Labour stuck in EU muddle as Jeremy Corbyn and colleagues fail to agree

Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn leaves home on Monday Credit: Leon Neal/Getty

Labour's Brexit plans have descended into chaos after Jeremy Corbyn was directly contradicted by members of his Shadow Cabinet over his plans to leave the single market.

This weekend both the Labour leader and John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor, revealed that the party is now formally committed to taking Britain out of the single market and the Customs Union. 

However Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit and Barry Gardiner, the shadow trade secretary, said that the UK should try to negotiate a new form of single market membership.

Their interventions highlight the split at the heart of Labour over Brexit between Mr Corbyn, who is considered more eurosceptic, and his predominantly pro-European shadow cabinet.

The divisions over the issue are such that the policy was not set out fully in Labour's election manifesto, which instead referred generally to "retaining the benefits of the single market".

Keir Starmer 
Sir Keir Starmer appeared to contradict the Labour leader Credit: Stefan Rousseau /PA

David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, suggested that Labour had been "clever" over Brexit because it's multiple positions on the issue enabled it to appeal to both pro-European voters and Ukip supporters.

Mr Corbyn set out Labour's apparent position over membership of the single market on Sunday, when he told the Andrew Marr show on BBC One: "The single market is a requirement of EU membership and since we won’t be EU members there will have to be an arrangement made.”

Mr McDonnell subsequently said that the issue of single market will not be "on the table" in Brexit negotiations, adding that trying to retain membership would mean failing to respect the result of the EU referendum.

However Sir Keir appeared to directly contradict both Mr Corbyn and Mr McDonnell. 

He said: "David Davis said this morning is it's not that the Government doesn't want membership of the single market, it's that they've been told you can't have that without freedom of movement. It seems to me that would be a good place to start a discussion and a negotiation."

He also struck a different tone on free movement, saying that there had to be "some change" to curb migration. The Labour manifesto, by contrast, pledged to end free movement.

Asked whether he was trying to have his "cake and eat it", Sir Keir said he ws "not pretending that's going to be easy". 

He told BBC Radio 4's World at One: “These are difficult things to negotiate. Sometimes I think that in the campaign we got far too down in the weeds of the difference between access, full access and membership. Let’s focus on what the real outcomes are.

He added: “It can be done. I’m confident it can be done. We need to send a message to our EU partners that we want collaboration, we want cooperation, and we’re going to do this in a grown-up, mature way.”

Barry Gardiner, the party's shadow international trade secretary, echoed Sir Keir on Monday morning as he criticised Mrs May for "taking membership of the single market off the table". 

He said: “What we’ve said is that we need those benefits, and whether they’re achieved through reformed membership of the single market and the customs union, or through a new, bespoke trading arrangement, is actually secondary to achieving the benefits.

“It’s an open question as to what we can get. What we criticised [Theresa May] for doing is taking membership of the single market off the table right from the beginning.

“It’s quite ironic that she was the one who said you had to take certain things off the table, and she said we should not take off the table a no-deal outcome, which seemed crazy to most people.”

In further signs of chaos over Labour's approach, however, Mr Gardiner appeared to contradict himself just hours later by saying that membership of a reformed single market is "highly unlikely".

David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, said that Labour's Brexit strategy had enabled it to broaden its appeal to both eurosceptics and pro-European voters.

He said: "They had about six different positions on Europe over the course of the last ten months, for all sorts of internal political reasons, but they eventually landed the position, which is actually quite similar to ours, it's like a rebadged version of our policies."

The party also contrasted itself with the Conservatives on Brexit by vowing to immediately guarantee the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and abandoning a pledge to walk away from the EU without a deal.

A Labour source claimed that Sir Keir's position on single market is the same as that of Jeremy Corbyn. The source said that Mr Corbyn and Mr McDonnell were also only ruling out the idea of staying in the single market as it currently exists. “Our policy is the same as it was in the manifesto, and hasn’t changed,” the source said.

It came as Labour was forced to clarify claims by Richard Burgon, the shadow justice secretary, that more than 150,000 people have joined the party since the election.

In fact Mr Corbyn's office sent out an email on Sunday to all members and supporters suggesting that 15,000, rather than 150,000, people had joined the Labour Party since the election.

It came as Mr Davis also hailed Labour's social media campaign for "outplaying" the Conservatives. 

Momentum, the grass-roots group that helped Mr Corbyn become Labour leader, played an integral role in encouraging young people to vote Labour. It is also credited with waging an effective online political war on Facebook and Twitter.

Almost 13million people watched Momentum's videos, which were produced at low cost in contrast to the Tories whose more polished efforts which were party of a £1million campaign.

Mr Davis told LBC: "He [Jeremy Corbyn] had a fantastic online campaign, a sort of social media campaign, which, I mean, frankly outplayed us at that. So he managed to get a lot of people to vote."

Labour is thought to have attracted a significant number of student voters with its pledge to abolish tuition fees and bring back student grants.

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