Corbyn’s ally breaks ranks to back Brexit
LABOUR faced further turmoil over Europe last night after a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench broke ranks to back Brexit.
Left-winger John Cryer, chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, said he was voting Leave because the EU was ‘anti-democratic’.
His stance puts his Shadow Cabinet job at risk, as Mr Corbyn has instructed his top team to support Remain.
The intervention came as the Labour leader made the controversial claim that many of the party’s voters did not ‘understand’ what Brussels did for them.
A split began to emerge between Mr Corbyn and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell over the issue of immigration, with the Labour leader insisting the EU ‘depended’ on free movement – as well as claiming migrants were not driving down wages for British workers.
But Mr McDonnell backed calls to reform EU free movement, saying it was vital for Labour to address ‘the elephant in the room ... immigration’. He added: ‘We will look again at the free movement of labour to prevent the undermining of wages.’
Mr Cryer, MP for Leyton and Wanstead, is a member of the party’s Socialist Campaign Group. His intervention exposes the divisions among Labour Left-wingers, with many believing Mr Corbyn – in the past a prominent Eurosceptic – is not pro-Remain at heart.
Despite being warned his job was under threat if he came out for Brexit, Mr Cryer did so in an article on Wednesday.
Describing himself as ‘a critic of the European Union because it is anti-democratic’, he wrote on a local East London website: ‘The EU is not Europe but a political construct imposed on many countries.’ He said the EU was ‘undermining democratic governments, weakening national boundaries and handing power to the markets and the corporate world’.
Mr Cryer added: ‘Along with a majority of the British people, I think a referendum on our membership is long overdue.
‘The EU will continue as the same centralised monolith that it has always been. Eurozone states, who are really under the cosh of the Euro-sadists, are now being told that they will lose control over their own budgets; they have already, of course, lost control of their currency by joining the euro in the first place. Brussels is also indicating that there should be more “harmonising” of taxation.’
In a speech in Rotherham yesterday, Mr Corbyn suggested many Labour voters may be backing Leave because they do not understand the EU or the ‘serious’ implications of Brexit.
‘I think a lot of people haven’t understood the relationship with the European Union, haven’t appreciated the amount of investment that’s come into many parts of this country,’ he said.
‘I think that many people don’t realise that the implications of voting to leave on the 23rd could be quite serious.’
The Labour leader insisted that immigrants were not driving down British workers’ wages, adding: ‘The European Union actually depends on the movement of people across the continent.’
He laid the blame on previous Tory and Labour governments for the lax City regulation that led to the banking crash and for eroding workers’ rights.
The situation has led to unscrupulous employers such as Sports Direct employing hundreds of migrants on zero-hour contracts, undercutting ‘good businesses’ and forcing a race to the bottom, he said.
‘The EU is a political construct’