SIXTEEN Labour MPs from London have broken ranks with the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn by demanding a tougher stance on keeping Britain in the EU Single Market, staking out a growing party division based on London’s strong opposition to Brexit in last year’s referendum.
Former leadership candidate Chuka Umunna and ex-Shadow Health Secretary Heidi Alexander led the push in which the London MPs responded to the May 11 release of the official Labour Party manifesto by launching their own rival “pamphlet” the following day pledging stronger resistance to a hard Brexit. Click here to view the rival manifesto
The release of the informal anti-Brexit manifesto prompted Conservative Party claims that Labour was a divided shambles due to the anger of vigorous opponents of Brexit at Corbyn’s often half-hearted performance in campaigning against leaving the EU.
While the party’s official manifesto says that Labour will strive to retain the free trade “benefits” of being in the EU Single Market without defining how that should be achieved, the dissident London group went further by insisting that Britain should find a way to formally remain in the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union.
The Labour MPs noted that 60% of Londoners voted against Brexit last year, compared to 46% of voters in the rest of the country, and said there was “not a shred of evidence” that the benefits of the Single Market can be retained without staying in the Single Market.
Umunna told BBC’s Radio Four on Saturday morning that the informal anti-Brexit manifesto had been released “from the point of view of London, where you’ve got over 600,000 jobs that are linked to our membership of the Single Market.”
Umunna, a former Shadow Business Secretary, said the Labour Party leadership had pledged to gauge Prime Kinister Theresa May’s performance in the coming Brexit negotiations “on whether she is able to get the exact same benefits that we get from our membership of the Single Market and the Customs Union.”
“We have simply gone one step further to say that we don’t believe that you can do that unless you remain a member of the Customs Union and the Single Market,” he said.
“Whether you voted to Remain or to Leave you didn’t vote to be poorer – our membership of the Single Market was not on the ballot during the EU referendum. We’re saying that yes you can be outside the EU and be inside the Customs Union like Turkey for example, you can be outside the EU and be in the Single Market like Norway.”
Michael Gove, the Conservative MP and a leader of the Brexit campaign, said the split between the London MPs and their party’s leadership showed that while the Conservatives had been warning that a Corbyn-led government would be a chaotic coalition “Labour is itself a coalition of chaos.”
“On the one hand you have people like Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer who wants us outside the Single Market, on the other hand Chuka and his friends who want us inside,” he said on Saturday morning.
“If we remain inside the Single Market we have no control over who comes here, we have no control over our laws and we continue to pay in to the EU. Chuka really just wants to revisit the referendum result and turn the clock back.”
“I do sympathise with (Umunna) because your party leader takes a different position from you and it is uncomfortable for you being in a split, divided and chaotic party. There is no unity within the Labour Party on any issue.”
Umunna claimed it was possible for the UK to remain in the Single Market without surrendering control of immigration by conceding totally free movement of labour.
“We can actually stay in the Single Market, have the benefits it brings but also reform the way our immigration arrangements work,” he said.
“So for example if somebody comes here and they’ve been here for three months they haven’t got work and there is no prospect of that they can be asked to leave. We don’t do that at the moment. “And there are countries who are in the Single Market like for example Lichtenstein who have actually been able to apply quotas to the number of EU citizens coming. So I don’t accept this kind of binary explanation of how things work.”
The 16 Labour MPs endorsing the anti-Brexit pamphlet are a minority of the 45 Labour MPs in the capital, who also include Corbyn and his close supporters John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Emily Thornberry.
In the same way that Londoners are younger and more pro-EU than the rest of the nation, the dissident MPs are also younger than their House of Commons peers, with an average age of 46. While 68-year-old Corbyn leads a line-up of election candidates featuring four MPs in their 80s and 17 others in their 70s, all but four of the MPs signing the pamphlet are in their 30s or 40s.
The pamphlet was signed by Alexander, the MP for Lewisham East, Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green & Bow), Karen Buck (Westminster North), Neil Coyle (Bermondsey & Old Southwark), Stella Creasy (Walthamstow), Mike Gapes (Ilford South), Helen Hayes (Dulwich & East Norwood), Meg Hillier (Hackney South & Shoreditch), David Lammy (Tottenham), Seema Malhotra (Feltham & Heston),
Steve Reed (Croydon North), Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead & Kilburn), Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith), Gareth Thomas (Harrow West), Stephen Timms (East Ham) and Umunna (Streatham).
Two MPs from outside London also backed the pamphlet – Peter Kyle (Hove & Portslade), and Ian Murray , (Edinburgh South), Labour’s only remaining MP from Scotland.
by Peter WIlson
The post Election: 16 London MPs Just Split from Corbyn on Brexit appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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