An Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn

Dear Mr Corbyn

I write to you as my constituency MP, to urge you to use your vote in the House of Commons to block the invocation of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, and so prevent the disaster that Brexit will surely bring upon this country. You are widely respected for your work in North Islington, one of the most deprived constituencies in the UK, where you have stood up for the poor and dispossessed whose interests you have at heart. The most vulnerable will go the wall first.

The referendum result should not be seen as an unambiguous statement of the electorate’s settled will to leave the EU: it is too narrow for that interpretation; and the Leave campaign was a farrago of half-truths and downright lies, which will have deceived a fair number of voters about what Brexit would mean. If anything, the so-called ‘Project Fear’ by Remain underestimated the damage. The poorest will suffer the most. We can already see that the collapse of the currency and the stock market is sending the economy into a state of shock, perhaps recession. Investments are being suspended or stopped. Pension funds are worth less. Employers will make redundancies, and cut wages. There won’t be enough tax revenue for benefits or basic services.

Democracy is not served when the dice are loaded, as they were here, by a feral press, and by self-serving mendacious leaders. Accepting the result just because it’s a vote is not good enough in these circumstances, when so much is at stake. Your vote against Brexit in Parliament, and your ability to explain your vote, could save the country from the disaster it faces. It will save the very people who are closest to your heart, and their children and grandchildren, from years of intense uncertainty (at best) – and maybe it will even save Parliamentary democracy itself. Ask yourself this: if the Tories had offered a referendum on the death penalty, and 51.9% of the electorate voted for it, would you just accept it?

It’s not too late, even now. Please don’t let them have their way. Vote Brexit down.

 

Yours sincerely

 

Francis FitzGibbon

 

 

One thought on “An Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn

  1. As a member of the Advisory Board of the ECBA (European CBA), I congratulate you on these two letters and wholeheartedly agree with everything you said.

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