Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party is bracing itself for a major backlash from Labour voters if it backs a second Brexit referendum, senior aides to the Labour leader have told Business Insider.
The Labour leadership is under growing pressure from senior party figures and the membership to back a so-called People’s Vote if Theresa May’s Brexit deal is defeated in the House of Commons next week.
Corbyn is committed to the possibility of campaigning for another referendum if all other options — including its first preference of an early general election — fail to win enough parliamentary support.
The Labour for a People’s Vote campaign told BI this week that they believe doing so would gift the party an additional 1.5 million votes and 70 seats at the next election.
However, some of those close to Corbyn are deeply sceptical about such predictions and fear that committing to a new vote would in reality trigger a wave of anger towards the Labour party and its leader, jeapordising its chances of winning the next general election.
“We would be badly hit,” one adviser to Corbyn told BI. “Right now the political narrative is directed towards ‘why aren’t we backing a Peoples Vote? We need these two million votes’ or whatever.
“But what happens if we back a People’s Vote and then we get resignations from the shadow cabinet?”
“What happens if you get loads of Labour MPs in the North of England saying this is a betrayal of the working classes who are being told to vote again until they give the right answer?
“That would totally change the game and we would be up against this betrayal narrative.”
Sources close to Corbyn told BI that the party had conducted private polling and focus groups in marginal seats which suggested there was no real appetite for a second vote.
“We’ve got polls showing that there are broadly 70% of the population who are bored by Brexit and just want politicians to get on with it. Theresa May has clearly got those same polls because she is saying the same thing,” the aide said.
The party has been conducting polling and focus groups of voters in marginal seats in the Midlands about which way the party should go.
“We’ve done some private focus groups of soft Remain and soft Leave voters in the Midlands where there are a lot of marginal seats,” one aide told BI.
“And while Leave voters are all against a second referendum, Remain voters are also really sceptical as well. Those voters think it would be a cynical move, because people have already voted on this and they think ‘well why hasn’t this already been sorted out?”
Corbyn’s allies believe the issue risks preventing Corbyn from reaching Number 10.
“Here we are with our best ever chance of electing a socialist prime minister and we’re being dragged into something that will make it harder to achieve that,” one ally of Corbyn told BI.
The Labour Leave campaign, which represents the party’s small number of MPs who are enthusiastic supporters of Brexit, held a briefing this week warning that the party risked being “decimated” if it backs a second referendum.
“If Labour goes down the route of supporting another referendum, we will cease to be able to call ourselves the Labour Party, because the working class in this country do not support continued membership of the EU,” Brendan Chilton, Labour councillor and supporter of Labour Leave, said on Thursday.
“We’ll become the party of capital. We’ll probably be decimated in our heartland seats. We have seats in the Midlands and the North with very slim majorities — they’d go.
“It would be a death sentence to the Labour Party outside of London and metropolitan areas.”