City Labour MP Gareth Snell says he ‘made a mistake’ in voting against Theresa May’s Brexit deal for a third time.
The MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central made the admission during the parliamentary debate on Labour’s latest attempt to block a no-deal Brexit in October.
Both Mr Snell and his Stoke-on-Trent North colleague Ruth Smeeth abstained on the motion, which was defeated 309 votes to 298.
Mr Snell said that while he remained opposed to no-deal, the motion would not actually take it off the table but merely ‘make the table longer and put it further away’. The only way of preventing no deal, he argued, would be to either approve a deal or revoke Article 50.
He admitted that he should have backed Mrs May’s withdrawal agreement when it was put up for a vote in the Commons for a third time on March 29.
Mr Snell voted with the Labour whip against the deal, as he had done on the two previous occasions, and it was defeated by 344 votes to 286. But he said he would vote for a deal at the next opportunity.
He said: “I made a mistake: on that day I should have voted for a deal. I will now vote for a deal if one is brought forward, because it is inconceivable that we can continue with this line of debate in which we seek to make the decisions that we want to make and avoid making the decisions that we have to make.
“I do not object to the content of the motion, but I will not be voting for it. I shall abstain and withhold my vote, but not because I believe that no deal is something we should play with or that no deal is acceptable. I have voted continually to prevent no deal - I have ruled it out and taken it off the table - but in doing so all I have actually done is make the table longer and put it further away. Delaying Brexit does not stop no deal being the ultimate default endpoint; it just pushes it further into the future.
“The fact is that there is a deal. It is not a great deal, but it is what we are presented with. We can make decisions only on things that are presented to us. Until we face up to that, instead of messing around on what we want to do, we will make no progress, and my manufacturing constituents may be at the mercy of no deal. That will be the responsibility of everybody in this house who refuses to decide between the deal and revoking.”
The motion would have given MPs the chance to table legislation to prevent the UK leaving the EU without a deal on October 31, the latest Brexit deadline.
Ten Conservative MPs rebelled against the government and backed the motion. But these votes were mostly cancelled out by eight Labour MPs
Stone's veteran anti-EU Tory MP Sir Bill Cash, who voted against the motion, said it would result in 'government by Parliament'.
He said: "I have already described this as a phantom motion for a phantom bill. We do not know what the bill will contain. We have had various suggestions that it may contain some elements of what has been proposed by some of the so-called leadership candidates. I do not know what they will propose by the end of the process.
"What I can say, however, is that this is, as I said earlier, an open-door motion. It opens the door for any bill, of any kind, to take precedence over government business, which is inconceivable as a matter of constitutional convention."
During his speech, Mr Snell mentioned that the British Ceramic Confederation had urged all MPs to back Mrs May’s deal.
The BCC is strongly opposed to a no-deal Brexit, which it says would be a disaster for the industry. More than half of British ceramic exports currently go to Europe.
Laura Cohen, chief executive of the BCC, said: “No deal would be really harmful for ceramic manufacturing jobs, businesses and investment, and must be avoided. We have been calling for Parliamentary consensus for a deal, and we’ve kept Gareth and other MPs with ceramic manufacturing in their constituencies informed of our members’ views.”
Around 70 per cent of voters in Stoke-on-Trent backed Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum.
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