For months, Labour has been moving ever closer to the Tory position on Brexit while pretending that it isn’t. First, it backed Brexit. Then in June, John McDonnell told Robert Peston that he couldn’t see continued membership of the single market being ‘on the table’ in Brexit negotiations. He added that people would interpret membership of the single market as ‘not respecting that referendum.’ In July, Jeremy Corbyn told Andrew Marr that single market membership is ‘dependent on membership of the EU.’ Barry Gardiner has even suggested that the UK would become a ‘vassal state’ if it were to remain in the single market after Brexit.
Today, Sir Keir Starmer writes in the Observer that, unlike Liam Fox and Philip Hammond, he’d like Britain to ‘remain in a customs union with the EU and within the single market’ during a transition period. The government’s negotiating position is that it wants neither – but it could well concede on both, given how little is at stake.
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