Jeremy Corbyn’s anticipated speech on Brexit, laying out his party’s vision of post-Brexit relations with Europe, ticked many boxes with his supporters.
The key box ticked by the leader of the UK Labour Party in a speech he delivered to an audience of journalists, Labour MPs, party officials, and workers in the city of Coventry, central England, is that if he is elected prime minister after the next election, Labour will seek strong trade, economic, and political relations not only with the EU but with the whole of Europe, RT reported.
“We are leaving the European Union but we are not leaving Europe. We are not throwing up protectionist barriers, closing the borders and barricading ourselves in. And we want a close and cooperative relationship with the whole of Europe after Brexit,” Corbyn said.
Indeed, lest people have forgotten, Europe does not only consist of the EU and the eurozone. How can real European unity be achieved without the inclusion of the continent’s largest and most populous country, Russia? And what kind of European unity is it that looks to Washington for leadership geopolitically, economically, and militarily.
But this aside, up to now Corbyn had been navigating something of a fudge when it came to Brexit. On the one hand, he had been pledging to respect the result of the 2016 referendum in which 17 million cast a vote for Britain to leave the EU – a Brexit vote largely located within Labour electoral constituencies in the post-industrial north and midlands of England, along with former mining communities in south Wales.
