Labour can’t win election with Brexit negativity, shadow minister says

Labour's shadow Northern Ireland secretary Peter Kyle (C) said the party wanted to be positive about Brexit

Labour cannot win the next general election by pointing out the negatives of Brexit, the party's shadow Northern Ireland secretary Peter Kyle has said.

The party was accused of admitting defeat on the case for closer ties with Europe at a Labour conference event.

But Mr Kyle said Labour wanted to present a "positive vision for a better Britain" outside of the European Union.

He said merely deriding the failures of Brexit "won't get you across the line in an election".

"Pointing out a negative, and also wallowing in a negative, does not win elections," Mr Kyle said.

"We've wallowed in enough negatives on different subjects on recent elections."

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Labour has largely avoided debate about Brexit under the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer.

In a speech earlier this year, Sir Keir said the UK would "not go back into the EU" under a Labour government vowed to "make Brexit work".

The Labour leader's address was an attempt to regain control over an issue that has polarised the party since the EU referendum in 2016.

Up until that point Sir Keir - who as Jeremy Corbyn's shadow Brexit secretary said the party should advocate staying in the EU in any second referendum - did not talk about his vision for Brexit much as leader.

Senior figures within Labour - including the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan - have been pushing for the UK to rejoin the EU's single market.

But at a conference fringe event titled "How Can Labour 'Make Brexit Work?", Mr Kyle "we're not going to be rejoining the single market".

"But we do want to see how opportunities can be granted to those who have had them taken away," Mr Kyle said.

During the event Mr Kyle had a robust exchange with one of the panellists, the public policy editor of the Financial Times, Peter Foster.

"One of the most worrying parts of this conversation is that Peter says I won't do anything that gives Boris Johnson and his like any more oxygen," Mr Foster said.

"But in some ways I think that's an admission of defeat.

"The Labour Party has made a political decision that making the cogent case for Europe, for membership of our neighbourhood outside Brexit, is too difficult."

In response, Mr Kyle said when it comes to the politics of the Brexit situation, "you don't win elections by pointing out a negative".

Earlier in the discussion Mr Kyle outlined Labour's vision for rebuilding the UK's relationship with the EU, which he said was "unhealthy".

He said a Labour government's first task would be to "get our own house in order" and "rebuild the institutions in our democracy".

He accused former Prime Minister Boris Johnson of waging "a populist war against the institutions of our democracy, from the independence of the civil service to the judiciary.

"Just as we looked on at what Trump did to America, the rest of the world looks at us and asks are we a country that we can trust?"

Labour, he said, would rebuild that trust.

At the end of the conference event, the host Anton Spisak of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, asked the audience to raise their hands if they trusted Labour to make Brexit work.

More hands, Mr Spisak said, seemed to raised than at the start of the event, when they did the same exercise.

Relations have been fraught between the Conservative government and the EU over the issue of the Northern Ireland protocol, a part of the Brexit divorce agreement the UK has threatened to override.

Prime Minister Liz Truss has said she preferred a negotiated solution with the EU and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said there was an "atmosphere of goodwill" on both sides.