Tom Watson thinks Labour should back Remain, but the real solution is a Final Say

Well, someone had to say it. Someone, that is, towards the top of the Labour Party. Even if the party’s actual leader studiously and stubbornly refuses to accept the reality of his party’s views on Brexit, at least his deputy, Tom Watson, is brave enough to do so.

He should be reassured that, while his outspoken remarks may not endear him to Jeremy Corbyn and the curious clique that surrounds him, he speaks for many, many millions of Labour supporters, members, voters and parliamentarians from Cardiff Bay to Brussels. They have been heartbroken by their party’s betrayal of its European values.

It is in fact little more than a truism – though a powerful and hazardous one – to repeat in today’s Labour Party that Labour members’ “hearts are Remain” and, more to the point, it is not too late to reverse the UK’s exit from the European Union.

Words that would have seemed unremarkable a few years ago are regarded as heresy in today’s Labour Party. As Mr Watson says: “Pro-European is who we are and who we have always been. Our members are Remain. Our values are Remain. Our hearts are Remain.

“Our future doesn’t need to be Brexit. We can change our future. We can put Britain back at the heart of Europe again.”

Like Rory Stewart in the Conservative Party, Mr Watson will win little thanks from some of his colleagues for telling a few simple truths, but it is greatly to his credit and honour that he is telling his party what some of them do not wish to hear. The notions of a “Labour Brexit”, a “jobs first” Brexit, one that “honours” the result of the 2016 referendum but which retains all the existing benefits and imposes none of the costs are chimeras – a con trick on Labour voters. They are first cousins to the fantasies now being batted around in the Conservative leadership election. The notion that the unique political skills of some new leader replacing Theresa May can transform matters and deliver the undeliverable is utterly foolish at best, dishonest at worst. It is, to borrow a phrase Boris Johnson once meant in jest, to be in favour of having our cake and eating it. It is not serious. It is now a sick joke.

No more and no less than Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Michael Gove or Dominic Raab, Mr Corbyn does not possess the secret ingredient that will transform the minds of Macron, Merkel and Barnier. Force of personality alone or cuddliness is insufficient to change the present mess of contradictions into a workable plan. It is true that Labour has fewer red lines than the likes of Mr Raab, but then Labour also has different priorities, such as state aid and state intervention, that the EU Commission would find just as impossible to approve as some of the Conservatives’ more unrealistic demands. Nor is Labour very clear about its immigration policy.

If Labour cannot and will not go so far as Mr Watson wants, and “come out” as a fully fledged Remain party, then it could at least stick more faithfully to the policy position actually agreed, if tortuously, at party conference last autumn, and reiterated by the NEC. Mr Corbyn could, in other words, accept that the chances of the Conservatives cheerfully agreeing to hold a general election are zero. He might also quietly consider that, in reality, a general election might well damage Labour too, given the unpredictability of events in our four/five-party system. The revival of the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, the strength of the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and the arrival of the insurgent Brexit party will yield random results under the British first-past-the-post system. In some circumstances it might yield an accidental Corbyn landslide – but it might also pin Labour back to an ever smaller heartland and leave Mr Johnson with a working majority.

What the swings of opinion in recent electoral contests have all proved – the local elections, the European parliamentary contests and the Peterborough by-election too – is that Labour is being squeezed by the Liberal Democrats and by Greens, nationalists and the Brexit Party. The constructive ambiguity that served Mr Corbyn so well in the snap election of 2017 is wearing thinner by the day.

The electorate, now that it sees what Brexit means, is coming to the conclusion that a soft Brexit is not something it especially wants – it is the worst of all worlds. That goes for the May plan, but also the variations on it suggested by five out of the six aspirant Tory leader candidates and by Mr Corbyn.

A second referendum, which would face the electorate with a stark choice between Brexit as we now know it, and Remain, is inevitable while parliament and the Tory party stand at an impasse.

Mr Watson calls a Final Say popular vote on Brexit “the least worst option” around, but he is wrong. It may be an acrimonious affair, but elections often are. With the divisions already ingrained, there is a democratic imperative at the heart of this that needs to be recognised.

Even if parliament could make a decision, it would still morally and politically require popular assent, as sovereignty now rests, after the 2016 experience, with the people as a whole. Parliament is too enfeebled to decide, but the people can and must do so.

When the time comes for a fresh vote, then Labour should do right thing, and put its people first. A Final Say referendum remains the best option.