Labour's Brexit madness 2.0

Any attempt to inveigle Britain back into the EU fold would play right into Nigel Farage's hands

You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

IF I WERE a Reform UK operative running a mole at the top of the Labour party, I would give him or her one simple instruction: restart the Brexit wars!

For nothing would be more likely to inflict electoral damage on Labour, and play right into the hands of Nigel Farage, than the reopening of the rancorous EU referendum debate.

Many will therefore be utterly perplexed that Labour appears to be embarking on that destructive course. After Wes Streeting told a Blairite thinktank that Brexit had been a ‘catastrophic mistake’, an under-pressure Andy Burnham quickly declared that he would not be advocating a return to the EU in the upcoming by-election in Leave-supporting Makerfield – only for footage of him doing exactly that at last year’s Labour conference to immediately resurface.

We’ve since seen other senior Labour figures pressed in interviews to reassure Leave voters that there would be no attempt in the future to reverse Brexit – and in some cases conspicuously failing to do so.

All of which means that, having previously proclaimed the debate dead, Labour is fighting the battle all over again – and is suspected by many of secretly organising to force Britain back into bed with Brussels. Reform UK must think all its Christmases have come at once.

I happen to be that rare thing in politics: a pro-Brexit Labour party member. People like me were once commonplace inside the party. But that was back in the days when a rich Eurosceptic seam ran through Labour, rooted in the principles of sovereignty and democracy, and articulated by titans such as Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Barbara Castle and Peter Shore. Nowadays, any Eurosceptic is about as welcome inside the party as a hedgehog would be at a nudist colony.