SCOTTISH Labour bosses have blocked a bid by members to discuss staying in the single market at this weekend’s conference.
Delegates gathering in Dundee will now see Brexit, the biggest political issue of the day, reduced to a single hour-long debate early on Sunday morning, with the party faithful merely asked to back a “jobs first Brexit”.
LISTEN: Richard Leonard squirms in painful BBC interview over blocking Brexit Labour conference vote
After a furious row at the Scottish Executive Committee, the party’s governing body, on Thursday night, the effort by former leader Kezia Dugdale and a number of constituency parties to have members vote on a motion to tie Labour to remaining in the single market was denied.
The debate over the single market will reopen the divisions between the left-wingers who support Leonard and Jeremy Corbyn, and the more moderate members.
It’s also likely to overshadow Corbyn’s speech to conference this afternoon.
In a interview with BBC Scotland this morning, Leonard said the jobs first Brexit proposal put forward by the SEC was a “unifying position” .
He said delegates would still have a choice, and would get a vote on “whether they support the statement drawn up and agreed upon by the executive last night or whether they prefer to support the half dozen local labour parties who put forward a proposition that the Scottish Labour Party at this stage should pin all its colours onto the mast of a continued membership of single market.”
The party boss also said the single market proposal would have wed Scottish Labour to the policy, and suggested he might be open to other proposals once the negotiations are finished.
The show’s host, Gary Robertson, pointed out that it was difficult to square Leonard’s call for a “jobs first Brexit” with his support for leaving the single market, given that analysis from the Scottish and UK governments predicts slower growth and job losses.
“I take exception to anyone who would suggest that I don’t support jobs first Brexit,” Leonard said.
The government’s analysis was based on “what people generally call a hard Brexit,” he added, insisting that didn’t “believe we should have a hard Brexit”.
Robertson put it to Leonard that a “hard Brexit is leaving the single market, that’s what people believe it to be”.
“Well….” Leonard replied, pausing. “We are going to leave the single market because the country has voted to leave the EU, the question is what the future arrangements will be after we have left. And that’s where we need to keep our options open about what kind of deal we can fashion.”
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