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The ‘People’s Vote’ is a right-wing wrecking operation
In the first of a two part investigation, SAM EDWARDS analyses how the right wing of the Labour Party – with allies outside – is plotting a course for disaster using the People's Vote campaign
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
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AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
ON October 19 2018, the right-wing pressure group inside Labour, Progress, tweeted, whilst sharing an advertisement for the “People’s Vote” march of the next day, that: “Progressives don’t get lie-ins anymore — not until everything is back to normal.” But what is “normal” and what is the strategy of the People’s Vote campaign to get there – and where does it leave Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left?
It is clearly a plot from the right. Solomon Hughes in the pages of the Morning Star has identified leading figures from New Labour, Cameronite Conservatism and the Liberal Democrats as key personnel in Open Britain, Our Future Our Choice and the People’s Vote, as well as some of the most vocal supporters of the “chicken coup” in June 2016. But what is their strategy?
Despite a People’s Vote being the least likely of all the options available, pursuing a second referendum offers an obvious advantage to anti-Corbynites of potentially stopping Brexit without an election and hence preventing Corbyn from benefiting. More than that, it aims to weaken not just Corbyn, but the entire concept that the left-wing of the Labour Party speaks for the membership.
To do this, the campaign hides the necessity of changing the parliamentary arithmetic in order to get Parliament to approve a second referendum on Brexit.
At the time of writing, 71 Labour MPs have come out in support of a second referendum, plus nine Lib Dem MPs (excluding Norman Lamb and Stephen Lloyd), one Green MP, 35 SNP MPs, four Plaid Cymru MPs and one independent MP (Jared O’Mara). Adding to this the eight core Tory Remainer MPs and the 30 Tory MPs identified as “reachable” by the Peoples Vote campaign and that’s 161 MPs.
That is not even a quarter of the House.
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