If there is a second referendum, only Labour can win it

Labour is right to wait for the government’s proposal to be published — though the signs are it will vote against it. If that means a second referendum, Labour will need to lead and win it.

There have been predictable howls of outrage at Jeremy Corbyn’s Die Spiegel interview in which he says “we can’t stop Brexit”. It is a classic Westminster scandal because he has stated a fact: with the country having voted to leave in 2016, and Labour having lost the 2017 general election, Labour cannot simply ‘stop Brexit’. It cannot claim to respect the referendum result without letting the government open negotiations and put forward a proposal to parliament. But that does not mean that Labour will support Brexit at any cost, as its six tests for the deal make clear.

While it would be emotionally satisfying for Remainers, it would be a profound political miscalculation for Labour to come out against the government’s proposal before it has been published. Plainly, the signs do not look good: Labour has indicated that based on what is currently known, it will vote against. But it is democratically responsible and politically shrewd for Labour to judge the government’s eventual proposal on its merits. Labour has held its nerve up to now; days away from a proposal being published, it is unthinkable that it would bow to pressure to fold on its long-term approach.

If the deal is as poor as has been reported, and it fails the six tests, Labour will do everything it can to block it in Parliament, with a strong three-line whip to vote against the government. Ever since the referendum took place, the so-called ‘meaningful vote’ has been the sole opportunity to meaningfully adjust the course of the Brexit project — and too little credit is given to the party for having secured the parliamentary vote in the first place. Everything else has been noise, with a diverse array of different motives from a sincere desire to do the best by the country to the petty narcissism of politicians who are more concerned with remaining in the public eye than in remaining in the European Union.

The strong likelihood is that the PM gets her deal through, possibly with the help of Labour abstentions, though the chance of these is diminishing with every day as more information is known about the deal — and more groups with the Labour Party mobilise against the government’s plan. Remainers that loudly demand Labour opposes the people’s decision on whether to leave rather than the government’s proposal on how to leave fail to recognise that Labour has its own challenges with party discipline largely from MPs in seats with overwhelming majorities that voted to leave. If Labour is to maximise votes against the government’s deal, it cannot adopt a position that simply pretends the referendum never happened.

If the government’s proposal fails to pass, then there will be a political crisis: there are a wide range of possible outcomes if this occurs. The failure of a vote would likely prompt chaos in financial markets and perhaps even panic buying of food and medicines, given how effective the campaign has been to talk up the prospects of ‘no deal’ (As I’ve written previously, no deal is a hoax, not a plausible option, but public perception is otherwise). The circumstances of any defeat would shape the response. One possible scenario would see the prime minister face down the ERG by threatening to withdraw article 50 notification, thus offering her proposal or no Brexit at all. Perhaps she would win a second time round.

Labour would, of course, demand a general election to change the negotiating team and produce a plan that could be supported by parliament. Yet it seems highly unlikely that the Conservative benches would be prepared to gamble with a general election that had been generated by the failure of the government to win a vote on a proposal that had satisfied neither Leavers nor Remainers. If parliament were to refuse to support either a Brexit proposal or a general election, a second referendum would be the only route out of the impasse.

Should this occur, then there will be an enormous fight to determine the options on the ballot in a second referendum. May and the Brexiters would demand a choice between the PM’s deal and ‘no deal’. Labour obviously could not support the calamity of ‘no deal’ but neither could it support an option that it had already rejected in parliament and doesn’t believe in anyway. Labour would therefore by logically necessity demand that Remain be an option. This means Labour would need to build a new parliamentary coalition for a second referendum that would be different from one that had defeated the government’s proposed ‘deal’. It is worth remembering that the vast majority of Tory MPs supported Remain in 2016, and if given a way out of Brexit, they might be tempted to take it.

If there is a second referendum, then Labour must rise to the moment and lead. An overwhelming victory in a referendum in 2019 that smashed the generational political project of the radical right of the Conservative Party would pave the way for a transformative Labour government to be elected in 2022. If the vote to Remain were to exceed 55 per cent, it would be such an enormous blow to the political legitimacy of the Conservatives that it would be hard to see how they could continue to govern, perhaps precipitating the general election that Labour has sought all along. No one should pretend that it would not leave a deeply divided and wounded country in need of healing. But a vote to Remain would mean that a future government had the political and economic headroom to focus on a programme of profound reform, rather than trying to manage the chaos of Britain’s exit from the EU.

Moreover, only Labour can lead and win a second referendum. Remain messages can only be given political definition in opposition to the government: what have we learned in nearly three years since the vote? First, that the Conservatives have proved incapable of putting the national interest ahead of the party interest. Second, that many of the alleged problems of the EU were in fact the fault of UK government policy — from a political class that had deceived the country about who was responsible for what. And third, Brexit has been a massive waste of time, effort and money, when we could have been focusing on improving the economy, health service, and many other areas of daily life. Labour will need to speak on behalf of the whole country and deliver a rebuke to the Conservative Party while giving political voice to the discontent with the status quo that was expressed in the vote to leave, particularly in the ‘kept behind’ areas of the country. It obviously could not take such an approach as part of a cross-party campaign that included the government.

A further big implication of this is that Labour will need to rule out working with any other party in a campaign. It will need to erect a firewall between itself and both the government and those politicians that came to define the status quo that people rejected. The Labour NEC might need to pass a motion to apply its usual election rules and make it a disciplinary matter for MPs to campaign with other parties. Labour, too, will need to distance itself from the ‘people’s vote’ contingent which has been hijacked by those more concerned with toppling Jeremy Corbyn than remaining in the EU. It is no coincidence that the most effective pro-European group — ‘Best for Britain’ — has itself wisely stayed separate. So Labour should have no shared strategy, staff or messages with the ‘people’s vote’ groups. Given these groups repeated political miscalculations, it can only help the Remain cause for Labour to keep its distance from them.

All of this is speculation, of course, and as I say, the most likely outcome is that the Prime Minister’s vote passes and that Britain leaves the EU on 29 March next year. But it is worth thinking through what happens in the alternative scenario, which is what this attempts to do.

This analysis is written in a personal capacity.