Labor has broken its long silence on Brexit, setting out detailed plans to improve, not eliminate, the deal Boris Johnson reached with the EU, to an extent he admits will infuriate supporters.
On the sixth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy confirmed that the party would only seek limited change and would not attempt to re-enter the single market.
“We are not going to the next elections saying that we will enter the single market or the EU.
“You may not like it, but Labor is determined to rule the whole country,” he said, adding that “there can be no repetition of arguments” in other constituencies like his in London.
“The British people have made a decision and we have to honor it,” he told the UK at an annual Changing Europe conference.
His statements came just hours after former Brexit negotiator Lord Frost declared “Brexit works” and said those who said it harmed the economy had an “ax to grind”.
Lammy promised that the party would seek to sign an agri-food agreement; to restore visa-free business travel for musicians and tour performers, and try to improve transportation arrangements.
It would also seek to restore mutual recognition of professional qualifications such as accountants and architects, seal a financial equivalence agreement for the city of London and ensure membership in the EU’s £ 80bn Horizon Europe science funding network, which that the EU is delaying due to the dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol.
Without rejoining the single market or the customs union, the Labor approach is a renegotiation of the trade agreement which will be periodically reviewed by both parties.
In a passionate speech, Lammy downplayed the importance of not seeking a return to the single market, but said he had the “scars” on his back from “past attempts to get a second referendum.
“We will not go over it again. And I am afraid that, psychologically, we have to accept it,” he said.
Instead, he reserved his disapproval for the Conservative Party’s attempts to unilaterally repeal the Brexit treaty with a draft piece of legislation to repeal part of the Northern Ireland protocol.
“Boris Johnson’s Conservatives are trapped in a feverish 2016 dream, choosing small fights with our closest allies instead of moving forward and negotiating solutions,” he said.
The “consensus among economists” was that the deal Lord Frost had negotiated had “contributed to the UK lagging behind the rest of the G7 in the trade recovery”.
The UK would also have the lowest recovery among G20 nations, apart from Russia, he said.
Lammy spoke just hours after Frost told the same conference that the Office of Budget Responsibility’s forecasts were based on “zombie figures” based on academic studies that looked at the effect of opening up self-governing autarkic and formerly authoritarian economies. . ”.
When EU leaders met to support Ukraine and Moldova with a plan to give them candidate status as members, Frost asked how long Brussels would continue to “mobilize and conference” in Britain and he said conservatives had the option of taking unilateral steps to resolve Brexit in the north. Ireland.
But Lammy said the EU was “eager” to re-establish relations and that the laws government’s plans to overturn the Brexit treaty were “reckless” and hypocritical for a country calling on dictatorships across the board. law-abiding world.
“This law protocol is a letter to anarchy, which serves the interests of those who want to weaken the rule of law,” he said. “One of the most troubling aspects of all this is the dangerous legal distortion that is used to justify it.”