LABOUR is ready to vote with Tory rebels to force PM Theresa May to agree a customs union with the EU, shadow Brexit Keir Starmer indicated yesterday. Starmer told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show that ‘crunch time is coming for the Prime Minister’ as he claimed May did not have enough support in parliament to push through plans to leave the EU trade agreements.
Ahead of a major Brexit speech by his party leader Jeremy Corbyn today, Starmer said Labour’s front bench was ‘unanimous’ in its backing for striking a new deal with the EU after Brexit.
He told Marr: ‘We’ve now had many weeks of discussion and unanimously we’ve agreed – we had a big meeting on Monday to develop our policy and Jeremy will announce that tomorrow.’
He added: ‘There’s going to have to be a new treaty. It will do the work of the customs union.
‘So it’s “a” customs union, that’s what the CBI are saying now, it’s what the various amendments are now all saying. There’s going to have to be a new agreement. But will it do the work of the current customs union? Yes, that’s the intention.’
He claimed that being in a customs union was the ‘the only way realistically to get tariff-free access’, which was ‘really important for our manufacturing base’ and the only way to avoid the return of a ‘hard border’ in Northern Ireland. Starmer indicated that Labour will support pro-EU Tories, Anna Soubry and Ken Clarke’s rebel amendments to a key Brexit bill, which would put customs union membership back on the table.
He said: ‘The Labour front bench put down a number of amendments paving the way for the option of a customs union – they went down a few weeks ago.
‘Now these cross-party amendments have gone down essentially saying the same thing and to put it bluntly crunch time is coming for the Prime Minister.’
Asked whether Labour would back the Tory-led amendments, he said: ‘We haven’t made a final decision on that but they are so close to our amendments… but whether it’s our amendments or cross-bench amendments, crunch time is now coming for the Prime Minister because the majority of Parliament does not back her approach to a customs union.
‘The majority in Parliament needs to be heard and it will be heard sooner rather than later.’
The amendment to May’s trade bill is heading to a crisis point that could bring the government down with a growing number of Tory MPs likely to support remaining in a customs union with the EU.
The Soubry amendment is also backed by the group of Tory ‘mutineers’ who inflicted an embarrassing defeat on the government last year by winning a meaningful vote for MPs on the final deal.
