The Labour leadership contender Jess Phillips has said she would be prepared to argue for Britain to re-enter the European Union at the next general election, opening a divide with the shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer, who has insisted Labour must move on.
Boris Johnson’s Brexit bill cleared its first parliamentary hurdle before Christmas, and the prime minister is expected to use his comfortable majority to carry it through parliament in time for Britain to leave the EU at the end of this month.
When Phillips, who came third to Starmer in an early poll of Labour members last week, was asked on the BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday whether Labour should become the party of rejoining the EU, she declined to rule it out.
You would have to look at what is going on at the time. What our job is, for the next three years, is to hold Boris Johnson to account for all the promises, she said.
So if we are living in an absolute paradise of trade, and we’re totally safe in the world, and we’re not going to worry about having to constantly look to America for our safety and security, then maybe I’ll be proven wrong. But the reality is that if our country is safer, if it is more economically viable to be in the EU, then I will fight for that, regardless of how difficult that argument is to make.
By contrast, Starmer, who has been one of the key figures pushing his party towards a remain position over the past 12 months, told Marr he believed the matter was closed.
We are going to leave the EU in the next few weeks; and it’s important for all of us, including myself, to realise that the argument for leave and remain goes with it. We are leaving. We will have left the EU, he said.
This election blew away the argument for a second referendum, rightly or wrongly, and we have to adjust to that situation.
The race will swing into gear this week, with Labour’s ruling national executive committee (NEC) meeting on Monday to decide the ground rules.
Starmer rejected the idea that Labour’s pro-referendum policy, with which he was closely associated, had been the key factor undermining support for the party in leave-voting constituencies. However, he conceded, we didn’t persuade on our policy.
He suggested Labour’s lack of clarity about whether it would support leave or remain in that referendum was a problem and claimed the party had failed to knock down Johnson’s claim that a vote for him would get Brexit done.
We didn’t knock it down hard enough, and I’d have liked the opportunity to knock it down hard, he said. Because that was what was coming back: people were saying to us, Ah: this’ll get Brexit done. We hadn’t wrestled that phrase to the ground. He also cited an overloaded manifesto, the party’s leadership, and antisemitism.