Brexit: What is Labour policy?

Corbyn’s inconvenient truths

THE GLEEFULNESS of Sir Keir Starmer was plain to see when the Shadow Brexit Secretary mocked the Government after Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party vetoed a potential deal with the EU.

Yet Sir Keir’s mocking of Brexit Secretary David Davis masks the fact that Labour, too, has been in favour of leaving the customs union and his opportunism in the House of Commons masked this inconvenient truth.

And it’s not just the Conservative and DUP parties which are divided – senior Labour backbencher Kate Hoey, who hails from County Antrim, blamed the EU, and not the Government, for the current impasse.

That said, Theresa May – and her advisors – should certainly have foreseen these difficulties. Northern Ireland’s border arrangements were always going to a totemic issue, even though the DUP backed Brexit, and sufficient agreement should have been sought before her talks with EU kingpin Jean-Claude Juncker.

At a time when more than half of British people think the country will get a bad Brexit deal, this week’s events will hardly inspire public confidence when the whole country needs to be pulling in the same direction in order to achieve the best settlement for the whole of the UK. Significantly, Mr Davis said this was still the Government’s position as he made repeated reference to the ‘Conservative and Unionist Party’ in a bid to soothe the DUP.

However it should not exempt Labour from scrutiny. It appears to want the country to fail while saying little on the strategy that would be pursued if Jeremy Corbyn – no friend of the DUP due to his support for Sinn Fein – came to power. What would he do differently? Perhaps he should now say so. After all, Brexit was driven, to an extent, by the strength of feeling among voters in Labour’s heartlands in the neglected North.