Keir: Door open for second referendum
SHADOW Brexit Secretary Sir Keir Starmer has left the door open for a further referendum on the UK’s relationship with the EU by insisting that Parliament will have the right to vote down both a “no deal” and a “bad deal” this autumn.
During a visit to a farm in the Vale of Glamorgan to discuss farmers’ future funding fears, Sir Keir pointed out that as a result of a defeat inflicted on the Government, Parliament will now have a meaningful vote on the outcome of Brexit negotiations.
Asked whether he could envisage circumstances where people were given the opportunity again to vote to remain in the EU, Sir Keir said: “I think no deal would be a complete catastrophe, and we must all do everything we possibly can to avoid that.
“No deal means a hard border in Northern Ireland, no deal would be a catastrophe for farms such as this farm.
“The way we’ve approached that as a party is to say to the Prime Minister: ‘You have got to bring your deal or no deal back to us in the autumn, let’s say October or November, and we must have a vote on it to say whether we agree or don’t agree’.
“And if we don’t agree – this is one of the key amendments coming back from the Lords – the Government must then proceed according to a motion of Parliament at the time.
“And so we need that point at which Parliament steps in, possibly later this year, and says in the event of either no deal or a deal that’s not good enough, we will then decide what happens next.”
Asked whether that was as far as he would go at the moment, Sir Keir responded: “That’s as far as I’m going.”
Explaining why he had come to Flaxland Farm near Llancarfan for talks with representatives of the Farmers’ Union of Wales, Sir Keir said: “It’s really important to come and hear their concerns and actually come to a family farm like this to see for myself.
“What I’ve found in this role is that going out and talking to people involved in the front line is the best way to absorb their real concerns. You can’t get this from a briefing paper.
“There are obvious concerns that I share.
“The three main ones are funding, obviously, and continued funding – it makes up a huge part of the income that comes into a farm like this; access to market – getting the livestock, meat, into the European market, which at the moment is really important; and then in the longer term, what happens if there are trade agreements or deals that involve the importation of cheap meat, because that will undercut everything that’s being done in farms like this.
“These are three really big concerns that I share.”
Sir Keir said the overarching concern was that there is so much uncertainty about where we are going: “Here we are nearly two years after the referendum with the Cabinet arguing over two options for customs, neither of which are acceptable to the EU, and neither of which would get a majority vote in Parliament if they were put to a vote.
“It’s not as if a customs union or a customs arrangement were an unexpected issue that we’d have to be grappling with.”
He said he though everyone was frustrated with the Government, that they still hadn’t got clarity about where they were going.
Asked whether there was any clarity about agricultural funding after Brexit, Sir Keir said: “No. There’s the suggestion that funding for this Parliament may last, but no real detail about how it actually gets from central government to Wales and is distributed to people who need it.
“There’s very much a sense of people having to make decisions year by year, not knowing what the year after next is going to bring. And that’s no basis for farming or anything else.”
When it was put to him that there wasn’t enormous clarity about Labour’s position on Brexit, Sir Keir disagreed, saying: “On the question of a customs union we’ve said we should be in a customs union with the EU. That is pretty clear.
“The customs arrangement we currently have is in the membership treaty, so we need a new treaty. It will be a customs union between the UK and the EU27, so it’s inevitably not ‘the’ customs union but ‘a’ customs union.
“I’ve made it very clear from the start when we set out our position in February that this was a customs union that does the work of the customs union we’re in.
“You may agree with our position or disagree, but I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s not clear.”
On the Single Market, Sir Keir said: “We’ve said we do need the benefits of the Single Market. The customs union on its own isn’t enough and we want to see that hard-wired into a new agreement. Again, we’ve spelled it out: it means no drop-off in standards, rights or protections, no new trade impediments.
“We’ve described, I think, in some considerable detail what it is we’re trying to achieve.”
He denied that Labour was wanting to have its cake and eat it, by wanting the benefits of Single Market membership without the free movement of people, an EU requirement for such membership.
Sir Keir said: “That’s a negotiation and discussion we’ll have to have with the EU.
“Obviously the first thing we need to do is decide what is the immigration policy we actually want in this country. It’s got to work for the economy, it’s got to work for communities and we’ve got to have ‘fair’ movement of people across borders.
“We’ll have to draw up fair rules – they’ve got to be properly enforced.”
Details of who would be allowed to come in hadn’t been worked out by any political party, he said, because we were still in the middle of negotiations.
Asked about the odd situation where Scottish Labour MSPs had voted with the SNP government against the so-called Westminster power-grab, while Welsh Labour AMs had backed down and voted with the Tories and Ukip, with Jeremy Corbyn apparently backing the position of his Scottish colleagues, Sir Keir said it was important to recognise that the UK Government had moved from its original position of wanting to intercept permanently 64 legal powers that were due to transfer from the EU to the devolved administrations.
He said: “I don’t think you should read into Jeremy Corbyn’s comments that he favours the model in Scotland rather than the model in Wales.
“They’re two different places with different approaches.
“You’ve got to take Wales as it is and Scotland as it is, and the devolution settlements are different.
“It’s up to Wales to decide what’s best for Wales and Scotland to decide what’s best for Scotland,” he said.
“I don’t think anybody should be under the misapprehension that what we now have is much better than what we had before, and as a result of the campaign which we’ve been waging for many months to get the Government to change its mind.
“We’re only in this situation because the Government got it wrong in the first place and took so long to even move to the position we articulated 12 months ago,” he said.