In Transition

Staying in the Single Market and the Customs Union during the transition period is the merest trifle compared to staying in them forever, as advocated by Theresa May and Peter Hitchens.

Single Market membership is absolutely incompatible with key points of this year's Labour's manifesto. So a Corbyn Government would have to leave in the end. At the end of the transition period, in fact.

Whereas a May or other Conservative Government would never have any reason to do so. Everything about it suits them down to the ground.

By the end of 2019, it will have required even the privatisation of the French and German railways, the public ownership of which is cited by the illiterate as some sort of riposte to the fact that the EU forbids the renationalisation of anything that has ever been privatised, including the British railways.

Today, the Labour Party stated the obvious: that, in accordance with the clearly expressed views and the obvious interests of the Labour heartlands that delivered the Leave vote, a Labour Government will eventually withdraw from the Single Market and from the Customs Union.

But the Conservative Party has never given any such assurance, and it never will. Why should it? Its heartlands mostly voted Remain in what was, 33 years late, the Labour victory of 1983, when the areas that had been mostly badly damaged by all Governments since that point finally got their well-deserved revenge.