Labour‘s shadow Brexit Secretary says he believes this week’s deal with the EU means the UK will be linked with the single market “in perpetuity”.
Labour supports keeping the closest possible trading ties with the European Union after Brexit and will lobby Prime Minister Theresa May to stick to that, the party’s Brexit policy chief Sir Keir Starmer said on Sunday.
Asked by the BBC’s Andrew Marr whether “you really think that the agreement that Theresa May struck this week means that Britain will, in perpetuity, stay very, very close to the single market and the customs union?” he said: “Yes.”
He added: “And I think that’s the right thing and I think we should hold her to that.”
Sir Keir said: “What are the benefits of the single market and the customs union? They are no tariffs and they are alignment of regulations and standards and that means that for goods and services we can trade successfully in the future. That’s what we want.”
“The way we’ve put it is that we would start with viable options, staying in a customs union and a single market variant which means full participation in the single market.”
Ms May clinched a last-minute deal on Friday after a fraught few days in which an earlier agreement seemed to have been reached before the DUP stepped in to veto it.
She pledged that the entire UK would “maintain full alignment with those rules of the Internal Market and the Customs Union”, where they applied to avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Though the Prime Minister later said the UK would leave both the customs union and single market, EU figures said it was “hard to reconcile” that aim with the agreement to avoid a hard border.
