forget about it.
Three, shall we say unfortunate, years later, there is no point trying to understand anything Corbyn says
about Brexit, without viewing it through the prism that all of it has always been a deception, not merely
from day one, but from sentence one on day one. And here he was, in a community centre in Corby, saying
again that, “We will do everything necessary to stop a no-deal Brexit.”
Which is all very well, but when you happen to have personally watched him walk through the voting
lobbies in the House of Commons, three times, to vote down the deal that would have stopped no deal,
there is a kind of deja ja ja vu on these occasions. “If you’re serious about stopping a no-deal Brexit,” he said,
“then back my motion of no confidence, to stop this government taking us over a cliff edge on the 31
October.”
And if you’re serious about stopping no-deal Brexit, try not to dwell too long on whether or not you’ve
already tried to stop no-deal Brexit by backing a Corbyn motion of no confidence in the government, a few
months ago, and whether or not, generally speaking, that’s done you much good on the whole stopping no-
deal Brexit front.
When, three years ago, in the middle of his most high-profile TV appearance of the referendum campaign,
Corbyn told Channel 4’s The Last Leg that he cared, “oooh about seven out of ten” about actually winning
the campaign he was leading, it seemed, at the time, to be a moment of madness. But, there’s an election
coming up, and “oooh seven out of ten” is now official party strategy. “Brexit is the framework of the crisis
we face,” he said, “but the problems we face are much, much deeper.”
The NHS. Austerity. Tax cuts for the rich. And so on. And so on. Just like a few months ago, when the
Corbyn schtick was all about telling Mike from Mansfield and Bob from Brixton that even though one voted
leave and the other remain, they were both one and the same, Corbyn still thinks his best hope is to try and
convince the country that, just like him, it doesn’t actually care about Brexit.
There are various U-shaped graphs on professor John Curtice’s laptop that point to the likelihood of success
with this particular strategy. In any event, by mid-afternoon on Monday 19 August, Labour’s current Brexit
position is thus. A vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson, followed by a general election in which Labour
would offer a second referendum with the option to remain. It would also, somehow, then negotiate a better
Brexit deal than the current one, and the EU’s persistent refusal to renegotiate the deal would magically not
apply to Corbyn’s new government in the way that it does to Johnson’s.
And once it had secured this superior deal, it would then campaign against its own deal in a second
referendum, in favour of remaining instead. Whether you choose to believe this last bit or not is frankly up
to you. But, at least for the time being, it would appear to be the truth.