Brexit bind could hurt Labour in a snap election

Kylie MacLellan -

Retired electrician Steve Oliver has voted for Britain’s opposition Labour Party all his life but if the political crisis over leaving the European Union leads to an early election, he will not be

doing so again.

Oliver wants to leave the EU and, more than three years after he and around 17.4 million other Britons voted to divorce Britain’s largest trading partner, he cannot support Labour’s position that there should be another Brexit referendum.

“I can’t understand for the life of me why Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of my party, is trying to force down this vote. Brexit has been voted for by the public,” the 64-year-old said as he strolled through the local market in Bitterne, a suburb of Southampton in southern England.

“If that man had any sense he should realise that if he tried to do that he’d never get (voted) in.” With opposition parties threatening to collapse the government in a no-confidence vote and media reports of Prime Minister Boris Johnson war-gaming an early election if parliament tries to thwart his Brexit plans, expectations Britain could be heading to the polls this autumn are growing.

The parliamentary seat of Southampton Itchen is a top Labour target and the kind of place it needs to be successful if it is going to win a national election.

It is the governing Conservatives’ most marginal seat — incumbent lawmaker Royston Smith held it by just 31 votes in 2017 — and it was represented by Labour for more than two decades before Smith first won it in 2015.

But it also voted by 60 per cent to 40 per cent in favour of leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum, making it more pro-Brexit than Britain as a whole, which voted 52 per cent to 48 per cent to withdraw from the bloc. Oliver says he would now vote for the Brexit Party, led by prominent ‘Leave’ campaigner Nigel Farage, which triumphed in this year’s European Parliament elections in Britain by riding a wave of voter anger over the failure to deliver Brexit.

The chances of a snap national election rose markedly this week when new premier Johnson — a Brexit campaigner who has vowed to leave the EU on October 31, with or without a deal with Brussels — enraged opponents of a no-deal exit by ordering the suspension of parliament for more than a month.

However as voters have become increasingly polarised along Brexit lines, Labour has suffered public and political criticism of Corbyn’s strategy of trying to keep both Leave and Remain voters onboard by not siding with either camp. Instead Corbyn, a long-time eurosceptic in a party where a majority of members oppose Brexit, has sown confusion with his ambiguous position and alienated many voters on both sides.

Before a 2017 national election, which the Conservatives narrowly won under then Prime Minister Theresa May, Labour said it accepted the referendum result and would seek to negotiate an exit deal that kept the country closely aligned to the EU.

As Brexit paralysis set in after May’s withdrawal deal was repeatedly rejected by parliament earlier this year, Corbyn pushed for another election to break the deadlock — but, under pressure from within his deeply divided party, has now also backed holding a second referendum on any Brexit deal.

How Labour would campaign in such a referendum would depend on the deal, he has said, leaving open the possibility a Labour government could negotiate a new Brexit agreement but then campaign against it in favour of Remain. — Reuters