CLAMOUR FOR GIANT BREXIT JAMBOREE
LABOUR’S leadership rivals clashed over Brexit after hardcore Remainer Jess Phillips pledged to fight for the UK to rejoin the EU.
The outspoken backbencher revealed she would try to take the country back in if it boosted security and the economy.
But Sir Keir Starmer insisted the General Election had settled the row and it was time to move on.
And he told Ms Phillips to listen to Labour’s lost voters in its Leavevoting heartlands. Party officials will meet today to set out the rules and timetable of the election to replace Jeremy Corbyn.
Ms Phillips, who represents the Leave-voting Birmingham Yardley seat, is seen as having reasonable prospects in the race after coming third in a poll on who should win.
Viable
The backbencher said she campaigned for Remain because it was the best option for the country. She insisted: “I’m not going to just change my mind on that.
“The reality is if our country is safer, if it is more economically viable to be in the European Union then I will fight for that regardless of how difficult that argument is to make,” she said on BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show.
Lord Mann, a former Labour MP for the Leave-voting Bassetlaw seat, invited Ms Phillips and other candidates to the area to listen to voters.
He said rejoining the EU is “clearly not what people voted for and that’s not what is going to happen”. Leadership rival Sir Keir, a prominent Remainer, said Labour
“should have taken a stronger position one way or the other” on Brexit in the election.
But the contest frontrunner admitted Britain’s departure on January 31 means the battle is over and the party needs to accept that the “argument has to move on”.
He added: “We are going to leave the EU in the next few weeks and it’s important for all of us, including myself, to recognise that the argument about leave and remain goes with it,” he said. “We are leaving.We will have left the EU.
“This election blew away the argument for a second referendum, rightly or wrongly, and we have to adjust to that situation.” Mr
Corbyn’s successor is expected to take over by the end of March.
All of the confirmed candidates, apart from shadow Treasury minister Clive Lewis, appeared on Sunday’s political shows to make their pitches ahead of the formal start of the contest.
Sir Keir, the favourite in the race, said Labour lost the public’s trust over a lack of clarity on Brexit, antiSemitism, and a “feeling that the manifesto was overloaded”.
But he told Marr that “we shouldn’t retreat from the radical” as he outlined his vision.
He called for more long-term investment for businesses and for the Government and private sector to set green targets and together. Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, who was the first MP to announce a tilt at the top job, said the “dreadful” electoral result was partly because Labour’s manifesto “just wasn’t convincing because their was too much in it”.
She told Sky’s Sophy Ridge On Sunday: “We can say until we are blue in the face that there is another way – and there is – but we won’t get the opportunity to serve if people don’t believe us.”
Ms Thornberry refused to describe Mr Corbyn, a long-time ally, as a good leader, saying only that he had “many, many talents”.
Wigan MP Lisa Nandy blamed
Mr Corbyn for failing to acknowledge the power of the Prime Minister’s Brexit message.
She added: “Trust was the issue, not the radicalism, not the deeper fundamental change we were promising, but trust.
Affect
“What we hadn’t understood is that ‘take back control’ resonated like no other slogan in my lifetime. Why did it resonate? Because people lack the means to affect change in their own lives.”
Meanwhile, Ms Phillips questioned some of Labour’s election policies, including free broadband.
She said: “While there are still homeless people literally sleeping outside my office both in London and in Birmingham we have to make the choices that people can trust that we will deliver.”
‘If our country is safer and more economically viable in the EU I will fight for that, regardless of how difficult that argument is’