When the Labour leader meets the prime minister to discuss Brexit, he should tell her to ask the EU to delay Brexit at next week’s summit for long enough to achieve something useful. With the UK set to crash out on April 12, this is not a moment to play games.
Theresa May came up with another wheeze today after a seven-hour Cabinet meeting. She wants Jeremy Corbyn to agree a Brexit deal with her, which they would jointly put to Parliament. Fat chance of that. He’d be torn to shreds by his party if he agreed her deal; she’d be hung, drawn and quartered by the Tories if she accepted his plan.
May knows this. That’s why she has a fallback idea – that she and Corbyn should agree a run-off between a number of different Brexit ideas. They would agree to back whichever idea MPs liked most.
That’s another hopeless scheme. The prime minister seems to want to stitch up the process so it gives her the answer she wants. In particular, she wants Brexit done and dusted by May 22. That wouldn’t give enough time to put any Brexit plan to the people.
If there is ever to be another round of “indicative votes” in Parliament, it needs to be an open process without preconditions. And MPs must be free to rally around a new compromise option that could unite them not divide them – and not close off the option of putting the least bad form of Brexit to a confirmatory referendum.
Unless May agrees to such a process, Corbyn should just say “no”. The prime minister doesn’t have any other good options.
She doesn’t want to crash out with no deal next Friday. Indeed, she her herself said tonight we need extra time – although she seems to want too short a delay to be of any use. The EU probably wouldn’t agree such a useless extension anyway as it would store up trouble for them too.
The prime minister might try to bring back her deal in the next few days without Labour’s approval. But after it was shot down last Friday for the third time in a row, it would be doomed to failure.
And then there’s an election, which some wilder heads in Downing Street are muttering about. That may yet happen. But it’s hard to see why Corbyn should be worried given that the Tories would fight like ferrets in a sack about Brexit all through the election campaign. What’s more, the prime minister’s own party might stop her calling an election as they would know they would be savaged and wouldn’t want her to lead the charge.
There’s no harm in Corbyn meeting May – so long as he doesn’t get sucked in by her gimmick. Unless she agrees to put whatever comes out of the Parliament to the people, he should tell her to ask the EU immediately for an extension to the Brexit process. He should add that, if she doesn’t, MPs will pass emergency legislation to force her.