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.

Yet the likes of Anna Soubry, who recently stated that she would vote on May’s deal, and Yvette Cooper — who does not support a People’s Vote and argued strenuously for activating Article 50 — are lionised as heroes of the Peoples Vote “movement.”

A situation in which 61 per cent of Labour constituencies voted to leave (according to Chris Hanretty at Royal Holloway) but only 24 per cent of the Labour electorate in voted to leave (Ipsos Mori, June 20 2017) is one that any Labour leadership would struggle with.

But instead of addressing the leadership’s concerns over this, and convincing them that Labour can back another referendum and win the next general election (although to my mind there is no convincing evidence for this view), the campaign focuses instead on the Labour membership, with Corbyn presented as the primary obstacle to a People’s Vote.

No less than five major polls of the wider public released in January showed a consistent opposition by over 40 per cent of the electorate against a second referendum that included an option to Remain — ICM Research and SkyData on the 18th (46 per cent and 48 per cent opposed respectively), two ComRes polls on the 15th and 17th (47 per cent and 48 per cent opposed respectively, and YouGov on the 8th (49 per cent opposed).

“Don’t Knows” in these polls range from a high of 18 per cent (ICM Research) to a low of 14 per cent (SkyData). Given results such as these present a larger “oppose” and “don’t know” combination against a second referendum than the 52 per cent by which Leave won the 2015 referendum, the People’s Vote campaign should pause for thought. But no.

Wilful delusion is one explanation and probably accounts for a great deal of it, but the disproportionate focus on Corbyn and the Labour membership to the detriment of engaging with this data speak to another motive. These are not tactics that can be explained by groups that seek simply to produce a second referendum by any means necessary.

The choice of tactics consistently, consciously emphasises a focus upon the opinions of the Labour membership, always framed in diametric opposition to Corbyn’s stance on Brexit, to the exclusion of all else.

We are asked to believe that a membership that voted for Corbyn as leader in 2015, as opposed to other far more pro-EU candidates, then voted for him as leader in 2016 against a challenger — Owen Smith — who promised to attempt to appeal Article 50, and then voted for Corbyn’s Labour in 2017 and not the supreme party of Remain, the Liberal Democrats, conceptualise Brexit as Remain or Corbyn.

This drive for an either/or presentation of the membership’s views on Corbyn and Brexit can be seen by an ongoing mendacity in reporting polling relating to Brexit by leading pro-Remain newspapers to a degree that goes far beyond simply amplifying pro-Remainer voices within the membership.

For example, the Guardian, reporting on the ESRC/YouGov poll into the Labour membership’s opinion on a second referendum on the day the findings were released (January 2 2019), reported the finding that if a new referendum was called, 88 per cent of Labour members would vote Remain — yet did not report the response to “Do you support or oppose the stance that the Labour Party have taken towards Brexit?” where 47 per cent of the membership were in support, and 29 per cent in opposition.

In contrast, a Survation poll on January 12 2019, specifically with relation to broader polling, asked “Imagine the Labour Party called for a second referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. How would you vote?” That scenario resulted in a decrease from 41 per cent to 39 per cent for Labour, and an increase for the Tories from 38 per cent to 40 per cent.

These findings were recently reiterated with a leaked poll by Populus, commissioned by none other than the People’s Vote campaign itself, finding that 11 per cent of Labour voters would be less likely to vote for the party, as opposed to only 9 per cent of Conservatives switching, if Labour adopted a Stop Brexit stance. The response from the People’s Vote crowd to these stark facts? Deafening silence.

By avoiding any attempt to convince the wildly popular left leadership now in control of Labour with a huge mandate from the membership that adopting a second referendum will not cost Labour the next general election, the People’s Vote conspiracy plots a collision course between “remainia” in the ranks and the rocks of electoral reality – with the right wing hoping to pick the wreckage of the crash.

Sam Edwards is a Labour and Momentum activist in south-east England.