Activists want a people’s vote and option of remaining to be in any election manifesto

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A leftwing, remain-supporting coalition of Momentum activists, local party chairs and Labour councillors is to create a pop-up pressure group to persuade the Labour leadership to ditch a commitment to Brexit in any snap election manifesto.

The push came as another Labour frontbencher, Rosena Allin-Khan, broke with the party line and backed a second referendum on the final deal in an onstage announcement at a People’s Vote rally on Sunday.

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The drive by the grassroots Labour group is the latest in a series of offensives to put pressure on the leadership to back a fresh poll if Theresa May’s deal fails to pass parliament.

The pressure group, led by many of the anti-Brexit activists who were behind the push to put a second referendum policy to a vote of party members at Labour’s conference, will create a platform for pro-EU Labour voters to try to influence the leadership before any future manifesto launch.

Organisers of the drive, who include the former CWU general secretary Billy Hayes, the national co-ordinator of the pro-EU group group Another Europe is Possible, Michael Chessum, as well as the MP Catherine West, say they have been convinced that a snap general election is on the horizon and want to shape Labour’s direction.

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In a letter to the Guardian from 40 Labour activists, the group said: “As Labour members and supporters, we want our party to fight in the months ahead, including in any general election campaign, to stop the anti-working class disaster that is Brexit,” it said, adding that there is “concern that the party’s policy is “shifting, but is not yet committed to stopping Brexit”.

In effect, the group hopes to force a more explicit commitment to a second referendum in the next Labour manifesto and for the party to campaign to remain.

On Sunday, Rosena Allin-Khan, the MP for Tooting and shadow sport minister, became the third frontbencher to back a second referendum. The former shadow Northern Ireland secretary Owen Smith was sacked for breaking that line earlier this year but more junior frontbenchers have escaped sanction.

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“Let’s end the economic uncertainty, let’s end the fear mongering – and let’s have a campaign on the facts,” she said. “If calls for a general election are rejected – I’ll be backing a people’s vote.”

Party strategists are undecided about pursuing a formal no-confidence vote in the government if May loses the vote on her Brexit deal, one of the ways a snap general election could be triggered under the Fixed Term Parliament Act.

The Democratic Unionist party, which May relies on to prop up her minority Conservative government, has vowed to vote against the Brexit deal but has said it will support the Conservatives in a no-confidence vote, meaning Labour would have to rely on Tory rebels to vote against their own party in order to pass the motion of no confidence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest On Sunday Rosena Allin-Khan, the MP for Tooting and Labour’s shadow sports minister, became the third frontbencher to back a second referendum. Photograph: Peter Nicholls/Reuters

Labour may consider other paths, including a non-binding no-confidence motion in May herself, which Labour has previously attempted against the transport secretary, Chris Grayling, during the rail crisis.

On Sunday, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, Jon Trickett, refused to confirm that Labour would table a confidence motion, saying, “let’s see what happens”.

“If you can tell me whether she will still be prime minister on Tuesday evening, then perhaps I can tell you what exactly we will do next,” he told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday.

Trickett sounded a note of caution against those in his party calling for a second referendum, an echo of the comments made in a private meeting by the Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey.

“If people feel that the privileged political elite has decided by subterfuge to find a way of reversing the previous referendum, that would cause us some difficulty, and rightly so,” he said.

Both Corbyn and Labour’s shadow business secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, insisted on Sunday the party’s primary strategy was to renegotiate a better Brexit deal.

Corbyn told ITV that the government had to “go back, negotiate something that is acceptable, which does protect rights and conditions, which does give us that trade access, or they’ve got to get out of the way, have an election so that it will be a government here that will be serious about those negotiations”.

Long-Bailey repeated the insistence that a Labour-backed Brexit deal would not require the controversial backstop arrangement because it would be the party’s primary policy to keep the UK in a customs union. “The backstop was installed to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland,” she told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show. “A permanent customs union would do exactly the same thing and it would offer that long-term certainty and that is what we would go into a negotiation advocating for.”

However, a customs union alone does not avoid a hard border, because of the requirement to also do some regulatory checks which form part of the EU’s single market regulation.

The Conservative party chair, Brandon Lewis, called the plan “a fantasy Brexit, which the EU has repeatedly ruled out”.