Labour’s ambiguous Brexit stance is now untenable

To govern is to choose. The same is true of opposition. Normally, the difference is that governments can choose what they do, while oppositions can only choose what they say. That is not true of Brexit. There is a hung parliament. The Conservative government has endured a rash of ministerial resignations and the prime minister relies on a shaky deal with the Democratic Unionist party for her working majority. In those circumstances, an opposition is not reduced to merely striking — it can lead.

This is Jeremy Corbyn’s headache. What should the Labour leader do about Brexit? Labour party members are clear — a new survey shows that they overwhelmingly want him to campaign for a second referendum. But that very clarity gives Mr Corbyn a big problem.

Last year he was strategically ambiguous over Brexit. This worked politically. It focused pressure on Theresa May as she negotiated both with the EU and her own backbenchers. Labour party members — who had backed Mr Corbyn in two leadership elections, in defiance of the parliamentary party — supported him, trusting in the adage “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”.

Frustration mounted when, at the party’s autumn conference, the grassroots pushed for Labour to come out in clear support of a second referendum (a “people’s vote”). This was fudged. But the time for ambiguity is over. The parliamentary vote on Mrs May’s proposed Brexit deal approaches, as does Brexit itself, at the end of March.

Labour needs a clear, convincing plan — for parliament and for the party. But the politics are exceedingly tricky. In electoral terms, the Labour leadership believe their vote is a coalition. On the one hand they enjoyed the support of southern, middle class voters, many of them young and enthusiastic Corbynites, who backed Remain. But many of their northern, working class voters wanted to leave the EU. Losing the Nottinghamshire town Mansfield in the 2017 general election while winning both Kensington and Canterbury is used to prove this argument.

Jeremy Corbyn needs to hold the party together to gain power and one in six members say they would leave over the wrong Brexit policy

Trying to steer a course between two strongly opposed positions is a lot like the “Third Way-ism” of Tony Blair and New Labour: a period of recent Labour party history that Mr Corbyn always vociferously condemned. For his supporters, his authenticity has been rooted in an unwavering commitment to his uncompromised core beliefs.

Unfortunately for those supporters, one of their leader’s longest held beliefs is an opposition to the EU. This is currently expressed as a concern that state aid rules would prevent a Labour government from building a socialist economy, but it goes right back to his part in the campaign against UK membership of the Common Market in the 1975 referendum.

Unfortunately for Mr Corbyn, 88 per cent of Labour members and 71 per cent of Labour voters say they would vote Remain in a second referendum, according to the survey released this week for the Economic and Social Research Council and YouGov.

Not only is this a rare case of virtual unanimity (left of centre political activists pride themselves on debate and dissent). It comes from the very source of Mr Corbyn’s personal political authority — the membership. Whenever he has been in conflict with Labour MPs and peers, he has been able to appeal to the membership, who have vocally backed him. Now it is Yvette Cooper, Chuka Umunna and his other outspoken pro-European critics on the Labour backbenches who are in line with party members. Mr Corbyn himself is badly out of step. What can he do?

In the end, the leadership will have to give ground. And they can find cover — it is not just the membership who want to stay in the EU, so do the unions. The charge is being led by one of the most leftwing union leaders— Manuel Cortes of the railway workers union, the TSSA. Mr Corbyn has a motive: he needs to hold the party together to gain power and one in six members say they would leave over the wrong Brexit policy.

The Labour left has long accused reformist leaders of betraying the membership — the irony is lost on no one that Mr Corbyn risks being accused of the greatest betrayal since Ramsay McDonald. And he has form — he gave way on the policy to back renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent, despite his life-long objection to nuclear weapons. Like Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin seeing Parisians marching on the street in 1848, it is time for Mr Corbyn to cry: “I am their leader. I must follow them!”

The writer is a political strategist