All eyes this morning are on Britain’s Brexit divorce bill, but meanwhile Labour’s Brexit strategy remains as confused as ever. Diane Abbott is the latest figure from the party’s frontbench to hint at the possibility of a second referendum, despite this being ruled out by Jeremy Corbyn in the run-up to June’s snap election. In a letter to two constituents this month, the shadow home secretary wrote:
‘I will argue for the right of the electorate to vote on any deal that is finally agreed.’
Abbott is now suggesting those remarks were ‘poorly worded’. This seems hard to believe; indeed, that sentence couldn’t have been much clearer: voters should get another say. It’s true that Abbott stops short of suggesting that another vote could be used to reverse the outcome of the first vote here. But her argument that voters should be given another vote at all strays close to the line on Labour’s position on a second referendum. And even if we take Abbott at her word here and accept that she did phrase things badly, this is more than just a blunder on the part of the shadow home secretary.
Confusion over the question of whether or not Labour would back a second referendum has been rumbling on almost since the day after the original vote last year. In April, Jeremy Corbyn appeared to put paid to the doubt by ruling out another Brexit vote. Admittedly this came in the form of a statement from the leaders’ office, rather than from Corbyn himself who dodged answering the question directly. But the wording from Corbyn’s spokesman seems watertight – Labour did not want another vote: ‘A second referendum is not our policy and it won’t be in our manifesto’, we were told.
Yet while the party can still technically say this line has held and that another vote is not party policy, that hasn’t stopped Labour politicians from toying with the possibility that things could change. At Labour’s party conference, the new line taken by a number of Labour figures was that ‘as things stand’ there would be no second vote. Sadiq Khan made precisely this point, saying that: ‘I think as things stand the referendum results are the referendum results’. The shadow communities secretary Andrew Gwynne also took this line, suggesting that: ‘It’s not Labour Party policy to have a second referendum…It is about making sure Parliament holds this government to account, but who knows where we will be at the end of this process, at March 2019’. Tom Watson also joined in: ‘We’re not ruling it out’, he said.
So Abbott’s latest comments are nothing new, but they are yet another reminder that the tactical confusion is hardly an accident. Tellingly, when Abbott told the Guardian today that her reassurance was ‘poorly worded’, there was little clarification on what she had actually meant to say. It’s hard not to see this as deliberate. The party’s policy of having its cake and eating it on the issue of Britain’s departure from the EU continues. Will Labour opt for a second referendum? Only time will tell.
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