The Shadow Cabinet has its session with Emily Thornberry on Trident today. At least there are fewer people so she cannot be shouted down, as she was at points in last night’s parliamentary Labour party meeting. But there are a number of MPs at the table who only joined Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench on the understanding that they would be able to vote in favour of Trident renewal when the time came.
Andy Burnham made it clear on the Today programme this morning that there was no way Thornberry would be able to find a ‘third way’ on this, and that it would be ‘impossible’ to get the two sides to agree:
‘We always knew this was going to be a difficult debate for the party, there are two positions here that are difficult to reconcile, maybe impossible to reconcile, and the party has got to find some way of accommodating those positions and move forward, and not let this issue take over everything.’
He added that ‘most people have found that [hybrid options] just don’t work and that instead the party needed to work out a way for both sides to stick to their positions so that Labour can move on:
‘So the discussion has been in the party about ‘can you realistically try and find a sort of halfway house? And most people have concluded that you can’t.
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