Archbishop of Canterbury Calls Brexit ‘Poison’, Urges May to Appoint ‘Cross-Party Commission’

Comparing Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU) to “poison” for a second time, the Archbishop of Canterbury has urged Theresa May to appoint a cross-party commission to advise her on Brexit.

Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Justin Welby contrasted the “spirit of Grenfell”  — describing responses of “Muslims, Christians and none-of-the-above” to the tower block tragedy as “diverse, buzzing and brilliant”  — with divisive “zero-sum, winner takes all” Brexit discussions in Westminster.

In order to “draw much of the poison” from the debate over leaving the EU, the Anglican leader called for the prime minister to set up a cross-party “forum or commission or some political tool which can hold the ring for the differences to be fought out, so that a commonly agreed negotiating aim is achieved.

“We need the politicians to find a way of neutralising the temptation to take minor advantage domestically from these great events,” he wrote.

Welby’s latest intervention in the EU debate adds further weight to the wider globalist push for a “soft” Brexit, in which the UK would be kept chained to the Single Market and Customs Union.

It comes as the Sunday Telegraph revealed that Europhile Tory MPs are planning to inflict a series of damaging parliamentary defeats on their own government in a bid to dilute Brexit and force May to deprioritise controls on immigration.

“We don’t want the immigration tail wagging the Brexit dog,” an influential MP told the newspaper.

And Remain-supporting MPs were reported to have opened lines of communications with a new group of Labour politicians committed to “soft” Brexit, containing 50 MPS, MEPs, and peers who signed a promise to “keep fighting unambiguously for membership of the single market”.

Amongst the signatories was Blairite Labour MP for Streatham Chuka Umunna, who the Mail on Sunday disclosed has been holding meetings in secret with Tory Europhiles to reach the sort of “consensus” the Archbishop advocates.

In July last year, following the Brexit vote, the Archbishop slammed the referendum, claiming it caused “an outwelling of poison and hatred that I cannot remember in this country for very many years”.

And in February, presenting his Presidential Address to the Church of England General Synod in London, Welby suggested that Brexit was symptomatic of a rise in nationalist, ‘fascist’ politics globally.

He said: “There are a thousand ways to explain the Brexit vote, or the election of President Trump, or the strength in the polls in Holland of Geert Wilders or in France of Madame Le Pen and many other leaders in a nationalist, populist, or even fascist tradition of politics.”