the weekend that the party is now formally committed to taking Britain out of the European Union’s single market and the customs union.
However, Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, and Labour’s trade spokesman Barry Gardiner, said the UK should try to negotiate a new form of single market membership.
Their interventions highlight the split at the heart of Labour over Brexit – between Mr Corbyn, who is considered more Eurosceptic, and his predominantly pro-european team.
The divisions over the issue are such that the policy was not set out fully in Labour’s general election manifesto, which instead referred, more generally, to “retaining the benefits of the single market”.
David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, yesterday suggested that Labour had been “clever” over the European issue because its multiple positions enabled it to appeal to both Remain voters and Ukip supporters.
Mr Corbyn set out Labour’s apparent position over membership of the single market on Sunday, when he told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC One: “The single market is a requirement of EU membership and, since we won’t be EU members, there will have to be an arrangement made.”
Mr Mcdonnell later said that the is- sue of the single market would not be “on the table” in Brexit negotiations, adding that trying to retain membership would mean failing to respect the result of the EU referendum.
However, Sir Keir yesterday appeared to directly contradict both Mr Corbyn and Mr Mcdonnell.
He said: “David Davis said this morning it’s not that the Government doesn’t want membership of the single market, it’s that they’ve been told you can’t have that without freedom of movement. It seems to me that would be a good place to start a discussion.”
He also struck a different tone on free movement, saying there had to be “some change” to curb migration. The Labour manifesto, by contrast, pledged to end the free movement of people from EU member states to the UK.
Asked whether he was trying to have his “cake and eat it”, Sir Keir said he was “not pretending that’s going to be easy”.
He told BBC Radio 4’s World at One: “These are difficult things to negotiate. Sometimes I think that in the campaign we got far too down in the weeds of the difference between access, full access and membership.
“Let’s focus on what the real outcomes are.”
He added: “It can be done. I’m confi- dent it can be done. We need to send a message to our EU partners that we want collaboration, we want cooperation, and we’re going to do this in a grown-up, mature way.”
Mr Gardiner, the shadow international trade secretary, echoed Sir Keir yesterday as he criticised Theresa May for “taking membership of the single market off the table”.
He said: “What we’ve said is that we need those benefits, and whether they’re achieved through reformed membership of the single market and the customs union, or through a new, bespoke trading arrangement, is actually secondary to achieving the benefits.
“It’s an open question as to what we can get. What we criticised [Mrs May] for doing is taking membership of the single market off the table right from the beginning.
“It’s quite ironic that she was the one who said you had to take certain things off the table, and she said we should not take off the table a no-deal outcome, which seemed crazy to most people.”
In further signs of chaos over Labour’s approach, Mr Gardiner appeared to contradict himself just hours later by saying that membership of a reformed single market is “highly unlikely”.
Mr Davis weighed in for the Government by saying that Labour’s Brexit strategy had enabled it to broaden its appeal to both Eurosceptics and proeurope voters alike.
He said: “They [Labour] had about six different positions on Europe over the course of the last 10 months, for all sorts of internal political reasons, but they eventually landed the position, which is actually quite similar to ours, it’s like a re-badged version of our policies.” La- bour had also contrasted itself with the Conservatives over Brexit by vowing to immediately guarantee the rights of the almost 3million EU citizens currently living in the UK and also by abandoning the possibility of walking away from the EU without a deal, a position that the Tories adopted with the slogan “no deal is better than a bad deal”.
A Labour source claimed that Sir Keir’s position on the single market was the same as that of Mr Corbyn.
The source said that Mr Corbyn and Mr Mcdonnell were also only ruling out the idea of staying in the single market as it currently exists.
“Our policy is the same as it was in the manifesto, and hasn’t changed,” the source said.
The confusion over the EU came as Labour was also forced to clarify claims by Richard Burgon, the shadow justice secretary, that more than 150,000 people have joined the party since the June 8 election.
In fact, Mr Corbyn’s office sent out an email on Sunday to all members and supporters suggesting that 15,000, rather than 150,000, people had joined the party since the election.
However, Mr Davis hailed Labour’s social media campaign for “outplaying” the Conservatives.
Momentum, the grass-roots group that helped Mr Corbyn become Labour leader, played an integral role in encouraging young people to vote Labour. It is also credited with waging an effective political war on Facebook and Twitter. Almost 13million people watched Momentum videos which were produced at low cost compared with the Tories’ polished efforts that were part of a £1million campaign.
Mr Davis told LBC radio: “He [Mr Corbyn] had a fantastic online campaign, a sort of social media campaign, which, I mean, frankly outplayed us... so he managed to get a lot of people to vote.”
Labour is thought to have attracted a significant number of student voters with its pledge to abolish tuition fees and bring back student grants.