Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Starmer is about to make a big mistake in backing Boris’s deal

Labour leader Keir Starmer, picture credit: Getty

Keir Starmer has announced he is whipping his Labour MPs to vote for Boris’s Brexit deal in the House of Commons today. There are two likely reasons behind this decision: firstly, to make himself seem like a Labour leader who is a grown up, after Corbyn’s teenaged politics; secondly, to demonstrate that Labour accepts Brexit in order that it may win back Leave voters in red wall seats at the next general election. But there is a big problem with this calculation. While all of Starmer’s Brexit options are difficult ones, he may be about to enact the worst of the lot.

A no-deal situation would have allowed Keir Starmer to claim that as prime minister he would be able to get the Brexit deal from the EU that Boris evidently could not. The Tories would have been in a situation where accepting any deal from the EU after the cliff edge had passed would have been politically difficult, if not impossible, opening this door up for Labour. The Christmas Eve deal kills all of that for Starmer’s party, without even the bonus of a civil war on the right over the terms of the deal. Nigel Farage saw to that.

It is far too late for Starmer to convince anyone that he is Mr Brexit

Yet being placed in this position by Boris does not mean Labour needs to fold; there are a lot of reasons why voting to approve the agreement today will be very bad for them politically, possibly for a long time to come.

One is that while it is far too late for Starmer to convince anyone that he is Mr Brexit, voting for the deal could alienate enough Remain voters in vital seats and young people along the way to make any chance of victory in 2024 even more remote.

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