Northeast MPs were right to rebel over Brexit – the entire Labour Party should take note and change its stance

With the Tories’ divisions on Brexit all nakedly on display, the fact that Labour isn’t exactly united on the subject often gets pushed into the background.

To a certain extent, its cracks have been papered over by dint of it being in opposition, which has helped facilitate it having a rather malleable policy that seems to change by the day.

The current iteration of it has the party saying it’d be a bit more flexible than Theresa May were it in power, but will otherwise do what she says on big issues like membership of the single market and customs union.

That is looking increasingly untenable at a time when Parliamentary arithmetic provides an opportunity for those who believe in putting the best interests of the country, and the people that live here, first to restore a little sanity to the process.

The negative consequences of Brexit are also slowly but surely being realised, and it goes beyond falling from the top to the bottom of the OECD’s growth leader board when we were in first place.

Big employers that make things and pay their employees well for helping them to do that are starting to vote with their feet.

It is against that backdrop that five Northeastern Labour MPs have decided that it’s time to break ranks with Jeremy Corbyn, who seems to feel keeping the smallish minority of Labour voters that backed Leave onside is more important than the people he says he wants to help, and join the call for a people’s vote on the final deal.

This could be seen as courageous on the part of Phil Wilson, Paul Williams, Bridget Phillipson, Anna Turley and Catherine McKinnell. The region they represent voted heavily for Brexit in the EU referendum after all.

But that region stands to suffer the most from it. The government’s own research says so. More to the point, so do the likes of Nissan, Hitachi and the movers and shakers in Teeside’s chemical industry. They want to be part of a single market that contains more than half a billion potential customers in it. With businesses to think of, that’s perfectly understandable.

As such, a side effect of what is essentially a Tory project is that it could easily finish what Margaret Thatcher started by gutting what manufacturing remains in the north of England. And in the rest of the UK too.

If you are an MP in a region that relies heavily on that industry to provide good private sector jobs, facing their future replacement with call centres at best, what do you do?

If you genuinely care about that region you have to act regardless of whether that pisses Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour whips off.

It’s actually rather refreshing to see a group of MPs taking risks to put their constituents and the country’s interests first.

Some might even see it as patriotic, a word that gets lobbed around a lot these days but mostly by people who put their egos, ideological purity and careers way ahead of the country they get all dewy eyed over.

In calling for a people’s vote, the five are also acting in the interests of democracy, one of the central tenants of which is the right to change one’s mind in response to changing circumstances.

The realisation that the Tories, who have repeatedly kicked the North where the sun doesn’t shine, have sold you a pup would be one of those.

Were a vote to be offered, the Northeast’s reaction might still prove to be yeah Brexit, even with the problems that are being thrown up by it. It would hardly be the first time people had voted in favour of a suicidal course that is against the best interests of them and their children.

But as the five have correctly pointed out, they ought to at least be given the chance to offer a judgement on what the government eventually presents them with.

I still don’t think they’ll get it.

Theresa May and her unruly Brexiteer mob talk a lot about the “will of the people” because they don’t have any other good arguments for what they’re doing.

It’s just that they’re not too keen on testing it. Democracy? Yah boo sucks to you! Perhaps the action of the five could ultimately contribute to forcing some of it upon her, and them. For the sake of the five’s region, and the country May’s wretched government is bent upon wrecking, we can but hope.