Posts Tagged ‘Customs Union’

Labour should back a ‘cooling off’ referendum on Europe. After all we did it before

12/06/2018, 04:55:26 PM

by Joe Anderson

Armaggeddon.’ There’s not much ambiguity about the word.

That’s the Whitehall assessment if there is no exit deal or transitional arrangements as we enter the Brexit endgame.

Even on civil servants’ less cataclysmic judgment, there is a chance that the Port of Dover collapses on the first day we leave the European Union. Food shortages follow.

Is this what Brexiteers mean by ‘taking back control?’

Their starry rhetoric and inflated claims are dissolving day by day.

The boast that the US is poised to sign an early trade deal with us – always a wide-eyed assumption – has been utterly shattered by Donald Trump’s trade war – which now puts 30,000 British steel workers’ jobs at risk.

Now all the talk is that the Government’s White Paper setting out its final negotiating position will be delayed until after the European Council meeting at the end of the month.

Will the Prime Minister be applying for an essay extension?

The impacts of Theresa May’s rickety negotiation position will echo for a generation to come.

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Country before party, reprise

12/06/2018, 07:28:39 AM

by Rob Marchant

Today, Parliament will have arguably its most important day of votes in decades.

There are three particular ones which matter: on the EEA, on the Customs Union and on a “meaningful vote” for the Commons on the final deal.

The Customs Union one Labour will vote for, but it’s not to get us to stay in the Customs Union. It’s just to get Theresa May to actually tell us what progress she’s made towards any participation in a Customs Union. As The Independent’s John Rentoul put it: “ ‘I haven’t made any’ would meet that requirement.”

As if this were not enough, the current position of both major parties on a customs union is nonsensical. Both are asking that Britain be able to negotiate its own trade deals as well, the absence of which power is the whole point of a customs union.

In other words, they are subscribing to what we might reasonably refer to as “Schroedinger’s Customs Union”, that is, a customs union that Britain is part of and not part of at the same time.

Next, that Parliament should effectively be left to sort out the next steps, in the event that the “meaningful vote” on the final Brexit package is lost. Labour will at least vote in favour of that.

No such luck with the vote on staying in the EEA, Britain’s last chance to have a Norway-style arrangement and actually hold onto the trade benefits the leadership is disingenuously claiming to want to hold onto (although, in reality, it doesn’t really). Labour MPs are being whipped to abstain.

But why are Labour MPs, the majority of which are apparently Remainers, even caring about the whip?

A PLP that rebelled on mass against Corbyn two years ago are now – with some honourable exceptions – supine, either for fear that their constituents will punish them or that their careers in a politically-destitute Labour Party will suffer? Even with the public now turning against Brexit, albeit slowly?

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Leo Varadkar has done Britain a favour. He’s shown that the voices shaping Britain’s future need not be only Farage’s and Rees Mogg’s

04/12/2017, 10:31:07 PM

by Jonathan Todd

There’s much to admire among the world’s new generation of leaders. The election of Justin Trudeau (now aged 45) as prime minister in 2015 on a pro-immigration, pro-investment platform made him Uncut’s overseas inspiration of 2015. Since then Jacinda Ardern (aged 37), Emmanuel Macron (aged 39), and of course Leo Varadkar (aged 38) have been elected to the leaderships of New Zealand, France and Ireland, giving hope that centrism might not be quite dead.

Over the past 48 hours, the last member of this group may have had the most significant impact on the future of the UK. By insisting on de facto all-Ireland participation in the single market and customs union, he has shown that the voices shaping what comes next for Britain, need not be only Farage’s and Rees Mogg’s.

“Brexit and the election of President Trump were inextricably linked,” recently observed Raheem Kassam, the Breitbart London editor and former chief of staff to Nigel Farage, leaving the prospects of centrism bleaker in the UK and the US.

In the past week, Trump has retweeted three inflammatory and unverified anti-Muslim videos shared by the deputy leader of Britain First, secured wide-ranging legislation on taxation that Bernie Sanders decries as the “looting” of the American treasury, and witnessed his ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn become his administration’s most senior member to be charged in the investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

In the age of Trump, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian, it’s time to ditch the special relationship. Bold moves are easier executed from positions of strength. Which is hardly what UK, teetering on the brink of exit from our most important alliance, now enjoys.

The prime minister’s main focus is to resist every EU demand, before capitulating, having realised – contrary to her earlier insistence – that any deal is better than no deal. This pattern emerges across each of the divorce issues: the EU budget, the Irish border, EU citizens rights. This strategy will deliver Brexit. At any cost. Leaving an isolated UK looking for new friends. Which, particularly after the past week, only the foolish would think are to be found in Trump.

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To those who voted for Labour as a pro-Remain party: you’ve been suckered

26/07/2017, 10:38:24 PM

by Rob Marchant

The madness that is British politics in 2017 this week continued apace. While Tories continued to flounder in their Brexit negotiations and, Trump-like, blame the media for their self-inflicted disasters, we finally arrived at the point of disarray where the half-bonkers Jacob Rees-Mogg, a throwback, cartoon Tory backbencher, is considered 2nd favourite to be the next Tory leader, when Theresa May is finally defenestrated.

Even so, Labour aimed to outdo them in the madness stakes. The man who was, in theory, the most senior opposition politician campaigning against Brexit, finally admitted that he was not, if he ever had been, anti-Brexit at all. In fact, the Labour leader was now in favour of the hardest of Brexits. Britain would unequivocally leave the Single Market.

Furthermore, it seems that Corbyn does not actually understand the phenomenon of the European Economic Area; he believes that you have to be in the EU to be part of the Single Market (you don’t, as Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland will attest).

His pro-European supporters on the left, such as the redoubtable Guardian columnist Owen Jones, scrambled to find a simultaneously pro-Corbyn and pro-European position which did not involve Houdini-like logical contortions. They failed.

All in a party where the vast majority of the membership, most supporting unions and the majority of the PLP resisted Brexit in the referendum. The party’s Brexit policy, between Corbyn, McDonnell, Keir Starmer and Barry Gardiner is now a jumble of contradictions which shifts daily.

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