Jeremy Corbyn

Boris Johnson is likely to become the new Tory leader and prime minister, some time in the week after 22 July. If by some fluke he throws the leadership contest, almost surely someone equally hard-Brexit will win. This sharpens the choices on Brexit, and narrows further the space for temporising.

Johnson is less a right-wing ideologue, and more a mainstream opportunist, than Mario Salvini in Italy. But his choice is to project the Tories so as to appear as Brexiter as Farage (and thus recoup votes). His choice is to cut away from the EU and to veer towards Trump.

Labour’s victory in the 6 June Peterborough by-election has reduced the threat of a right-wing challenge to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership challenge. The Peterborough result was won by a vigorous and well-resourced campaign. But it gives no grounds for complacency.

Labour’s victory in the Peterborough by-election on 6 June was of course good news. It was also bad news. It seemed to vindicate the Labour leadership’s political cloak-work and shilly-shallying on the EU.

It wasn’t just Alistair Campbell types, Blairites, who defected from Labour to the Lib Dems or the Greens in the 23 May Euro-elections. Many left-wing Labour supporters defected too, or didn’t vote, disgusted by Labour’s equivocation on Brexit.

In the 23 May Euro-election, Labour, by not putting their lot in with the Remain parties, muddied the waters and stopped a clear Remain vote emerging.

The Labour leaders also allowed the Lib Dems to detox. For the first time since the 2010-15 coalition government, lots of people are willing to vote for them. That is damaging for Labour (though also for the Conservatives).

Comrade Corbyn!

Your wishy-washy politics on Brexit are usually explained as electoral manoeuvring in an attempt to attract both anti-Brexit internationalists and pro-Brexiters to the Labour Party. It is likely to satisfy neither. “Because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth”, as somebody said a long time ago. But even should your calculation here prove to be accurate, your approach is wrong in principle.

In the 18 May Morning Star, CPB (Communist Party of Britain) secretary Rob Griffiths indicts those he calls “Labour’s pro-EU fanatics”: “They have succeeded in scuppering the talks with the Tory government by demanding that a permanent customs union and a second referendum form part of any new Brexit package”.

According to all polls as we go to press on 21 May, the Brexit Party, the personal vehicle of the ex-Tory, ex-Ukip-leader, friend-of-Trump, right-winger Nigel Farage is set to come top in the European Parliament elections on 23 May. The Tories will do very badly. Labour will get a mediocre result, and according to one poll may even get fewer votes than the Lib-Dems.

Over 80 people turned out for a “Love Socialism Hate Brexit” meeting in Nottingham on 8 May, despite the Euro-election campaign being already underway. Many were students from the Nottingham Trent University, where the meeting was held. Every speaker from the platform, and almost every speaker from the floor, stressed their support for the post-2015 anti-austerity direction of the Labour Party, but deep concerned about fragmentation of Labour votes and Labour’s failure over Brexit to campaign against rampant nationalism.

You texted me saying “I am seriously considering voting Lib Dem in the European Elections. Can’t believe I’m writing this. Am I mad?”. My first response was “Yes”.

However I recognise that there are many people like you — lifelong Labour voters and people who supported Corbyn in the leadership elections — who are angry about Labour’s failure to support a remain position and a referendum on Brexit and find it unacceptable that Labour can enter European elections with no clear position on this key issue.