Of course Jeremy Corbyn should talk to Theresa May. Refusing forces us towards a no-deal Brexit

Rather than working with the prime minister, the Labour leader is engaged in irresponsible sophistry that can only end badly

Of course Jeremy Corbyn should talk to the prime minister. It would then quickly become obvious that there is hardly any difference between them; Labour could support the government’s Brexit deal, and we could get on with our lives.

The Labour leader doesn’t want to do that because he would have to explain in detail what is wrong with Theresa May’s deal, and it would become obvious that he was simply trying to manufacture differences with the government.

He has built his whole political movement on being the outsider, the anti-establishment force standing up for the people against the Tories, who represent the privileged few. Never mind that the party of the privileged few won the votes of the many – or slightly more of them than the Labour Party – at the 2017 election; Corbyn’s performance in that election exceeded all expectations. He knows it would be fatal to his brand to be seen to “collaborate with the enemy”.

So he is not going to do it. He and Seumas Milne, his strategy adviser, and John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, are going to obfuscate their way through this by throwing up plausible conditions. Just as they managed to get out of a head-to-head TV debate with the prime minister on Brexit last month, now Corbyn refuses to talk to Theresa May unless she “takes a no-deal Brexit off the table”.

However, the only way she can do that, given that the Labour Party refuses to support her deal, would be to say that she will ask the EU for an extension to the Brexit deadline of 29 March. That would make it impossible for her to get any deal through parliament, because MPs would know there were no consequences to voting it down.

And the EU might not grant an extension if we didn’t know what it was for. In which case her only option – to guarantee the double negative, no no-deal Brexit – would be to commit herself now to revoking Article 50 altogether. That would be to abandon Brexit. Many Remainers would be delighted of course, but she is not going to do it, and that is not what Corbyn says he wants.

He says he wants a permanent customs union, safe in the knowledge that the vast majority of his supporters have no idea what that is. The prime minister’s deal would take us out of the EU with an insurance policy – the backstop guarantee of an open border in Ireland – that would be a “temporary” customs union. There is no difference between the withdrawal agreement that Corbyn says he wants and the one the prime minister has negotiated. The difference between them is not the withdrawal agreement, it is a detail of the long-term trade deal with the EU, which has to be negotiated after we leave.

Corbyn is engaged in irresponsible sophistry. By refusing to vote for the prime minister’s deal and refusing even to discuss possible changes to it, he is making a no-deal Brexit – the very thing he says he wants to avoid – more likely.