Top Labour Remainer, member of the House of Lords, and ardent anti-Brexit campaigner Andrew Adonis has issued a grovelling apology for comments he made saying Brexit supporters shouldn’t vote for his party, because they had no interest in seeing Brexit happen.
Lord Adonis, who is standing for Labour in the upcoming European Parliament elections, said he was “deeply sorry” and walked back his previous remarks on Wednesday, claiming that Labour would respect the outcome of the referendum after all in a letter posted to social media.
The frank comments telling 52 percent of the British voting public, as measured during the 2016 referendum, not to bother voting for the Labour party — which as a national party would normally be seeking to appeal to the broadest base of voters possible — resurfaced after he was selected to stand as an MEP in the forthcoming EU elections.
Speaking in 2018, Adonis said: “…if you’re a Brexiteer, I hope you won’t vote for the Labour party, because the Labour party is moving increasingly against Brexit… if you want to stop Brexit, you should vote Labour.”
Even when challenged by radio host Iain Dale on the fact that over a third of Labour voters supported Brexit — the loss of whom would almost certainly condemn the Labour party to losing a significant number of MPs in a future election — Adonis appeared relaxed.
Yet his calm assurance that the party which put him into the House of Lords for life would be fine without the 17.4 million voters who support Britain leaving the European Union now seems to have melted away, with the leading Remainer taking to social media to assure voters he didn’t actually mean it.
He wrote on Wednesday afternoon: “I am deeply sorry for off-the-cuff comments I made during a live LBC radio phone-in last September. I encourage all voters, whatever their position on Brexit, to vote Labour in the upcoming European Parliament elections… Labour has always been clear that it respects the result of the referendum.”
Yet this contradicts even more recent remarks, also during radio interviews, when the Eurofanatic peer admitted he wanted to sabotage Brexit — a far cry from honouring the referendum as claimed.
Speaking in January, the unelected member of the upper house claimed somewhat counter-intuitively that he desired to overturn the largest democratic vote in British history: “I absolutely want to sabotage Brexit, but I do not want to do so in an undemocratic way”.
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