Lord Adonis tells Wimbledon campaigners to ‘keep up the pressure’ on People’s Vote
Anti-Brexit campaigner Lord Adonis declared the government’s calamitous day in parliament on Tuesday a ‘decisive move towards a people’s vote’ at a meeting in Wimbledon.
The former Labour minister delivered a rallying speech to a crowd of around 100 campaigners at Wimbledon Park Hall on Tuesday night, just hours after Theresa May’s government were ‘humiliated’ by losing three crucial votes in the House of Commons.
Lord Adonis compelled those in attendance to ‘keep up the pressure’ and called for a ‘popular front’ of cooperation between different parties.
He said: “It’s now clear that we can choose to stay in the EU without further negotiations. It’s also clear that Theresa May has lost control of parliament.
“The question is what happens now? I think there’s only one credible choice and that’s a people’s vote with the option to remain. We have a pathway to winning. I can see the way to winning. But we are not there yet.”
The event was jointly organised by the Lambeth and Wandsworth & Merton branches of the European Movement UK – a nationwide network of groups campaigning for a second Brexit referendum.
Lord Adonis said: “I’m hoping to give confidence to all of the campaigners for the People’s Vote that we can win and seeking to convert those who voted to leave two years ago.”
One of the main criticisms levelled at the People’s Vote campaign is that a second vote would undermine democracy and betray Brexit voters.
“The point I make all the time is the people cannot betray the people. We’re saying the people should make the decision and there can’t be anything more democratic than that,” Lord Adonis said.
“Just as when you buy a house you get the survey done. A large proportion of house sales fall through when you realise you’ve got dry rot, the neighbours from hell, or that the roof is falling. We are doing exactly the same as a country now.
“People couldn’t vote on the whole deal and knowing what it meant for them two years ago because it didn’t exist until now. Now that it does exist we have to decide as a country whether we are going to adopt it or not.”
The former infrastructure tsar, who resigned from the National Infrastructure Commission in December 2017 over May’s handling of negotiations, said he expected Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party’s non-committal stance on Brexit to change.
He said: “The fundamental problem Jeremy has with the EU is that it’s not a Latin American liberation movement. It doesn’t immediately get Jeremy’s juices going.
“But my view is that we will get Labour support for the referendum and Jeremy will be out there campaigning for it.”
Green Party member Alban Thurston, 61, said: “Today is yet another crack in this iceberg of immobility. The incoherencies of Brexit really are coming to the fore. The whole iceberg is crumbling into the sea. These developments have brought a people’s vote much much closer.
“We are a very very broken country and in some ways the debate over the two years shows what a broken nation we are. Lord Adonis talks about ways of healing this.”
Chairperson of the Wandsworth branch, Helen Rennie-Smith, said: ‘It’s really valuable to get this sort of input, particularly on a day that has been so eventful in parliament. It’s so exciting and raises morale.”
Campaigns organiser, Ben Austin, said: “Nights like tonight act as a good drawcard for members of the local community in Wimbledon to engage with us.
“You need to do all sorts of activities and getting a big name of the People’s Vote to come talk to us is quite impressive. We want people to feel excited about the campaign.”
Lord Adonis was signing copies of his new book ‘Saving Britain: How We Must Change to Prosper in Europe’ co-written with Will Hutton, principal of Hertford College, Oxford.
Current odds for a second Brexit referendum taking place are 6/5 according to Sky Bet.
January 12, 2019 @ 11:16 am
I was among 100 or so voters attending this speaker event, and I’m quoted in Mr Fullerton’s report. He gives a good account. Though their leaders fed them lie after lie, Brexiteers had a wide range of reasons, I fully accept, for their votes. Racists & Empire sentimentalists aside, some of those reasons were well founded. A Westminster-originated decade of austerity for industrial towns leading to ‘crap-life syndrome’, coupled with 40 years of Westminster-originated neglect of infrastructure, government & prosperity for communities outside the South East’s affluent hot-house. The EU sought to mitigate Westminster’s neglect, through regional grants. Brexiteers’ quarrels are with Westminster, its neglect, its remoteness, its 68% of votes wasted at GE2017 through a 19th-century voting system, the least representative in an advanced western democracy, and its too-broad parties, relics of the early 20th century. Sovereignty has always lain with Parliament, and Britain has been outvoted in the EU Council of Minister fewer than 5 times in 30 years. That the uneducated & the old, dead at the rate of 700,000 a year since 2016, should now decide the future’s of the young, is unacceptable. Absent a Corbyn leadership fantasising his own unicorns in a laughable ‘Brexit for Jobs’, Britain needs a People’s Vote. Wimbledon’s MP Stephen Hammond, a decent man, must defy the dinosaurs of his Conservative Association, defy his paymaster the PM, and show the courage of his neighbour Justine Greening, of Dominic Grieve, of Sarah Woolaston, of Anna Soubry, of Philip Leigh & Philip Johnson, of Antoinette Sandbach. Not a vote on Brexit, this is a vote on what his party has delivered in 30 months of negotiating a Brexit the Brexiteers under Dominic Cummings never bothered to define. Why should Conservatives vote to make their country and their constituents poorer?