The Labour Party still doesn’t understand that no government will recover from no-deal Brexit

For all the flaws in the way that 160,000 Conservative Party members are going about choosing its next leader and a prime minister on the behalf of the nation’s 46 million voters, the Labour party also seems to be suffering something of a democratic deficit.

One man, albeit a powerful one, is vetoing a second referendum on the EU. It is a throwback to the worst recesses of the power of the union barons. It must not stand.

As The Independent has reported, the leader of the Unite trade union, Len McCluskey was in effect set to block the party backing a Final Say referendum on Brexit at the shadow cabinet meeting by using his influence to stop it.

Despite hopes that the party leader himself, the representatives of the parliamentary party and the constituency membership could steer Labour in the right direction, they failed to do so. They kicked the can down the road.

It is a bad day for Labour and for the people they purport to represent. It is an even worse day for members of the Unite union, a disproportionate number of whom are employed in manufacturing and are thus vitally threatened by any variety of Brexit, but especially a no-deal Brexit. Under Brexit – and there is no such thing as a “jobs first” Brexit, or a Labour Brexit – there will be mass unemployment, a collapse of sterling, higher inflation and interest rates, lower house values and a crisis in the public finances and public services. We cannot borrow our way out of this one.

The blunt truth, which Mr McCluskey would do well to acknowledge, is that under Brexit thousands of Unite members and their families will, over the next few months and years, lose their jobs, see their families impoverished and – the older ones especially – spend the rest of the lives on whatever benefits a Conservative-Brexit Party-DUP coalition sees fit to dole out.

Lives will be blighted. There will be much hardship. Unite the Union, as it calls itself, will shrink along with what is left of British industry.

It doesn’t seem the smartest or most honourable of strategies for a body dedicated to making its members better off, and to represent their views, which tend to be anti-Brexit.

As the party’s deputy leader Tom Watson so rightly and bravely said the other day, the vast majority of Labour’s members, supporters, voters, friends, sympathisers, candidates and MPs across every region of Britain are passionately pro-European and are terrified, rightly, of Brexit.

They want their party to stand up for what it believes in. They are good democrats too, most of them, and they want to offer the people a Final Say on Brexit – deal or no deal. Now that we know what Brexit will mean, we can make an informed judgement. We have to have the option to remain.

And what is behind this adamantine resistance of Mr McCluskey and a few others in the Labour movement?

Let us be generous. Partly, it is sympathy for those in the north and east of England, in the midlands, in south Wales and in coastal communities who feel left behind, who feel that the EU and the “system” have done little for them in recent times. They are also the people who have tended to defect to Ukip and, nowadays, the Brexit Party. It is not too extreme to suggest that many blame immigration.

So what is the right response to their fears? Is it to tell them that all will be well when a socialist Britain is built, a land so secure and prosperous that being a full member the world’s largest single market is of no account? Or is it to persuade them that blaming Europe for their problems was and is wrong and that leaving the EU under any terms will merely make their plight worse? Socialism will not save them. No British government will be able to find the funds to repair the damage the mass closure of industries will bring.

Mr McCluskey and those who think like him sincerely desire to “respect” the 2016 EU Referendum verdict. That is fair; but a further referendum, to confirm the way forward, is no denial of democracy. It is not a betrayal of people’s wishes to ask them if they still wish to go ahead with something that may or may not be what they thought they were voting for three years ago.

If the Labour Party refuses to listen to the views of its own members and adhere to the spirit of its own conference decisions, then there are other people and other parties who are willing to do so. Labour does not have a divine right to exist or possess a monopoly on representing working people. It is being eaten alive. As we have seen in recent weeks, it is finding itself torn apart because it can never compete with Nigel Farage in outright hostility to Europe. Who could?

Neither can it compete with the Liberal Democrats, Welsh and Scottish nationalists and the Greens as a pro-European party. The policy adopted at the 2017 election – creative ambiguity – served it well enough then, when no-deal Brexit was a more distant nightmare. In more recent times, Labour’s 2018 conference policy, such as it is, is confused and meaningless, convincing neither side of the Brexit debate.

A rump of about 10 to 20 per cent of the electorate, Labour tribal loyalists, will soon be all that is left of the mighty cross-class coalitions that Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair once built to make Labour a reforming, progressive party of government. In London, Scotland and much of the south of England, Labour will be extinct. It is already dying there.

Jeremy Corbyn used to be celebrated and respected for standing up for his principles and respecting party democracy. There was hope – great hope – that he would rebuild his party’s fortunes and lead them into power. No longer. He is much closer now to presiding over the dereliction of a party than forming a majority government. A commitment to a Final Say referendum might transform his party’s fortunes. In any case, it is what Labour people yearn for. There is still a little time for Mr Corbyn to do what he is supposed to be in politics to do – the right thing.