The shadow Brexit secretary has formally confirmed that Labour wants the UK to effectively remain permanently in the EU’s customs union.
Sir Keir Starmer told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC One on Sunday the shadow cabinet had unanimous support for the new policy, which Jeremy Corbyn will flesh out in a speech in Coventry on Monday.
Starmer said the party wanted the UK to have “a” customs union with the EU after Brexit, rather than to remain in “the” customs union, but he also said this distinction was merely technical and that in practice the effect would be the same.
“The customs arrangements at the moment are hardwired into the membership treaty, so I think everybody now recognises there is going to have to be a new treaty [between the UK and the EU]. It will do the work of the customs union. So it is a customs union,” Starmer said.
“But will it do the work of the current customs union? Yes, that’s the intention.”
Starmer said staying in a customs union was “the only way realistically” for the UK to get tariff-free access to the EU. This was really important for manufacturing, he said.
The government is strongly opposed to staying in a customs union with the EU on the grounds that this would prevent the UK negotiating its own trade deals with non-EU countries after Brexit.
But Starmer said he was not aware of any credible analysis showing the UK would do better on its own than it would negotiating deals with the EU.
He said that after Brexit Labour would want the UK to have a say in how the EU negotiates future deals. That would have to be negotiated, he said.
He went on: “But the real point is – because we all want trade agreements, more trade – we will be more likely to get them if we do it jointly with the EU [than] on our own.”
Labour has been firming up its support for remaining in a customs union for some time, but the formal confirmation that this is party policy opens the door to the opposition supporting amendments to legislation forcing the government to adopt it. A key one is an amendment to the trade bill, new clause 5 (NC5), which has already been signed by eight Tory MPs.
Starmer effectively confirmed Labour would vote for NC5, saying it was “essentially saying the same thing” as what his party wanted.
“Crunch time is now coming for the prime minister because the majority of parliament does not back her approach to a customs union and the majority in parliament needs to be heard and it will be heard sooner rather than later,” he said.
In his own interview with Marr, Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, confirmed the government was delaying the key votes on the trade bill because it feared losing on the customs union. “We want to persuade our colleagues of the merits of our argument before we take the bill forward,” he said.
Fox also insisted that with 90% of global growth due to come from outside the EU in the years ahead, the UK needed to be outside the customs union so it could strike its own trade deals.
Sir Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and Caroline Lucas, the Green party co-leader, both welcomed Starmer’s announcement, but urged Corbyn to go further and to back staying in the EU single market, a position advocated by more than 80 senior Labour figures in a statement issued to the Observer.
Cable said: “Labour supporting permanent membership of the customs union is a modest step on the road to sanity and it is right that progressives from across the left and centre-left keep up the pressure for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn to properly resist the government’s plans for a hard and reckless Brexit.”
Lucas said: “Leaving the single market – threatening labour standards, putting women’s rights at risk, and giving those who want to weaken or abolish environmental protection an opportunity to run amok – would still be a mistake and should be opposed by those on the left in all parties.”