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Monday 26 February 2018

Barry Gardiner in Customs Union Flip-Flop per Guido Fawkes

Guido Fawkes https://order-order.com/2018/02/26/barry-gardiner-squirms-customs-union-flip-flop/ reminds us of Labour's chosen spokesman, Barry Gardiner, on Brexit. First from The Guardian last year:

'Other countries such as Turkey have a separate customs union agreement with the EU. If we were to have a similar agreement, several things would follow: the EU's 27 members would set the common tariffs and Britain would have no say in how they were set. We would be unable to enter into any separate bilateral free trade agreement. We would be obliged to align our regulatory regime with the EU in all areas covered by the union, without any say in the rules we had to adopt. And we would be bound by the case law of the ECJ, even though we would have no power to bring a case to the court.

As a transitional phase, a customs union agreement might be thought to have some merit. However, as an end point it is deeply unattractive. It would preclude us from making our own independent trade agreements with our five largest export markets outside the EU (the US, China, Japan, Australia and the Gulf states).'

Pretty clear where he stood then.

It was also pretty clear where he stood on the same matter in December, Guido has that Tweet too.

So what caused Barry Gardiner to change his mind since then? Anything other than opportunism or what his party leaders told him to do.

An independent news organisation would be relentless in asking such questions, so don't expect much analysis on the BBC website where Brexit is to be destroyed, along with the Conservative government.

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