Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, was pushed to the brink of resignation early this year after Jeremy Corbyn and his allies tried to kick his customs union plan into the long grass, senior Labour sources have told the Guardian.
Labour’s Brexit policy has evolved over the past 18 months through a series of painstaking negotiations between key players at the top of the party, the most fraught of which came at a stormy meeting of the “Brexit subcommittee” early this year.
Corbyn’s close allies ambushed Starmer with a paper which shelved the decision on joining a customs union, a policy he had been pushing privately for weeks.
Several people present at the meeting told the Guardian the general feeling in the room was that Starmer was willing to resign rather than accept the proposals, numbered copies of which were handed out at the start of the meeting and retrieved at the end.
“He looked close to telling them to shove it – and I think that did count for something,” said one MP present. “I think Jeremy was slightly surprised at how angry Keir was, and how pissed off he was.”
Another witness to the confrontation said: “Jeremy started speaking, and Keir just said, enough, this was just completely outrageous. He did lose his temper. I think they were genuinely shocked at his reaction. They tried to bounce him and it completely backfired.”
tarmer and his backers on the Brexit subcommittee, including Labour’s leader in the Lords, Angela Smith, and Owen Smith, who was then shadow Northern Ireland secretary, argued a customs union was the only way to safeguard manufacturing supply chains and avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland.
But members of Corbyn’s inner shadow cabinet, which includes Jon Trickett and Diane Abbott, were anxious about appearing to cave in to noisy backbench advocates of a customs union – such as Chuka Umunna and Chris Leslie.
They were also keen to ensure any stance the party ultimately took could reconcile the Brexit leavers and remainers.
So they drafted their own paper, in a move that foreshadowed Theresa May’s attempt to bounce her Brexit secretary, David Davis, at Chequers, by surprising him with a handout that he, at that stage, had not seen.
Within weeks Starmer’s proposal that Labour should sign up to the idea of a customs union – while insisting Britain retained the right to strike its own trade deals – was adopted. But Labour stopped short of advocating joining the single market.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... toms-union
