The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, has insisted there would be no contradiction between having a second referendum and respecting the result of the one in 2016, as another senior Labour MP warned the party would lose the trust of its traditional supporters if it backed such a vote.
Abbott said the party was “supporting a people’s vote strongly now because it’s the right thing to do and it’s the democratic thing to do”, though she said it was uncertain that remain would win a fresh poll.
“Now, at minutes to midnight on these negotiations, the Tories have plunged into their leadership contest so we get no sense out of them for a few months. We think it’s important to foreground the people’s vote,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
"There is no inherent contradiction between respecting the referendum and having a People's Vote."
— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) May 28, 2019
Shadow home secretary @HackneyAbbott says Labour would want a general election otherwise would support another Brexit vote#r4today | @bbcnickrobinson | https://t.co/cZY6yGVr6f pic.twitter.com/qm9mHJu7s0
Earlier on Tuesday, the Labour MP Lisa Nandy said a second referendum would lead to the country voting for no deal with the EU and that it would destroy trust in Labour.
The MP for Wigan told Today: “I think we’ve got to wake up to the seriousness not just of what we’re about to do to the Labour party, but what we’re about to do to the country because I strongly suspect that if there is a second referendum people here would come out and vote in fairly large numbers and probably vote for no deal.
“There is a huge frustration amongst Labour voters who voted leave in towns like mine to see leading figures from the Labour party out calling for a second referendum before there has been any serious attempt to implement the result of the first.”
Abbott said there was “no inherent contradiction between respecting the result of the referendum and having a people’s vote, not least because it’s still not sure how a people’s vote would pan out”.
“I’ve always argued that it’s perfectly possible that leave would win again but we’re supporting a people’s vote strongly now because it’s the right thing to do and it’s the democratic thing to do.”
Nandy said she believed her constituents were not shifting in favour of remain but towards no deal. “To most people the idea of a second referendum just seems quite absurd,” she said.
“People were asked what they think. You can see from the results that we had here that very few people have changed their minds and if there is a shift in this area of the country I think it’s towards no-deal Brexit.”
The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, pledged to support a second referendum on any Brexit deal, saying he was “listening very carefully” to both sides of the debate after the party fell behind the Liberal Democrats and also lost ground to the Greens in the European elections.
He said Labour’s preference would be a general election but any Brexit deal “has to be put to a public vote” – a shift from his previous position that a second referendum was being kept as an option on the table to stop a damaging Tory Brexit.
