Labour braced for ‘good kicking’ in EU poll: McDonnell

LONDON: Labour is braced for a “good kicking” in the European Parliament elections, shadow chancellor John McDonnell has said.His comments come after deputy Labour leader Tom Watson said the party must “find some backbone” and fully commit to a second referendum on Brexit to have any chance of winning the next general election.McDonnell said he understood Watson’s frustration, but that the party had been right to “tread a really difficult road” of trying to bring Leave and Remain supporters back together. The shadow chancellor said Labour would pay an electoral price for that stance when European Parliament results were announced later in the day. McDonnell told Sky News: “I think we most probably will get a good kicking in the election results tonight. We’ll see. We are braced for that.”He added: “But, you know, we had to do the responsible thing. It was a hard road to follow. But someone had to be there and say ‘Can we bring the country back together again?’ And it would have been easy to go to one side, go to the Remain side and ignored all those people who voted Leave — that’s not the nature of our party.“We are the party that is trying to bring people back together again. That’s been difficult electorally for us in these elections, of course it has. But now we have got to move on.”Watson said he feared the results of the European elections would show that voters had deserted the party and blamed Labour’s ambiguous position on a public vote. The party must stop “hedging its bets” and urgently rethink its stance in order to realign itself with its members, he added.Writing in The Observer, he said: “For our party’s sake, but most of all for Britain’s sake, Labour needs to find some backbone on Brexit, find our voice — and do it fast.”He added: “Our performance (in the European elections) is a direct result of our mealy-mouthed backing for a public vote on Brexit when it is being demanded loud and clear by the overwhelming majority of our members and voters.“Polls show Labour has been losing up to four times more voters to parties giving full backing to a people’s vote than to (Nigel) Farage. And those same polls show we would have beaten him by a country mile if we had unambiguously backed a public vote on any form of Brexit.“Once results are in, we must channel our frustration into winning those voters back. Never again can Labour policy on the most crucial issue of our generation be on the wrong side of its members and voters.”Watson described the party’s stance on a second referendum as “a deliberate, self-defeating attempt to triangulate between different groups”.

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