BRIGHTON, United Kingdom, Sept 23, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Britain’s main
opposition Labour Party prepared to vote Monday on a new Brexit strategy that
could unite its warring factions and avoid a potential drubbing in early
polls.
Britain is hurtling toward its October 31 departure from the European
Union without an exit agreement and facing the threat of border disruptions
that the government admits could cause food shortages and spark civil unrest.
Yet the same disputes over ways out of the crisis that saw Prime Minister
Boris Johnson’s right-wing Conservatives lose their working majority — and
make a general election appear inevitable — are also fraying Labour on the
left.
Top members of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow government argued at
their annual conference Sunday that they were a fundamentally European party
with an obligation to get the 2016 Brexit referendum results reversed.
But unions and a powerful leftist lobby that helped Corbyn become Labour
leader in 2015 want the party to embrace its working-class base of supporters
who back Britain charting its own course.
The debate is being waged with opinion polls showing voters confused and
dismayed by Labour’s muddled stance on the biggest issue to face the country
in generations.
One survey released this weekend put Labour 15 percentage points behind
Johnson’s Conservatives.
Another showed Labour effectively tied for second with the Liberal
Democrats — a resurgent group that beat Corbyn’s party in May’s European
elections and is now campaigning to cancel Brexit.
“We must not just campaign to remain but we must lead the campaign to
remain,” Labour’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Emily Thornberry argued on the
sidelines of the party gathering in the south coast resort city of Brighton.
Unite union boss Len McCluskey shot back that pro-EU party leaders like
Thornberry should “step aside from the shadow cabinet” if they disagreed with
Corbyn’s approach.
“Everybody needs to be singing from the same hymn sheet,” he told Sky
News.
– Letting voters decide –
Corbyn has persevered with efforts to embrace both wings of his party by
leaving the ultimate decision on Brexit to voters and campaigning instead on
bread and butter issues such as schools and jobs.
“Please remember why people voted leave, why people voted remain, but also
remember there is more that unites all of those people — over austerity,
over investment, over education, over housing, over health, over a green
industrial revolution — than there is that divides them,” Corbyn told the
BBC.
The party’s executive committee approved a draft Brexit policy proposed by
Corbyn that would see Britain remain in a much closer economic alliance with
Europe than provided by former prime minister Theresa May’s now-discarded
deal.
Labour would then stage a second referendum in which voters would be given
the choice of either backing the new Brexit agreement or staying in the EU.
But the draft cited by UK media said the party would only decide whether
to campaign for its own Brexit deal after it takes power in a general
election.
The exact text of the motion that will be voted on by the Labour party
congress Monday was being debated at a special meeting late into Sunday night
behind closed doors.
Corbyn is due to conclude the party congress with a keynote address on
Wednesday.