Keir Starmer has announced he is whipping his Labour MPs to vote for Boris’s Brexit deal in the House of Commons today. There are two likely reasons behind this decision: firstly, to make himself seem like a Labour leader who is a grown up, after Corbyn’s teenaged politics; secondly, to demonstrate that Labour accepts Brexit in order that it may win back Leave voters in red wall seats at the next general election. But there is a big problem with this calculation. While all of Starmer’s Brexit options are difficult ones, he may be about to enact the worst of the lot.
A no-deal situation would have allowed Keir Starmer to claim that as prime minister he would be able to get the Brexit deal from the EU that Boris evidently could not. The Tories would have been in a situation where accepting any deal from the EU after the cliff edge had passed would have been politically difficult, if not impossible, opening this door up for Labour.
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