LABOUR need to come out of hiding and work with others to stop a hard Brexit, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said.

In a tweet yesterday morning, the SNP leader said the chaos caused by Theresa May’s botched deal on the Irish border provided an opportunity for those against a cliff edge Brexit to do something about it.

“This could be the moment for opposition and soft Brexit/remain Tories to force a different, less damaging approach — keep the UK in the single market and customs union,” she tweeted.

“But it needs Labour to get its act together. How about it @jeremycorbyn?”

He didn’t respond. It was Corbyn’s predecessor Ed Miliband who provided the most scathing Labour attack on the UK government.

“What an absolutely ludicrous, incompetent, absurd, make it up as you go along, couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery bunch of jokers there are running the government at the most critical time in a generation for the country,” he tweeted.

Corbyn did tweet about Brexit on Monday evening, calling May’s Government “completely ill-equipped to negotiate a successful deal”.

The veteran left-winger is a reluctant remainer, who has opposed the EU for much of his time in Parliament, and in leadership he has been vague over what his party position on leaving Europe is, calling only for a “jobs first Brexit”.

He was in parliament where his Brexit minister Keir Starmer had secured an urgent question about the collapsed talks.

There Starmer seemed to suggest some movement from Labour, in that he attacked May for taking membership of the single market and customs union “off the table”.

Though he didn’t explicitly say Labour’s position was to keep it on the table.

“Fantasy met brutal reality,” he said of Monday’s talks. “Labour is clear that there needs to be a UK-wide response to Brexit, so the question for the Government today is this: will the Prime Minister now rethink her reckless red lines and put options such a customs union and single market back on the table for negotiations?

“If the price of the Prime Minister’s approach is the break-up of the Union and the reopening of bitter divides in Northern Ireland, that price is too high.”

For Labour backbenchers, however, the option by itself wasn’t enough. They were overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in single market and customs union.

“There’s a vast majority in this House and in the country and in the House of Lords in favor of us staying in the customs union,” Chris Bryant told David Davis during the urgent question.

Liz Kendall added: “The government only has itself to blame for choosing to rule this option out when it doesn’t have to.”

North of the border, Scottish Brexit minister Michael Russell called on Labour party here to make solid their position on single market membership.

Addressing MSPs in Holyrood, Russell said: “If this chamber were to speak with one voice on membership of the single market and the customs union, I think it would be very effective indeed.

“Single market membership for the whole of the UK would be the way out of this incredible mess that has been created by Theresa May and I urge it on every member in this chamber.”

The SNP Brexit minister added: “The whole of these islands should be in the single market and the customs union — we urge that upon all, but particularly upon the Labour Party.

“If the Labour Party were to adopt that to be a standard, that would move this on very considerably indeed. The First Minister made that point in a tweet to Jeremy Corbyn this morning and I repeat it to Richard Leonard.”

Labour’s Lewis Macdonald said, however, that “it would be a mistake to use the chaos of Theresa May’s failed deal on Northern Ireland yesterday simply to push for a differential deal here too”.

He added: “Is the right conclusion not to say if it’s good enough for Northern Ireland, it’s good enough for the whole of the UK?”

Russell told him: “That is precisely what I have just said. A differentiated deal is at the end of the row, we are forcing the pace by trying to say ‘let’s have a deal for the whole of the UK’.”

He added: “It is wise to be prepared for any circumstances ... we are preparing ourselves, we

have to be realistic, if there is not that solution, there has to be another solution.”