Labour’s Brexit Position is so unambiguous, no one can decide how ambiguous it is, or isn’t

Here are your choices in the EU elections: Brexit, Bollocks to Brexit, Bollocks to the Elections, Bollocks I Forgot to Send The Leaflet, or just plain Bollocks

We’re in EU elections campaign season proper now. The leaflets are coming through the door, the people are being asked to choose who they want to represent them for an unspecified period of time of anywhere between five years and zero days, in a parliament they are meant to have left already.

In such times, it is perhaps best to keep it simple. The Brexit Party – clue’s in the name. The Tories are not campaigning and may not bother to send a leaflet at all. The Liberal Democrats have gone with “Bollocks to Brexit”, nothing if not snappy. Snappier, certainly than “exotic spresm” and easier to pronounce. Change UK Now The Independent Group With No Logo may also, it turns out, not be sending out the completely free leaflet they are allowed to send to every household in the country under Electoral Commission rules. There has been some kind of technical oversight, we have been told. Something to do with them not having sent one in, and the deadline for doing so being a date that is earlier in the year than today.

Still, cutting across this great maelstrom of confusion is, as ever, Jeremy Corbyn, who was in the library of a university in Kent on Thursday morning, to make absolutely unequivocally certain of the fact that everybody knows his party’s position on Brexit. It’s right there in the manifesto, and it’s this:

“Labour will continue to oppose the Government’s bad deal or a disastrous no deal. And if we can’t get agreement along the lines of our alternative plan, or a general election, Labour backs the option of a public vote.”

Since the words came out, there has been much debate over whether Labour’s Brexit policy is ambiguous. It is in favour of Brexit. There’s nothing ambiguous about that. If there is any ambiguity, it might just be because the truth cannot be heard above the clanging cymbals of cognitive dissonance going off in the heads of hundreds of thousands of Labour Party members, and millions of Labour Party supporters, as they try and accept their party is unequivocally pro-Brexit, and thus, anathema to everything it has ever stood for.

But it’s not as simple as that. Phase One of Labour’s ingenious lock system on the Brexit canal to absolutely nowhere involves the Conservatives deciding to back its plan for a customs union, and so split their party to do Jeremy Corbyn a favour. This may not happen.

And if it doesn’t happen, Jeremy Corbyn wants a general election, which we must assume he wants to win (though he may not), so he can put his version of Brexit to the EU’s negotiators.

This version of Brexit is the one in which he gets to have a say in the EU’s own customs union, even though he’s left it, but kept the exact same benefits of it. This, also, potentially, may not happen.

And so we move on to Option Three, “Labour Backs the Option of a Public Vote.” When the option itself contains an option, it is not optional to consider whether that option might, in the end, un-optionally vanish. Not least as the “public vote” in question is as yet a long way short of being clear about what options might be in the option on that option.

The option to “remain in the European Union”, for example, the one that the 66 per cent of Labour Party voters are rather keen on, currently looks like an unlikely optional extra. But no one knows, because Jeremy Corbyn, very unambiguously, won’t tell you.

So there’s your options then, in the elections for who knows what for the parliament on the road to who knows where: Brexit. Bollocks to Brexit. Bollocks to the Elections, Bollocks I Forgot to Send The Leaflet, or just plain Bollocks.

What a choice.