Labour babble

Most people listening to Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s Brexit spokesman, on the radio yesterday must have struggled to understand what he was on about. The debate around the UK’S withdrawal from the EU has become a bewildering hodgepodge of acronyms, half-truths, obfuscation and excessive dithering.

The vast majority of the country has switched off to the interminable argument over the relative virtues of “max fac” frontiers against a “customs partnership”. Brexit has spawned its own lexicon, with talk of back-stops, implementation periods, cakes, Efta, Norwegian solutions and the rest guaranteed to preclude the country from participating in the discussion about its own future.

The plainest phrase most often heard is “just get on with it”; and yet that is the one thing that does not seem to be happening. Where we seek clarity we find just more opacity. Even Cabinet ministers are questioning whether an interpretation placed by Number 10 on their own conclusions about the length of interim arrangements on the issue of the Irish border actually reflects what they agreed.

We can all see why Theresa May wants to avoid making any clear pronouncements because to do so would anger one or other of the Brexit factions in her own party. She is aided in this endeavour by the total confusion in Labour policy, which differs little from the Government’s position, whatever gloss Sir Keir wishes to place on it. In order to focus this debate, we need the “ambitious and precise” road map to the future which Mrs May promised in the form of a white paper. This should be published as soon as possible, preferably before the Brussels summit this month.