OUTCRY AT LABOUR’S BETRAYAL OF BREXIT
Corbyn poised to back second referendum
JEREMY Corbyn faced a furious backlash last night after edging Labour closer to supporting the campaign to overturn Britain’s vote for Brexit by triggering a second referendum.
At the opening of the party’s conference in Liverpool the Labour leader confirmed he was ready to join calls for a re-run of the 2016 poll if delegates back the demand in a vote tomorrow.
He said: “I’m bound by the democracy of our party. There will be a clear vote in the conference.”
The signal of his readiness to cave in
and ditch his previous opposition to another EU poll provoked renewed infighting over Brexit among senior Labour and trade union figures at the conference yesterday.
And Brexit supporters last night rounded on the Labour leader for his threat to betray millions of voters.
John Longworth, chairman of the Leave Means Leave pressure group, said: “It would evidently be a massive betrayal of democracy for an honest result of a national referendum to be challenged. Every campaign during the referendum made plain that leaving meant leaving the single market and the currency union and regaining full control of our laws.
“Since that result those unhappy with Brexit have done all they can to spread baseless threats about our future and challenge every aspect of what should be a clean break.
“If Corbyn decides to push for a second ballot he would be disenfranchising the many millions who voted to leave by majority and millions of Labour voters.”
Conservative Party Chairman Brandon Lewis said: “The last pretence that Labour ever respected the democratic decision of the British people is rapidly disappearing.
“Jeremy Corbyn this morning proved he is not fit to govern our country. He confirmed Labour would take us back to square one on Brexit.”
Resisted
As delegates gathered for the conference the row over Brexit was threatening to dominate the week ahead. The slogan: “Love Corbyn, Hate Brexit” was emblazoned across many T-shirts and banners at the gathering.
Delegates are set to vote on a motion tomorrow, backed by more than 100 local parties, calling for a second referendum at the conference. Dozens of separate motions have been boiled down to a single “composite” motion.
Ahead of the vote thousands joined a protest march organised by the People’s Vote campaign group yesterday.
Mr Corbyn, who has previously resisted pressure from many of his MPs to campaign to halt the country’s exit from the EU, used a television interview to confirm he would abide by the vote.
He told the BBC One Andrew Marr Show: “I’m there elected as a leader of this party, elected as the leader in order to bring great democracy to this party and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the past three years.
“Let’s see what comes out of conference and then obviously I’m bound by the democracy of our party.”
He declined to say what the question in a second referendum would
be, describing the matter as “conjecture”.
He spoke after a poll showed that 86 per cent of grassroots Labour members were in favour of a referendum on any final Brexit deal between the Government and Brussels.
Bitter divisions over the Brexit issue surfaced among leading Labour and trade union figures in Liverpool last night.
Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Corbyn-backing Unite union, warned Labour could lose millions of votes if the party backed a second referendum move to halt Brexit.
He said: “There are significant numbers of traditional Labour supporters who are saying ‘we’re going to vote Conservative because we don’t trust Labour to take us out of the European Union’.
“For us to now enter some kind of campaign that opens up that issue again I think would be wrong.”
Mr McCluskey said even if a second referendum was held, voters should not be given the option of choosing to stay in the EU. “The referendum shouldn’t be on do we want to go back into the European Union,” he said, adding: “The people have already decided on that.”
Shadow business secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey agreed that a second referendum would be seen as a “betrayal” by many voters in traditional Labour areas.
She said voters in her Salford and Eccles constituency had been divided by the 2016 referendum, adding: “There were some firm Remainers and firm Leavers but a lot of people in between.
“That’s what a second referendum causes concern for me because I think for people like that who really weren’t sure and still aren’t sure and just want to get the best deal and make sure our economy is set up on the right track, it would be concerning for them.”
But Labour deputy leader Tom Watson said the leadership should “respect” the outcome of the conference vote and indicated he was likely to back staying in the EU if a poll was held.
He said: “I voted Remain in the last referendum, I think it is highly likely that I would probably vote Remain in the next one.
“But I would look at what the question is on offer and I would want to know what the deal is that comes out of the negotiations in Europe, if that happens.”
Manuel Cortes, the Left-wing general secretary of the TSSA transport union, also backed the second referendum call.
“We think that the terms of Brexit should be put to the British people,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend.
“People voted to leave the European Union but that doesn’t mean buying a pig in the poke or giving the Prime Minister a blank cheque.
“Whatever she negotiates she needs to bring back to the British people.”
