What is Labour’s policy on Brexit? No one has ever really known the answer to this question, and it doesn’t seem to be any closer to being resolved now that the election is out of the way, either. Sir Keir Starmer yesterday attacked the government for ‘simply sweeping options off the table before they even started with the negotiations’, including saying Britain will not seek to be a member of the Single Market. But Jeremy Corbyn has said in the past few days that Brexit ‘absolutely’ means leaving the single market – a stance echoed by John McDonnell.
The party is now trying to work out how to unite after Thursday’s surprisingly good election defeat (though many of its leading lights are behaving as though they’ve had a surprisingly good election win). A lot of the uniting will involve former Corbynsceptics using various formulas of words to say how wrong they were about Corbyn’s ability to appeal to the electorate, without necessarily saying they now think he is a good thing for the Labour party in general, and Corbyn appointing the more palatable of his former critics to frontbench roles.
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