Keir Starmer has ruled out rejoining the EU, single market or customs union and said reopening the Brexit debate would bring “turmoil”.
“We’re not rejoining the EU, we’re not rejoining the single market or the customs union,” the Labour leader told reporters on Saturday. “That isn’t our plan. It never has been. I’ve never said that as leader of the Labour party, and it’s not in our manifesto.”
Starmer was speaking at a campaign event in Vauxhall, south London, after Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, claimed he would reverse Brexit if he won power.
Badenoch, who is seen as a likely Tory leadership contender, said Brexit was a 10- to 20-year project that a Labour government would put into reverse. She told the Telegraph: “They will take us back to square one. They’re just going to copy what the EU does.”
In response, Starmer said he had no intention of reopening the Brexit question because the 2016 referendum threw “politics into turmoil for three years” and “returning to that kind of uncertainty” would not help the country.
“I voted to remain. I campaigned to remain,” the Labour leader said. “But what that referendum did was to throw politics into turmoil for three years. Between 2016 and 2019, our parliament couldn’t get anything done. It caused huge uncertainty. And I don’t think returning to that kind of uncertainty is actually going to help us rebuild our economy, rebuild our country, grow the wealth and create the wealth that we need for the secure jobs of the future.”
Starmer said while a Labour government would not rejoin the EU, it would seek a better deal with Brussels on trade, research and development, defence and security, and education.
Pressed on the fact that younger voters who were under 18 in 2016 did not get a say on the UK’s membership of the EU, the Labour leader said: “The nature of a referendum is it’s a one-off referendum on a particular date and necessarily means that those eligible to vote make the decision.”
He argued that the weaknesses in the UK economy predated the Brexit referendum.
“I will also add this, because I think it’s important: the problem with low growth, which has been at the heart of the economic problem in this country for 14 years, started well before Brexit,” he said.
“So the lack of any change to planning laws and the industrial strategy, having a skills strategy, getting that inward investment that we need, getting supply chains in this country – all of that was there before and after Brexit. And all of that is work we can start on, I hope, on day one of the Labour government.”
