• MY union general secretary, Len McCluskey, said of Labour’s general election defeat “To deny the centrality of Brexit to the outcome is wilful blindness”.

How right he is. Those who campaigned within Labour for us to support a “people’s vote” must be held to account for our defeat.

Even within the very remain London constituencies, where I canvassed for Labour, I spoke to leave voters who would have voted for us but for our Brexit policy, which they saw as thwarting the referendum result.

Many in Labour didn’t understand the reason why the working class voted to leave the European Union and instead wrote the referendum result off as a vote by old, racist, people.

Or at best they thought of Labour leave voters who had been daft enough to believe the message written on the side of a bus and that they had been fooled by the leave arguments.

Labour didn’t appreciate how important the Brexit vote was to our traditional supporters, and they didn’t see this as a class issue.

After insulting our traditional Labour voters for three years we then expected them to vote for us at the general election, thinking we could win them back through generous promises around jobs, the NHS and renationalisation.

Our message was, you can have whatever you want, apart from Brexit. The very thing that was fundamental for them.

We were far too influenced by our London members and MPs who pushed us ever further towards remain.

Our commitment to a second referendum and all the parliamentary shenanigans we were involved with to “stop Brexit” haemorrhaged us support from traditional Labour voters.

Of course, other issues fed into our defeat, but Brexit was central to it; 52 out of the 60 seats Labour lost were leave seats.

It was only the Brexit Party who saved us from further losses by spitting the leave vote. Brexit was not a geographic but a class issue.

In Dagenham (the only Labour leave seat we held) we won by a wafer-thin 293 votes. In Thurrock, which was a Tory-held marginal by only 535 votes from Labour, the Conservative vote increased by a whopping 19 per cent and Labour’s dropped by 4.5 per cent.

When electing a new Labour leader it must be someone who has no association with our disastrous Brexit policy, who is not a London MP and somebody who supports our 2017 and 2019 manifesto commitments.

SARAH FRIDAY
Unite delegate to Holborn and
St Pancras GC and EC