Jeremy Corbyn’s attack line on Theresa May at Prime Minister’s Questions today might have been more effective had the Labour leader not appeared confused about what he was asking. He had no option but to talk about Brexit, something he has tried to avoid in his year and a half in the job because of his own ambivalence over Europe and his disagreements with his party about what is particularly bad about the European Union. May teased the Labour leader about his apparent confusion yesterday over whether membership of the single market was the same as access to the single market, telling him that ‘I’ve got a plan, he doesn’t have a clue’.
He had a good (if painful) line about the Prime Minister snubbing Parliament, complaining that she was ‘restoring parliamentary democracy while snubbing Parliament. It’s not so much the Iron Lady as the Irony Lady’. Though it was nice to hear a politician who normally doesn’t seem that bothered by the efficacy of the Chamber of the House of Commons complaining about the Prime Minister not unveiling her plans to the House first, it is perhaps not all that helpful to repeat the compliment of ‘Iron Lady’.
Corbyn then appeared to repeat his confusion over the single market:
‘The chancellor said after the referendum that to lose single market access would be “catastrophic”, a few days later the health secretary said that the first part of the plan must be clarity that we will remain in the single market. The Prime Minister said something about frictionless access to the market and a bespoke customs union deal. Could the Prime Minister give us a bit of certainty and clarity about this? Has she ruled out paying any kind of access fee to achieve access to what she describes as a frictionless market?’
May was able to say, in exasperated tones, that ‘access to the single market was exactly what I was talking about yesterday in my speech’.
Thank goodness, then, for Angus Robertson, who continues to use his slot each week to ask questions that make sense and have a point. He first asked about whether she was taking the wishes of the Scottish people seriously as she developed her plans for Brexit, and whether forecasts of a £2,000 average drop in income and 80,000 job losses in Scotland was a ‘price worth paying for her Little Britain Brexit’. His colleague Kirsty Blackman had a good constitutional question, too, about whether any elements of the Great Repeal Bill would be subject to English Votes for English Laws.
But it was the questions from Remainers on the backbenches that showed the Prime Minister that she still has trouble in her party that she needs to work on. Anna Soubry demanded a white paper on the government’s Brexit priorities, while Alistair Burt wanted reassurance that May’s threat of ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ would not become the government’s preferred option. Ken Clarke, meanwhile, asked further about the scrutiny of the deal, which May insisted she was already giving to parliament in the form of a series of debates. We will certainly need better debates than the ones offered by Corbyn today.
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