Nice of you to ask Keighley, but I’ve given my view on this one at some length. There is no mystery as to how the EU went from electoral irrelevance to referendum. It was the ruling class’s pet project and they put their newspapers and their money behind making it happen. The prize was deregulation and a bigger slice of the cake. While I’d like to see Brexit binned, there is no Rejoin campaign with anything like the necessary political power to make that cause as powerful as Brexit was. Without that, it would be political suicide for opposition parties to reawaken the ghost. It would be an unbelievable gift to the Tories, the one thing that could re-energise them. Brexit will die in time, by 1000 cuts.
At some point it hopefully won’t be, but I don’t think that moment is going to happen soon, not this election anyway.
Well we are, if Rejoin isn’t able to seize the political narrative. That will not just demonstrate political parties didn’t want to talk about it, but the necessarily prerequisites to make them talk about it weren’t there.
I’m not sure why you are putting the onus on Rejoin. If one of the major political parties was brave enough to take this on, it would necessarily become part of the political narrative. You’re just excusing Starmer for not having the cojones.
Rejoin is a single issue party. They are never going to seize the political narrative. The question is, would campaigning on a rejoin ticket make Labour more or less electable? I understand your reasoning in believing the latter is true but I really don't think that it is as cut and dried as you believe it is. And the tide is turning against Brexit every day. If it is not a positive for one of the two major parties to hold a rejoin position today, it is only a matter of time before it will be.
The notion that Labour would see a significant collapse of support if they came out for rejoin given the widening public opinion polls about Brexit being a mistake, the obvious case that the country is going backwards at a rapid pace (an economic performance worse than a sanctioned Russia, and almost directly comparable with the US great depression), the enormous rises in cost of living and the increasing scarcity of previously commonplace basic foodstuffs just seems farfetched to me. People are seeing the impact of Brexit in their everyday lives now, and voting for the Leopards Eating Faces party doesn't seem so clever once the leopards are eating your face.
Exactly. The Tories have always used "Labour will reverse Brexit" as some kind of threat. It could actually work well now as a Labour campaigning slogan!
Right. The widening public opinion has happened despite no one trying to make it an issue, and tiptoeing around it. Fanning the flames wouldn't be difficult at all; people have seen firsthand what it means now, and the public has already soured on it. And unlike last time, Leave can no longer campaign on pie-in-the-sky all-things-to-all-men nonsense. It has a track record now. There's a difference between asking someone to believe in unicorns, and asking someone not to believe they are being mauled when they are, in fact, actively being mauled.
None of the leavers on this forum have turned against Brexit and I see no one on other social media expressing their buyer’s regret. That means that many of those who voted leave who now say they regret leaving/would rejoin are the less engaged. They were mostly against leaving too, up until a few weeks before the vote. Don’t think their votes are in the bag. My guess is that actual rejoiners are a minority compared with the doubling down on Brexit and the don’t open it up again or I just might remember why I voted Leave in the first place brigade. You cannot risk another defeat on this. Wait for the moment to come.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/987347/brexit-opinion-poll/ Unless you think the polling methodology is fundamentally flawed, plenty of people regret their vote. A couple of loonies on WFCForums don't represent the electorate as a whole.
I was surprised that you want to point at polls giving only 54% as regretting Brexit. That’s marginal and not nearly enough to be confident of getting enough of a vote out. It’s only an extra 5%, a figure Remain had going into referendum day polling. Never mind the undecided. There is no energetic, grass roots campaign or media clamour to see this through. Those would be well funded in the other direction. I can imagine people answering did you regret Brexit ‘yes’ are you going to vote to rejoin ‘nah, lets let it lie’. And in a way you can see why. Just as after the Scots Indyref, the losing side got to dominate politics, the 40-48% Brexit vote could unite to dominate politics in the aftermath. Any UK political party, other than the SNP, would be crazy to bank on these odds.
I think the best option for Britain would be to join the CU and CM without full membership. This would probably be acceptable to most if it would create better economic conditions, although there would probably be a bit of noise about the input of the European courts on British law. I really don't think full membership would be in Europe's interest as it would just lead to the same noise and disruption as before driven by the likes of Murdoch and the red tops. It might be easier for any party in Britain to push for these options rather than full membership, what with sovereignty and all that
I agree with this. It’s naive to assume that, even if the U.K. wanted back in, that the EU would just cave in straightaway and say “come back, we’ve missed you”. However, Labour isn’t even prepared to do this.
