Andrew Adonis: Don’t leave Labour. Stay and fight for a people’s vote

In 1994 I faced one of the toughest choices of my political career: should I join the Labour Party or stay in the Liberal Democrats? Anguished, I asked Roy Jenkins, founder of the SDP and my hero and mentor, what I should do. Without a moment’s hesitation, he said “join the large social democratic party not the small one, and stick to it”. He was right in the situation we then faced.

Some are now confronted with the opposite choice: form a new centrist party or stay in Labour. As the standard bearer of a generation of pro-Europeans, and Britain’s only president of the European commission, I am sure that Roy would urge them to stay for one simple reason: Brexit.

The truth is that the strong political opposition to Brexit that those toying with a new centrist party seek can only come from the Labour Party. The essential step is a critical mass of parliamentary support for a people’s vote. Labour must lead the charge on this because Conservative MPs have a dangerous tendency to fall behind disastrous policies for political gain, and must be certain that they are on the winning side.

Look at the poll tax. It was madness for £550 a head to be paid by the residents of Hackney, rich and the unemployed alike, and yet only after two years of horror did Tory MPs see the existential threat to their political careers and overturn it. The same is happening with Brexit. The Tory ‘wets’ – George Freeman, Tom Tugendhat et al – are unashamedly backing Brexit in the hope that their ‘new generation’ will take over when the dust settles.

Only Labour can provide the decisive parliamentary leadership needed to fill this void and give sensible Conservative MPs a route to averting disaster. If it splits, Brexit will be all but certain. Never mind extending the lifetime of this terrible Tory government, enabling Brexit would be enough to make a new centrist party a mistake of truly historic magnitude.

Brexit also illuminates a deeper reason to stick with the Labour Party. It is that Labour’s factions and divisions can always be brought together behind the right course of action. It is often forgotten that before 1945, the Labour Party was bitterly divided, with Nye Bevan and Herbert Morrison viciously feuding from each wing of the party amidst overt scheming to replace Clement Attlee as leader. Yet when the time came, the whole party united behind the post-war vision of reform that delivered the NHS.

The same is happening this September. The Labour Party is rallying around the people’s vote from all sides – just look at the long list of local Labour parties that have submitted motions to conference calling for a public vote on the final Brexit deal. This issue has crossed factional lines. When all the strands of the Labour Party pull together in this way, they cannot be ignored. TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady and London mayor Sadiq Khan, the central weathervanes of Labour, have now backed a people’s vote, and I am certain that the leadership will follow suit.

The lesson I always learnt from Tony Blair is ‘get the policy right and the politics will follow’. This is true of the Labour Party itself. In 1945, that policy was the programme set out by the Beveridge Reform. In 1997, it was modernising the country. Today, it is a people’s vote on Brexit and every member should have the confidence to stick with Labour to see it delivered.

Andrew Adonis is a Labour peer and former education minister and transport secretary.