LABOUR must learn from the mistakes Syriza made in Greece, come clean about the incompatibility of Labour’s industrial and economic plans with membership of the EU, and above all avoid doing the establishment’s dirty work.

The genie is out. The people voted to leave the EU. Those who want to put the genie back in the bottle will have their fingers burned. Labour’s support for a second referendum and its declared willingness to contemplate abandoning Brexit if that is what it takes to stop a no-deal Brexit is a death wish. Workers have no truck with their “betters” trying to put them back in their place.

Having voted to leave the EU, those who make it their business to thwart Brexit fall in the same category as those who manoeuvre to hinder and obstruct a workplace strike that was agreed in a democratic vote of a trade union’s membership.

Labour should be careful not to get carried away with the remote possibility that a no-confidence motion in the government would force Johnson to resign with the Queen asking Corbyn to form a caretaker government tasked with arranging another public vote. It’s the ultimate poisoned chalice; Labour will be doing the dirty work of the elite just as Syriza did in Greece.

No-one expects those who voted Remain in the referendum to change their minds just because the vote went against them, but they are expected to accept the result and not to obstruct its implementation. The same goes for the Labour Party.

The Labour party is a Remain party. This of course has not been the case in the not so distant past and a fair proportion still follow the tradition of Attlee, Gaitskell and Benn who were deeply sceptical of continental plans for a united Europe with little democratic foundation.

Nonetheless, no-one expect the Labour Party to change to a Leave party just because the referendum went that way. However, workers expect it to accept the result — and it did.

In its election manifesto 2017, Labour promised to respect the outcome of the referendum on the EU. More recently, Jeremy Corbyn, in a letter to members clarifying the shadow cabinet’s position on Brexit, wrote: “As democrats, Labour accepted the result of the 2016 referendum.”

If this is the case, why then promise a public vote on a deal with Remain as an option — which can only be construed as an attempt to get the referendum result reversed. No wonder the public are confused. We must say no to a second referendum.

Confirmatory votes are nothing new. In the trade union movement, agreements with an employer are invariably ratified by members in a vote in which the choice is straightforward: accept or reject the outcome of negotiations.

No self-respecting trade union would put “abandon the original claim” as an option on such a confirmatory ballot. That would be seen a form of blackmail at best — or an attempt at betrayal at worst.

Yet that’s precisely what those who are calling for a second vote are proposing: put the deal to a public vote with abandoning Brexit as an option. If Labour follows such a route it will be found out; workers are no fools — they can smell betrayal a mile away. It’s one thing to oppose Brexit; it’s quite another to do it in an underhand way.

In bad faith some have gone so far as to suggest that even if a general election is called and Labour came to power and was able to negotiate its own deal to leave the EU, such a deal should be put to a public vote with Remain as an option and with Labour campaigning for that very option.

Labour will be seen as duplicitous, acting in bad faith. For if Labour is to campaign against its own deal in favour of Remain, then surely, the worse the deal it negotiates, the better the chances of winning support for Remain. A general election before Brexit is settled will be a disaster for Labour.

A general election may be on the cards soon and it’s only prudent for Labour to prepare for such a contingency — but to assume the result is in the bag is reckless; it certainly won’t be if it takes place on the back of a Brexit deal that has been blocked by lack of support from Labour MPs.

In such an election, if Labour campaigns to remain in the EU, it would be virtually indistinguishable from a revived Lib Dems; it will haemorrhage votes in the very constituencies that Labour is supposed to win votes by championing Remain. If Labour goes for respecting the 2016 referendum result — but promises to negotiate its own deal, it will be seen as pie in the sky, as chasing rainbows; the promise of an imaginary deal when there is a real one on offer would have little appeal. The prospect of more delay, years of uncertainty and chaos is not a vote winner.

The lessons from the debacle of Syriza in Greece must not go unlearned. Tsipras failed to level with the Greek people. He misled his people into thinking that Greece could defy the EU’s austerity demands while remaining a member of it.

Corbyn must not do the same; he must level with the British people that Labour’s plans for economic regeneration, nationalisation and state aid cannot be implemented in any meaningful way while Britain remains inside the EU.

Tsipras likened negotiations with Brussels following Syriza’s 2015 victory in the polls to a war. The same goes for negotiating Brexit. In a war, you prepare for every eventuality including a no-deal Brexit.

EU membership is incompatible with Labour’s industrial strategy. This is obvious from even a cursory look at the EU’s own website, which shows how difficult it will be to bring the railways back into public ownership — let alone water, electricity and other amenities.

Public ownership as such is not prohibited by EU rules — but it must operate in a competitive market under strict rules of competitive tendering, which makes Labour’s “public ownership under public control” impossible to achieve inside the EU. For rail, the EU has its “Rail Liberalisation” programme.

State aid is prohibited unless agreed by the commission. According to The Observer, one in four such requests are turned down, a high rate of rejection.

When you take into account the fact that member states would not ask for an exemption unless they thought it were likely to be granted, then the refusal rate is far more inhibitive than first meets the eye. The very fact that state aid is considered an “exemption” and not the norm should ring alarm bells to anyone who wishes to use state aid as a lever to revitalise our industrial base.

We need to get Brexit over the line. Labour MPs should stop the parliamentary antics, forming a government of “national unity” or joining up with opportunists like the SNP and anti-Corbyn outfits like the Lib Dems to stop us leaving on October 31; it will serve no purpose other than undermining the left in Parliament and the country.

If the Prime Minister brings back a deal to Parliament, Labour must not repeat the mistake it made when it failed to reach a compromise with Theresa May to allow her Withdrawal Agreement to go through parliament, a failure that increased the prospect of a no-deal Brexit — and helped to bring about the most right-wing government since Margaret Thatcher.

Labour MPs must get Brexit over the line at the next opportunity. Only then can a Corbyn government be elected to reset the political, social and economic future of the country.

Fawzi Ibrahim is a national officer for Trade Unionists Against the EU.