I think what you know is that Labour isn’t prepared to fight the next election on that basis. But that’s all.
The problem is that if they don’t, imo they will find it difficult to move much until the following election because the media/Tories will cry “betrayal, where’s the mandate” etc. Perhaps some tentative moves could be made esp if those are dressed up as “technical adjustments to the Brexit deal” or some such. I’m concerned Labour might be boxing itself into a corner.
Labour is most definitely boxed into a corner. We all are. This is because we lost. There are no good options here. But I have to remind you, for the seventeenth million time, that Labour cannot win an election on the votes of liberals and conservatives in the South East. It must win the Red Wall back to gain power and when you think of it like that the politics required becomes obvious.
So tell me how it could work? Which voters would Labour get for this policy and where? Given that Labour already is polling between 45-50% where is the win?
If he’s not in a winnable seat or in one they already have, then it’s irrelevant. Democracy UK is a bit carp like that.
But your assumption is that the electoral map is fixed (in this case, as it was in 2019). Blair proved that that does not have to be true. As did Johnson in 2019, for that matter. In respect of the Red Wall, you assume that any hint of a move away from Brexit will keep those constituencies Tory. But there are plenty of other reasons why those naturally Labour voters might shun the Tories, it's not as if they have been a shining beacon of competent governance over the past four years. As @sydney_horn says, I just don't think it is as cut and dried as you make out.
Isn't part of the issue that at the moment the assumption the red wall Tory convertees are more likely to abstain next time around rather than all flip-flop back to Labour? In which case it would be potentially ruinous for Labour to adopt the one policy which probably would drive them back into the arms of the Tories again.
Well, maybe but I'm not convinced that is correct either. There's been an awful lot of water under the bridge since 2019. Anyway, hey ho: I'm not making Labour strategy. I just wish Starmer would be a bit braver, that's all.
It is and it isn’t. There is no policy on Earth that would shift some shire Tory seats to Labour and the closer contests in the wealthier south, like in Bucks are more likely to be won by the Lib Dems. Labour can win in bigger towns and cities of the South, like Watford, but it’s not clear rejoin is especially crucial to that or wouldn’t actually cause more problems in those areas that were pretty much 50/50 on Brexit. Moreover, trying to make Brexit work isn’t going to lose Labour support in its cities. That leaves the Midlands and the North where adherence to Brexit persists. That is where the election can be won, where Labour is only a few hundred or a few thousand behind instead of constituencies in the South where it can be up to 20k behind with people who have never voted for it.
A significant part of this block were the mythical "Traditional Labour Voters" - the only traditional thing about them is they never voted. The referendum not only energised them to vote but actively campaign in their communities for Brexit. They were targetted by 2016's state of the art SM methods - imagine what 2023's far more subtle and nuanced SM methods could do to them and their heirs and that's before you mention the dog-whistle of "betrayal". This is not yet a battle to choose to fight.
You’d think he’d mention it at least once in a while. I’ve also heard (and this is between you and me) that his father was a toolmaker. But hush hush, but because he definitely doesn’t want that to get around.
It's not "only 54%", because it's a three way poll, including a "not sure" option coming in with 13% of responses. The key point is that "don't know" has remained largely stable, while "Right To Leave" support has plummeted and "Mistake to Leave" support has significantly jumped. The delta between mistake and not-mistake is now an enormous 21%, with Right to Leave support at a mere 31%. That's a landslide, especially given the original wafer thin margin of victory. Even if every single "not sure" response went with "Right to Leave" (and they absolutely wouldn't), it would STILL trail by 8 points. Public sentiment has shifted despite politicians developing a cultural omerta with regards to the impact of Brexit. Meanwhile, the country is disintegrating at a rapid rate and still none of the major parties are brave enough to speak the truth out loud for fear of losing power. We get the governments we deserve.
I referred to the ‘don’t knows’. There is nothing you can say about them other than they don’t know. At the referendum, they went to Leave. But the biggest problem here is that this is a poll about leaving. It’s not a poll about rejoining, a completely different question. Show me the polls, the campaign, the clamour, the media, the interests supporting that.
