A rethink on Brexit within the Labour Party and the poor progress in divorce talks with the EU mean there is a growing chance that Brexit will never happen, according to Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable.
Labour’s increasingly assertive stance against a hard Brexit and the doubts among Conservative MPs about their own Government’s Brexit plans mean that one of the major parties may end up backing the Lib Dems in calling for a second referendum, Cable told a Financial Times festival on the weekend.
May’s top lieutenants warned Tory backbenchers that any attempts to frustrate the Government’s Brexit agenda during the parliamentary scrutiny of key Brexit legislation beginning this week would risk electing a Jeremy Corbyn Government.
Former Minister Anna Soubry, one of the most outspoken Tory opponents of a hard Brexit, pushed back at the Government pressure saying MPs had a duty to closely scrutinise Brexit legislation as the Great Repeal Bill, which aims to transfer EU laws into British legislation.
“Any suggestion that this is in any way treacherous or supporting Jeremy Corbyn is outrageous,” she said. “It amounts to a trouncing of democracy and people will not accept it.”
Cable said the lack of strong progress in the Brexit negotiations with Brussels is robbing the government of the momentum it needs to push through a hard Brexit.
“Risk of Train Crash”
“I think there is more than a possibility that Brexit may never happen,” he said. “The balance of probability is still that it does but there is a strong possibility of it being stopped because tensions within and between the major parties are so large, that one or other may want to let the public decide on the facts whether this is something they want to go ahead with.”
Cable said there was “a real risk of a train crash” in the Brexit talks because it had become clear that the Conservative Government was “woefully unprepared” for the negotiations with Brussels, and had little hope of making the excellent new trade deals with other countries that the Government had promised.
“We’ve just seen in the last few weeks how absurd this is,” he said. “The PM has gone off to Japan to negotiate some special trade deal and they have said they would much rather deal with the EU.” When the Government approached India about trade access the Indians had demanded more immigration to the UK, he said. “To which (the British Government) said, ‘sorry we can’t, we are trying to keep people out,’ and the Indians said, ‘get on your bike’.”
The stakes for the Government have been dramatically raised by Labour’s decision to stop echoing the Conservative Party’s insistence that the 52-48% referendum vote for Brexit means that Britain must leave the single market and customs union.
Labour’s shift
The comments by Watson and Starmer were a clear shift from earlier statements by shadow chancellor John McDonnell and leader Jeremy Corbyn flatly ruling out staying in the single market.
Watson said that Labour now believes “that being part of the customs union and the single market is important in those transitional times because that is the way you protect jobs and the economy.”
“And it might be a permanent outcome of the negotiations, but we have got to see how those negotiations go.”
The Great Repeal Bill will have its second reading in the House of Commons on Thursday and the following Monday and the Government will be anxiously watching to see if any Tory MPs support amendments to the legislation.
by Peter Wilson
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