LABOUR is wallowing in a cesspit of its own leadership’s making. Once a mainstream democratic movement, the party is now ruled by dogmatic personality cult dedicated to the worship of Jeremy Corbyn.
In place of debate and moderation there is zealotry and intolerance, epitomised by the long-running scandal over vicious anti-Semitism.
It is a telling indicator of the hard Left’s descent into brutish fanaticism that, as Labour’s annual conference begins in Liverpool, one moderate MP, who is a persistent critic of Corbyn, has reportedly had to be provided with armed protection.
Yet the remarkable fact is that, despite Labour’s ideological flight to the wilder fringe of British politics, the party stands on the threshold of power.
The revolutionary fantasies of the Corbynista mob could soon become a nightmare for Britain. That grim prospect has opened up largely because of the turmoil in Conservative ranks over Brexit, which has become more serious as a result of the EU’s rejection of Theresa May’s Chequers proposal.
With aggressive opportunism, Labour is seeking to crank up the pressure on the Government, both by pledging to reject any negotiated deal that comes before the Commons and by flirting with the idea of a second referendum, a proposal that is strongly supported by the party activists.
One survey at the weekend found that 86 per cent of Labour members back another vote, even though Labour’s heartlands in the Midlands and the North are in favour of Brexit.
IN RESPONSE to this crisis, discussions are said have taken place in senior Tory circles about an autumn general election with the aim of breaking the Brexit stalemate and rebuilding the Government’s authority. But such a step would be suicidal lunacy for the Conservative Party.
It would play right into Corbyn’s hands and dramatically increase his chances of taking office. The Tory strategist who first came up with this idea has obviously learnt nothing from the 2017 general election when Labour started 22 points behind and ended up almost on level terms, having seen an increase of 9.6 per cent in its share of the vote compared to Ed Miliband’s miserable campaign in 2015.
The Tories would be even more vulnerable to a Corbyn surge next time for there are 17 Conservative MPs with majorities of less than 1,000, while at least 40 seats would fall to Labour on a swing of just 2.5 per cent.
Moreover, the two main parties are now neck-and-neck in the opinion polls, partly because Labour’s economic plans, based on whipping up envy, have a superficial appeal to parts of the public. One study last week showed that 60 per cent of people want higher taxes to improve the NHS, education and other state services. Engrossed in Brexit, the Tories have been utterly feeble in taking the attack to Corbyn’s hard-Left creed.
Margaret Thatcher would have made mincemeat of him. But nothing can disguise the truth that his premiership would be disastrous for our country. Labour used to be led by patriotic men like James Callaghan and John Smith. As post-war prime minister, Clement Attlee presided over the establishment of Nato and the creation of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent.
Today the party is led by a puerile radical who has spent his entire parliamentary career mouthing anti-Western mantras and Marxist slogans. Corbyn is a man of protest, not responsibility.
He never saw a Left-wing demonstration that he did not itch to join, nor a strike he did not want to defend. His whole political life has been spent in a swamp filled with communists, Trotskyites and Stalinists, several of whom now work in his office.
Never in British political history has there been a figure less suited to the role of prime minister. Any Government he formed would plunge the country into chaos and decline.
A insight into the extremist outlook of his frontbench was provided during the conference at the weekend by Corbynista ally and shadow equalities minister Dawn Butler who praised the Militant Tendency in the 1980s for its belief that it is “better to break the law than break the poor”, a line that led to municipal breakdown in Liverpool.
ACORBYN administration would bring back the dark days of Militant on a national scale, along with confiscatory taxation, profligate spending, the ruthless exploitation of business and trade union bullying.
Indeed, only yesterday Labour announced plans for a hefty levy on second homes, “the equivalent to double the current rate of council tax”. In the same vein, the shadow chancellor John McDonnell promised the TUC that a Corbyn government would introduce a massive extension of trade union rights to herald a workplace revolution.
A sympathiser with terrorism and defender of violent Irish Republicanism, Corbyn would be a catastrophe on national security. He despises the concept of British national pride.
Corbyn’s Britain would be a bleak world of state control, economic dislocation and diminished freedom. Within Labour, his sinister cabal has already shown its contempt for democracy through its ruthless attacks on dissent and its domination of the party’s machinery, as reflected in the drive to kick out MPs who depart from the Corbynista orthodoxy.
That kind of Orwellian oppression will be applied nationally in the event of a Labour triumph. The Tories had better get their act together to prevent it.
‘He would plunge the UK into chaos’