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The shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, has attempted to calm Labour dismay at Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement that “we can’t stop Brexit”, by insisting the option of campaigning for a second referendum was still on the table.
The senior Labour politician said the vote to leave the EU “ought to be abided by” and that there were still “several stages” before the party backed a “people’s vote”, but that “all the options remain on the table”.
Corbyn angered Labour MPs and supporters when he said Brexit could not be halted in an interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel on Friday in which he also urged the entire country to recognise why people voted to leave.
The Labour leader then ruled out backing a second referendum when asked on Saturday whether he agreed with the former Conservative minister Jo Johnson, who quit over Brexit last week demanding a fresh vote. “We can’t stop it. The referendum took place. Article 50 has been triggered. What we can do is recognise the reasons why people voted leave. The issue now has to be how we bring people together,” he said.
Labour has reached an uneasy internal truce on Brexit after members who supported remain left open the possibility of backing a second referendum if it could not force a general election.
However, Corbyn and his senior shadow ministers have long held more eurosceptic views, with deep concerns over state aid rules among other issues, while two-thirds of Labour MPs represent seats that backed leave at the referendum.
Thornberry told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: “Theresa May is simply giving us a devil in the deep blue sea – she’s saying you can either fall off a cliff or get on this bridge to nowhere, and you’re going to have to vote on that.
“That’s not a meaningful vote. That’s not an injection of democracy. We say if you’re going to give us that, we refuse to play that sort of game and, frankly, if you can’t come up with a decent suggestion then we should have a general election.
“If we don’t have a general election then yes, of course, all the options remain on the table and we would campaign for there to be a people’s vote. There are several stages before we get there.”
The shadow foreign secretary reiterated that Labour would not back Theresa May’s deal unless it pbaded the party’s six tests, underlining once again how the challenge of getting her Brexit agreement through parliament – including past her own backbenchers – could be May’s biggest of all.
She told the prime minister: “You cannot simply come to the House of Commons with a bit of nonsense that makes no sense. You cannot expect the Labour party to save you from your own backbenchers who are saying this deal makes no sense – and everybody knows it doesn’t make sense.”
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