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I'd argue the fact Labour were able to take some key liberally-minded Tory Remain seats in London suggests otherwise. Obviously there are swathes of the country the party just isn't going to win, but there were plenty of disaffected Tory after the Brexit vote who were willing to vote for Labour because they weren't so fervently for Brexit.Re: your first paragraph, 33% of those who voted Labour in 2015 voted to Leave the EU in 2016 so your assertion that staunch Leavers were already lost to Labour before 2017 doesn't stand up. 650,000 more Leavers voted for Labour in 2017 than did in 2015; it's unlikely that this would have happened had they campaigned for a second referendum.
It's unlikely that all, or even most, of the 3.7m Leavers who voted Labour in 2017 would still have done so if Labour had rejected the referendum result. To take the constituencies in my previous post as an example, had 252 disgruntled Labour Leave voters switched to the Tories in Bishop Auckland, County Durham would have seen it's first Tory MP in 30 years. Darlington would have taken 1600 defections to flip. Considering that an average of about 38,000 people voted Leave in each constituency across the county (higher in the ones I'm talking about here, balanced out by much lower numbers in Durham City constituency), Bishop and Darlo would likely be Tory seats now and Sedgefield and North West Durham would have gone from safe-seats to marginals in the drop of a hat.
The nature of our electoral system means that keeping Leave voters onside was key to Labour's performance in 2017 and remains key to their chances going forward. An unwelcome by-product of FPTP is that huge proportion of Labour's Remain vote effectively counts for nothing when it comes to a General Election as it's concentrated in a relatively small number of constituencies creating a handful of huge majorities. The Labour Leave vote on the other hand is distributed more evenly and basically accounts for Labour's continued hold on it's traditional heartlands outside the big metropolitan cities. The way the two sets of voters are distributed accounts for the odd stat that, whilst only 29% of Labour's voters voted leave, 60% of Labour seats did. Labour's leave vote is disproportionately important to the party's electoral success, which is why they're very reticent to alienate Leave when there could be an election on the way.
Your argument appears to be that, had Labour gone full-Remain, the loss of the Leavers would have been compensated by attracting more Remainers, but even as it was Labour attracted 2.8 million additional Remainers between 2015 and 2017 and 57% of the Remain vote overall. I have no doubt that single-issue Remainers exist who would have voted for Labour if they'd been openly pro-Remain but the numbers suggest they don't exist in sufficient numbers in the right places to swing seats. There were 35 marginals (less than 5% in it) in which Labour came second to the Tories in 2017; looking at vote shares it's clear that even if everyone who voted Lib Dem/Green (the 100% Remain parties) voted Labour they'd still not have won all the marginals, never mind the deeper Tory seats Labour have to win to be looking at a majority. In a fantasy-land 2017 GE scenario where Remain voters had come out of the woodwork to back a pro-Remain Labour and win the marginals, the Lib Dems stuck together elsewhere to win their seats,and Labour didn't lose a single Leave voter, the Tories would still be the largest party by 30 odd seats and a Labour-SNP-Lib Dem coalition would have a majority of 5.
There were a lot of Labour constituencies that voted Leave, but then plenty of said constituencies have massive Labour majorities that could take a significant dent and yet remain Labour all the same. That doesn't mean the party should neglect these seats, of course - it's just a Labour constituency voting Leave doesn't mean they're less likely to vote for Labour, since in plenty of these areas you'll have had Tory/UKIP voters who made up the predominant tally of said Leave vote, with most Labour supporters still opting for Remain.
Ultimately, while the party obviously shouldn't abandon its Leave voters who had serious grievances they used 2016 to air, I think there's a significant danger they're going too far in the other direction and essentially ignoring the majority of the party who are massively pro-EU. And it's not just annoying metropolitan London types either - plenty of working-class people supported Remain and will be angry at the party if Brexit fecks them over and Labour were seen to do nothing to fight against its worst elements. Public polling's never stopped Corbyn fighting against, say, austerity, because he quite clearly knew austerity was a bad thing. I'm not sure why his stance on the EU is given a special exemption in this regard. Being anti-Brexit might pose challenges, but at the same time it's the job of a politician to convince people why their stance is right. That's what people liked about Corbyn when he was first elected as Labour leader. Anyone who's not a hardcore Brexiteer should be able to see what a disaster the whole process is - a political leader who claims to represent ordinary people should be fighting against that, or neutering its worst excesses.
And not to mention...Corbyn's approach still hasn't ultimately yielded him much success. 2017 was still an election defeat, and he hasn't established a consistent poll lead. If he's doing this to improve his electability then it isn't going particularly well.