McDonnell: People’s Vote is ‘inevitable’

There had been speculation that senior Labour figures were preparing to back a People’s Vote if Theresa May’s deal was defeated – with Robert Peston claiming that Corbyn would make his party the ‘champion of another referendum or People’s Vote’.

This appeared to be supported in a new interview between John McDonnell and the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, where the shadow chancellor McDonnell said that he believed there could now be another Brexit referendum.

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He said: ‘We should have a general election but that’s very difficult. If that’s not possible we’ll be calling upon the government then to join us in the public vote…  that’s the sequence I think that we’ll inevitably go through over this period.’

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Kuenssberg asked: ‘It is inevitable that if a vote of no confidence didn’t bring down the government and a general election, it is inevitable, to use that word, that you just used, that there would be another vote?’

McDonnell replied: ‘That’s right.’

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McDonnell has seperately told a Guardian Live event that a People’s Vote ‘might be an option we seize upon’. He said that the options would include Remain, but not a ‘no Deal’ option.

He added: ‘We’ll have to go through that sequence to show we’re doing everything we can.’

At Prime Minister’s Questions Theresa May called a People’s Vote a ‘betrayal of the many by the few’.