Centrists and their media allies spent most of last week telling us all – in most cases loudly and stridently – that Labour needed to ‘lead’ by siding with a so-called “people’s vote” and even that the party would ride into power on a wave of public support if it did.

The fallacy of those claims – which the SKWAWKBOX and others have long warned about – was exposed by a poll released on Friday night by Survation, the most accurate polling company during the 2017 general election. That poll showed not only that Labour currently lead and would lose vote-share if it called for a new referendum, but that Brexit sentiment in the population persists – ‘remain’ is not ahead even against Theresa May’s abysmal excuse for a deal.

The ensuing silence of the centrist Establishment was predictably deafening, but rather than try to divert attention away from inconvenient truths by an escalation of smears it seems to have been paralysed into a fragmented response in which the common thread is “look over there instead!” – but in without a unified stance on where ‘there’ is.

Mistaken identity?

There were laughable attempts to portray David Miliband – not even an MP – as the people’s choice of a new Labour leader. Of course, the detail shows no such thing. Only six percent of those polled (ten percent of those who expressed a preference) plumped for Miliband.

Seventy-four percent said they had heard of him – but of course there’s no guarantee they weren’t mixing him up with his brother Ed, who as a former leader of the party during a general election campaign would be expected to have that kind of name recognition. Other centrist figures fared even worse.

Let’s attack a Labour employee!

MP Angela Smith launched a shameful attack on Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby for sharing an excellent article on why leading remainers have no resonance with leavers:

Ms Smith’s views, of course, don’t even resonate with members of her local Labour Party, who recently voted overwhelmingly for a motion of no confidence in her. But for an MP to attack a party employee who can’t defend herself publicly is disgraceful.

When Labour members – who have every right to express an opinion on the general secretary’s performance, unlike MPs – criticised Formby’s predecessor, centrist MPs decried such ‘attacks’ on an employee, but apparently the rules for right-wingers are different when it’s a left-wing employee.

Ms Smith’s intervention was spectacularly unsuccessful, leading to a cascade of hundreds condemnatory replies from Labour members:

A few of the hundreds of reactions to Smith’s tweet

Not just a river…

The social media feeds of many leading ‘PV’-campaigners went mysteriously silent in the 24 hours after the poll was released.

Some simply stuck their heads in the sand and didn’t say anything at all, about the poll or otherwise and are still quiet. Others seemed to be taking the time to regather their defiance of the inconvenient facts, before emerging this morning, not only to ignore the poll’s existence but to plough on with an unchanged narrative regardless:

The ever-reliable Lib Dem leader Vince Cable went further, appearing on the Marr show to keep whistling the same tune in complete denial of the new data, claiming that Corbyn backing a “people’s vote” would be a ‘game-changer’:

Any change to the game, of course, would not work in favour of the millions in this country desperate for a Labour government.

The denial of the poll’s existence and certainly of any significance covered the PV-movement almost as thoroughly as a blanket, with just a few peeping out from under its edges to cherry-pick a single statistic from the poll and claim that meant the whole thing supported their narrative:

The ‘fourth line down’ showed a single scenario showing Labour losing votes if someone else called a referendum and Labour didn’t support it. This makes sense, but can only apply to the Tory government calling one, because almost all the minor parties are already ‘calling for’ a referendum – and Labour leads by three points.

That point was addressed in the SKWAWKBOX article to which Akehurst – and others even more in denial – responded. It seems – surprise – that they had not bothered to read what they were responding to, or else did and chose to ignore it.

The response by centrists to the inconvenient existence of the poll by the most accurate of pollsters was surprisingly weak. They couldn’t even muster a decent smear to try to swamp people’s attention – and if 6% of respondents thinking David Miliband might be a viable Labour leader when he’s not even in Parliament is the best the Establishment could come up with, it is in a parlous state.

But such desperation may be explained by the fact that:

the PV campaign is calling for something there’s no time to do

that there is absolutely no chance of a Tory prime minister ever putting a referendum to the public that includes a ‘remain’ option

if such a fantasy ever became reality and May or another Tory called a further referendum – which the poll also shows would be political suicide for them – then the public is likely to prefer even May’s woeful excuse for a deal to remaining:



Not only that, but support for remain has fallen over the last five weeks.

By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn has been shown to be still on the right track – by the most accurate pollster and in spite of a constant media and centrist narrative to the contrary.

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