Open letter to Jeremy Corbyn – The People’s Vote is perfectly compatible with your ideals

Dear Mr Corbyn,

How are things? Bet this recent sunshine has done wonders for that allotment of yours, though hopefully you haven’t dwindled away too many hours there – not least because a considerably more publicised letter than this one has made its way through your letterbox in the past few days.

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Give the people a say on their own future? What a novel idea.

Yes, it appears that those latte slurping, metropolitan elites are at it again – keeping the feeble proletariat down in the disenfranchised dirt by way of a diamond encrusted shoe. Except that they’re not – a fact which will become remarkably apparent if you listen to what they’re actually saying, rather than tuning into the witless bloviations of Nigel Farage.

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See? Seems reasonable enough now, doesn’t it? Which is precisely the reason why it’s a source of endless puzzlement that you, as yet at least, don’t seem particularly keen on the idea.

You see, I rather like you Jeremy. While I haven’t yet taken a gulp of the Corbyn kool-aid, I’m most certainly not amongst the unpardonable cretins who consider you the love child of Stalin and Fidel Castro. You seem a perfectly nice bloke – amiable, considerate and, above all, possessing a genuine desire to improve the quality of life for your fellow travellers. All that lovely shit of which I’m entirely onboard with.

However it is with some sense of regret that, despite the aforementioned superlatives, I find myself unable to lend you my vote. Sure, it’s only the one vote lost amidst a vast ocean of ballots up for grabs; but given that you’re a man who utilises sincerity as a key staple of his brand, positioning it neatly alongside your apparent quest to aid the forgotten in their bid to finally be heard, it’s a vote you should care about. Also, if one were to further extrapolate, the notion of a people’s vote on the final Brexit deal should be perfectly compatible with your aims – not to mention being a wonderfully effective means of wrenching power from the political elite you so despise and handing it to the people you dearly wish to represent.

Yet you continue to oppose such an idea, affording the proposal such disdain that you sacked Owen Smith the moment he publicly uttered his sympathies for such a cause.

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Being “for the many, not the few” is a key tenet of Labour party policy. Except when it isn’t.

Of course, there was semblance of logic in your decision – you can’t sell your manifesto without a united front standing behind it – but that’s somewhat of a red herring in this case. Under your stewardship, Labour have (for perhaps the first time in years) been able to create a clear distinction between themselves and those curmudgeonly old Tories – at least when it comes to the prevailing narrative. You’re not merely content to just be the party for the people, you yearn to be the party of the people – hence why your steadfast reluctance to even entertain the idea of a final Brexit vote isn’t just befuddling, it’s entirely antithetical to your aspirations.

Now you could very find yourself retreating to the confines of the politicians playbook at this point, trotting out the groan inducing mantra of “the people have already spoken – they voted to leave” and yes, that is indeed true – they did vote to leave. However, failing to acknowledge the vast wealth of nuance that goes along with such a proclamation is the undoing of many a man’s credibility and it would sadden me to see yourself, a man of obvious good character, fall victim to the horrendously binary trappings of the Farage school of thought.

Not least because the man’s clearly an idiot:

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You might not get another vote on Brexit, but Nigel is happy for you to dump dead fish in a river.

That said, there was a brief glitch in the matrix when Nigel rather bizarrely called for a second referendum himself – before quickly changing his tune once more, going as far as to claim he never actually said the words that millions saw him utter on live television. As I said, Nigel’s a man who indulges in idiocy with apparent impunity – though there is a certain, rather disheartening irony to the fact that, if only for a brief flicker of time, Nigel Farage was more for giving people a voice than you are.

Not that I’m putting you anywhere near Farage on the Disingenuous Pissweasels leader board; please don’t think that of me – though I do implore you to listen to what those voices are actually saying. Despite what your Eurosceptic comrades may tell you, they’re not all clamouring for a Viagra charged Brexit while erecting picket fences across the entire coastline – there are many disquieted murmurs out there if you’re willing to seek them out.

While this letter may have come across as adversarial at times, it remains addressed to yourself in perfectly good faith – and, for the record, I do consider you a man of integrity and honest intentions. Yet I simply can’t clamber on board your bandwagon given the stance you currently subscribe to – even if it is heading to the most happening music festival of all time.

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I hope John McDonnell plays the album version of ‘Let’s lynch Esther McVey’. The single cut was rubbish.

Honestly Jeremy, there really is no reason to oppose a people’s vote – especially if using your own ideals as a baseline. The naysayers might be insistent but they’re not infallible. This isn’t about blocking Brexit, nor is it about undermining the “will of the people” – it’s simply a chance for those very same people to make a final, informed decision on a question they were posed two years prior with minimal information. That’s all there is to it at its very core.

When all’s said and done, you perhaps said it best yourself: leadership isn’t just about talking, it’s about listening too – and what sense does it make to listen to a previously uninformed electorate as if their word were gospel if you’re just going to close off your ears the moment they start putting the pieces together?

So come on Jeremy. Clamber out of that allotment, dust yourself down and get to work putting power back in the hands of the citizens you value so highly; by backing a people’s vote for the many, not just the few.

 

5 thoughts on “Open letter to Jeremy Corbyn – The People’s Vote is perfectly compatible with your ideals”

  1. Hopefully “Dear Leader” will read this and have a change of heart!! Sadly, methinks, it is not always thus, when the prevailing discourse is so behooven to the inanities of the pissweasels and spunkgoblins

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