He’s done a better job of uniting Remainers and Leavers than May – but it’s time for Corbyn to pick a side

If he sits on the fence he may find it much harder to hoover up the Remain vote than he did at the 2017 general election

Since the 2016 referendum, Jeremy Corbyn has made a much better fist of bridging Labour’s deep divide over Brexit than Theresa May has managed in her party. Of course, it was bound to be harder for the governing party, and Brexit was a Conservative product.

Mr Corbyn has for the most part managed to ride the Remain and Leave horses at once, defying repeated predictions that he would fall off. Although his task is not as nightmarish as Ms May’s, it is far from easy. Most Labour members back Remain and want a referendum and, although most Labour voters backed Remain in 2016, two in three Labour MPs represent areas which voted Leave.

Throughout the Brexit debate, the Labour leader has had his eyes on the prize of a general election. There is now a real prospect of such a contest this year; Ms May’s days in Downing Street are numbered, and her successor may want to win a mandate if Brexit remains stalled. Mr Corbyn’s desire not to alienate Labour supporters in the north and midlands is understandable, since many of the marginal seats Labour needs to win and defend are Leave-voting constituencies.

The pressures inside Labour resulted in its annual conference deciding last autumn that a public vote should be among its options if the party does not secure an election. Mr Corbyn has chosen to interpret this as backing a referendum on a bad Tory deal or as a means of stopping a no-deal exit. He did whip his MPs to vote for a confirmatory referendum on Ms May’s deal this month and 203 did so, while 24 opposed the idea. But his fabled “constructive ambiguity” is rightly under real pressure for the first time as Labour finalises a manifesto for the European parliament elections due on 23 May.

MEPs and candidates, trade unions, MPs and grassroots members have joined senior figures including Tom Watson and Sir Keir Starmer in calling on Mr Corbyn to go further by supporting a Final Say referendum on any Brexit deal. The issue will come to a head at a meeting of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) on Tuesday. The signs are that Mr Corbyn wants to stop short of that, to avoid predictable Tory criticism that Labour is a Remain party which no longer respects the 2016 people’s vote. Although the Labour leader normally commands a majority on the NEC, the vote could be very close.

Mr Corbyn should go with the flow of his party’s members, to whom he promised to hand more influence over policy when he ran for his job in 2015. He should show the strong leadership so woefully lacking in the Conservative Party, by accepting it is his duty to stand up to the right-wing xenophobes in Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party and his old one, Ukip. It is in the national interest that he does. He should leave the pandering to these parties to the Tories.

If Mr Corbyn continues to sit on the fence on a referendum, he may find it much harder to hoover up the Remain vote than he did at the 2017 general election. On 23 May, progressive voters who want to refer Brexit back to the people will have plenty of other options if Labour declines to make an unequivocal pledge of a referendum. Change UK (formerly the Independent Group), the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the SNP and Plaid Cymru all support a referendum without the shilly-shallying we have come to expect from Mr Corbyn. Indeed, if he refuses to budge, he could lose more of his MEPs as well as Labour voters, with no guarantee the latter would return at a general election.

Backing a public vote would not make Labour “the party of Remain”; people could still vote to leave the EU in any referendum. The mandate from the 2016 vote is increasingly out of date, given what we now know about Brexit. With no sign that Ms May can muster a Commons majority for her unloved deal, Mr Corbyn should acknowledge that the best course for the country is to hand its people the Final Say.