News from the Brexit Cliff Edge

Welcome to the Brexit Cliff Edge

From Che Guevara to Ramsay MacDonald in less than four years

• May plans to offer Jeremy Corbyn a temporary customs union arrangement with the EU which will be reviewed in 2022. This deal will be bolstered by selective allignment with single market regulations on goods, and a commitment to match all EU measures on workers rights. If this were to be agreed, after a lifetime of Tory-baiting Corbyn would find himself hugging the authors of austerity and neoliberalism tight. In a de facto coalition with them over Brexit

Labour strategist warns against a shift to Remain after the local election results

• Campaign boss Andrew Gwynne warned against a further shift towards Remain, in terms of Labour policy. Gwynne pointed out that all of the councils in which Labour had lost five or more seats were in heavily leave voting areas. Any talk of a second referendum would be a difficult message to put to Labour's traditional voters
• Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth dismissed any compromise deal, as it involves U.S. firms getting their hands on NHS assets
• Tory MP's told the Telegraph they will move to oust May this week if she agrees a deal with Labour
• The Independent said May is facing opposition from all sides over her attempt to strike a deal with Labour. She is being warned that more than 100 Tory MPs would rebel and block any compromise agreement with Labour
  

The emerging Labour-Tory compromise on Brexit is all a mirage

• The clock governing the transitional trade negotiations between the UK and the EU is now ticking and there is a lot still to negotiate. The deadline for an agreement is the end of 2020. This stop deadline is dealt with by the Withdrawal Agreement. The offer to Labour of a temporary customs union to run until 2022, becomes, therefore, almost irrelevant if it is tagged onto the Withdrawal Agreement
  

Is May's courtship of Corbyn really putting the Brexit deal on a knife edge?

• With Corbyn's chief strategist at the heart of any potential deal - Seumas Milne - the Tories believe Corbyn is fully engaged and serious about finding a deal. Milne is said to be asking detailed questions about the government's positions and conveying a very positive air during the negotiations
• Corbyn could be PM if he stops playing games with Theresa May - according to the Daily Mirror. 'Bailing out a failing PM and her unpopular bad deal would be political suicide, a real Shakespearean tragedy for a democratic socialist party which has vowed to radically renew Britain, both economically and socially'

Another £160m spent on Brexit consultants

• UK government has signed new Brexit consultancy contracts for the next twelve months, worth almost £160m in value

The Tory Party is already engaged in a leadership election, it has just not been officially announced yet

• Dominic Raab puts family-friendly policies at the heart of his bid to succeed Theresa May, reported The Times - as both he and rival Jeremy Hunt - introduced their wives to the media
• The Independent attacked Raab as 'having a nice wife and kitchen' but this being 'no substitute for his screaming lack of a clue what to do'

Both party leaders face fierce opposition to any Brexit compromise

• Conservative MP's are now describing Theresa May as a caretaker PM and saying that any deal brokered with Labour would be scuppered by backbenchers
• The 1922 Committee chairman, Sir Graham Brady, looks set to meet Mrs May in an attempt to get her to 'clarify her departure timetable for impatient backbenchers'

The spectre of a General Election looms large over the Conservative Party

• Brexiteer or no Brexiteer, any new Conservative Party leader would not survive with the current make-up of Parliament and they'd suffer all the same issues that have dogged Mrs May. So a top priority for any new incumbent has to be solving the lack of a working majority and no obvious Brexit deal which can hold the party together
• In Walsall Conservative councillors bucked the trend last Thursday and did a little better than their party colleagues elsewhere. Tory canvassers believe it was because they promised they were not going to have anything to do with the European elections at all - surviving the revolt by joining with it
• Political scientist John Curtice was quoted in a QZ.com article as saying 'we will discover that there are more than three significant parties at the European elections. We may see the most fragmented British electorate since the advent of mass British democracy'

Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party are getting away with a lot, as the media is looking elsewhere

• A Brexit Party candidate in the north-east expected to win, John Tennant, has a history of vulgar and obscene language about women in social media posts and once praised a colleague for using a Nazi slogan in the European Parliament
• Brexit Party leaflets arriving at people's homes are being trashed by social media activists in a never ending litany of creative and humorous ways
• The Guardian reminded readers that Nigel Farage has regularly repeated antisemitic tropes on a far right talk show in the USA - the Alex Jones Show
• Farage played down his north-west candidate, Claire Fox's previous defence of IRA bombing campaigns calling it 'irrelevant.'
• Farage also said that the name of the Brexit Party's biggest donor was also 'irrelevant'
• To distract attention, one can only imagine, Farage then challenged Jeremy Corbyn to a television debate about Brexit
• It emerged that Annunziata Rees-Mogg looks likely to be the Brexit Party parliamentary candidate for the by-election in Peterborough, set to take place in early June

Other News

• A No Deal Brexit could threaten evidence sharing with Europe on cybercrime, a Northern Ireland police chief told Irish News
• A court date has been set whereby the plaintiff will try and hold Boris Johnson to account for the £350m a week for the NHS claim on his big red bus during the EU referendum campaign
• A counter-factual study computer modelled a result whereby the UK had voted Remain in 2016, and concluded that inward foreign direct investment into the UK since 2016 has fallen by about a fifth
• Trade body Tech London Advocates found that 87% of all tech firms in the UK felt that the Brexit process had tarnished London's reputation as an international tech capital. Many pointed to losing out on investment as a result of the EU exit, with one firm saying they lost out to the tune of £300,000, because of investor fears about the post-Brexit regulatory environment
• CBI President John Allan said postponed business investment will cause knock-on effects further down the line and it will impact upon the economy, possibly for some years
• Law firm Irwin Mitchell and the CEBR produced a report that said there will be a growing gap that widens even further, because of Brexit. It will cause an even bigger divide both economically and socially between the north east and the south east