I campaigned for Labour in the European Elections and I know exactly what we did wrong

Voters didn’t get an answer to the most important political question they were after, and our ambiguity on a Final Say to a Brexit deal meant we were an afterthought when people cast their votes

As a Labour campaigner, I knew the European Election was going to be tough. I was campaigning in the northeast, a region that is labelled as Leave. There was a common perception that the recently formed Brexit Party could wipe the floor with us. After all, it was only three years ago that every area of our region with the exception of Newcastle voted resoundingly to leave the EU

The short but decisive MEP campaign was Labour’s opportunity to call out the vitriol of the far right, which we did to our credit with great efficiency. Vital trade union support helped launch targeted campaigns to ensure Tommy Robinson did not win his election in the northwest, and our campaigning focused on stopping Farage taking my region back to Thatcherite conservative politics by highlighting the damage his politics of social regression and economic isolationism would to do the region.

However what is now clear after the results is that voters didn’t get an answer to the most important political question they were after, and our ambiguity on a Final Say to a Brexit deal meant we were an afterthought when people cast their votes.

Our policy was too ambiguous and non-official policy lines that I repeatedly used on the doorstep were not enough to persuade Remainers. Claiming that we would have already left the EU if it weren’t for Labour, or that we were at heart a Remain party didn’t convince voters – that much is clear.

Furthermore, what I did not expect was having to spend large quantities of my time campaigning to persuade our own Labour Party membership to vote Labour and re-elect our region’s Labour MEPs Jude Kirton-Darling and Paul Brannen.

The regional polling for the northeast spoke for itself: it was a two-horse race between Labour and the Brexit Party. This however proved not enough for some voters who saw a pro-Brexit Labour movement too hard to stomach and lent their vote to the official pro-Remain parties who saw surges in every city of the northeast. To my disdain, people in their droves were suffering from austerity amnesia in voting for the Lib Dems and other explicitly Remain parties.

To put it bluntly, our stance as I still see it pushed the idea of an alternative “jobs first” Brexit, negating the reality that there is no such thing as a left-wing departure from the European Union. This therefore caused our vote to split and meant we lost one of our own Labour MEPs to one of two Brexit Party candidates.

We lost to people like Brian Monteith, who advocates a WTO departure from the European Union for a region which would lose 16 per cent of its GDP – as stated in the government’s own impact assessment figures – and who himself benefits from free movement of people, living in France commuting to London for work.

If anything Labour is a proudly members-led party, so on this issue that will undeniably define Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of our movement it is now time for us to be consulted on how we can develop a policy from our initial conference – where a public vote was established as an option – to a stance for today that does not make our voters desert us in their droves.

Almost one year on from that conference change it is now time for a renewed call upon our leadership to fully and explicitly back a People’s Vote. A second referendum is the only way we can currently break the parliamentary impasse in the state our political environment, with 45% of Labours 2017 voters backing remain parties last Thursday we cannot electorally be perceived to be facilitating something that in every way shape or form harm and cause the poor to get poorer in every region most detrimentally my region.

If we want to still pursue a general election and win a Labour government that can rebuild our public services, put an end to austerity and change the lives of millions of people in the northeast, there’s no other option but to support a People’s Vote.