JOHN McDONNELL said on Sunday that Labour had to “get on with” changing its Brexit policy to one of backing a second referendum. This had to be done “sooner rather than later,” he told the BBC. The drift of the Labour Party towards an official position that supports a second referendum is bad news for democracy. It may also prove to be an electoral disaster for the Labour Party. It will certainly make Tony Blair’s political divorce of the party from Labour’s working-class traditions irreversible.

The second referendum will be a disaster for democracy because it is plainly an effort to reverse the result of the first without having implemented it. The Remainiacs’ tortured efforts to rebrand the second vote betray its essential illegitimacy. “Second referendum” obviously means “try again.” So its supporters renamed it “People’s Vote.” But the people kept telling them that we had already voted. So it became a “confirmatory vote,” in which Brexit won’t be on offer at all: only May’s “Brexit-in-name-only” Withdrawal Agreement or Remain. A second referendum would be a mockery of democracy on these grounds alone, but it’s worse than that. 

More than 85 per cent of MPs in this Parliament were elected on manifestos promising to implement the 2016 referendum. This was not some minor policy issue. It was a promise to implement a major constitutional change that the majority of the electorate voted for in a referendum Parliament itself enacted.