One of Theresa May’s ministers has said the prime minister has rejected Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit plan of a customs union but insisted her letter to the Labour leader showed there was “a lot of common ground” between the parties.
“What’s happening here is not a shifting of red lines,” Rory Stewart, the prisons minister, told BBC Breakfast.
On Sunday, May responded to Corbyn’s letter from last week that laid out Labour’s conditions for backing any Brexit deal, one of which is membership of a permanent customs union.
While the prime minister made it plain she did not want this, several newspapers on Monday said May had held open the door to the issue, and thus the idea of a softer Brexit.
Stewart rejected this interpretation, saying: “The prime minister remains very clear that she thinks that a very major economy like the United Kingdom needs to have the freedom to be able to make its own trade deals, so she’s disagreeing with Jeremy Corbyn’s suggestion that we enter a permanent customs union.”
Asked if May was looking at some sort of compromise with the opposition leader, Stewart said: “Yes. I think she feels, as I do, that there isn’t actually as much dividing us from the Labour party as some people suggest.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Boris Johnson, a leading Brexiter, said May should focus on renegotiating the Irish backstop issue rather than join Corbyn in what he called “a complete U-turn”.
“He now wants to frustrate Brexit very largely by staying in a permanent customs union,” the former foreign secretary said.
Other elements of May’s letter indicated she is hopeful of at least winning over some wavering Labour MPs when her plan is next voted on in the Commons, which is unlikely to be before the end of the month or later.
In her response to Corbyn, May made a concession on environmental and workers’ rights, discounting his idea of automatic alignment with EU standards but suggesting instead a Commons vote every time these change.
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