Heavyweight Brexiteer and Tory leadership candidate Boris Johnson has denounced Theresa May’s decision to allow Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn to dictate the terms on Brexit in order to get a deal through Parliament.
The former Vote Leave frontman and two-time Mayor of London described Labour’s hard-left leader as a “Marxist” who is “not fit to govern”, emphasising his continuing support for the “Bolivarian revolutionary socialism” which has reduced oil-rich Venezuela to a state of penury.
“If we Tories have one duty, it is to prevent this man getting anywhere near the levers of power,” he opined.
“So it seems utterly incredible that he has now been invited into Downing Street to negotiate a Brexit deal… [and] to get Corbyn onside, the Government is apparently willing to abandon the cardinal principle and central logic of Brexit.”
For Johnson, the Prime Minister’s apparent willingness to agree to Labour’s demand that Britain remain in the EU Customs Union — or enter into “a” customs union with the EU, which would have the same effect — would “not only mean repudiating a manifesto pledge, and tearing up a promise made thousands of times in Parliament and elsewhere”, but “make a total and utter nonsense of the referendum result.”
Membership of the Customs Union, with the accompanying “regulatory alignment” which this would entail, would leave the United Kingdom unable to make its own rules or set its own tariffs, and essentially preclude the independent international trade policy — including a major British-American trade agreement — which was one of the key economic arguments for Brexit.
“It would mean that Slovakia or Lithuania – to say nothing of France or Germany – would have more say over UK trade policy than London,” Johnson lamented.
“It would mean that the British government could neither cut tariffs on food from sub-Saharan Africa, nor protect British manufacturers from dumped or underpriced goods. It would be a big step to economic serfdom,” he warned.
The state of affairs which membership of an EU-controlled customs union would entail would mean, Johnson claimed, that Britain would essentially be remaining in the bloc, minus its institutional representation — as in the so-called “transition” period which Theresa May’s deal envisages, but with no theoretical end point.
He maintained that a “managed no deal” could still give Britain “time to negotiate an FTA and to solve the [border] issues raised in Northern Ireland,” but insisted that “to agree to be non-voting members of the EU, under the surrender proposed by Jeremy Corbyn – it cannot, must not and will not happen.”