More than 60% of Brits want to re-join the EU with nearly the same number saying Britain was wrong to leave in the first place, a new poll shows.
More than 60% of Brits want to re-join the EU with nearly the same number saying Britain was wrong to leave in the first place, a new poll shows.
Yeah that’s not how the EU works and also a very simplistic way of looking at the world and global politics. In the UK 48% of people voted to remain so to lump an entire country together simplistically is naive. In the UK general election the Tories got 43.6% of the vote but because of our flawed democracy the tories got absolute power and that allowed them to pursue their aggressive and bombastic version of Brexit.
In any democracy people can change their minds and should be encouraged to do so, not aggressively condemend forever. The UK would likely be welcome to rejoin the EU; poltically it would strengthen the EU to show that leaving is negative and rejoining remains beneficial. It was also strengthen the argument that the EU needs to integrate further as a block because the hostile competing world of blocks such as the US, China, Russia and in the future India we’ll be better together. But the UK would have to rejoin without all the opt-outs etc established over the original membership.
However the poll is of limited value; there really is not a clamouring to rejoin the EU at present. It’s also not likely to be a simple thing to convince people to rejoin - the threshold for leaving was in many ways lower than the threshole for rejoining. Rejoining the EU now would mean no opt out for the Euro (which remains unpopular in the UK), and financially supporting the Common Agricultural Programme which is a mess. It also has to be said, leaving the EU has not been as bad as had been painted and negative elements have been obscured by the Covid pandemic in people’s minds.
The UK leaving the EU has been grossly simplified into a “good vs evil” narrative, in large part because of the idiocy and behaviour of the UK Government and Boris Johnson - the UK’s Donald Trump. The reasons for the UK leaving have been simplified into “ignorance and stupidity” so the many of the other reasons have been ignored and the EU has done nothing to address genuine flaws.
For example the conflicts between freedom of movement and the effects on jobs markets for low skilled segments of the population - that drove a lot of people in less prosperous “leave” areas to vote for leaving. Those people have been exploited by Leave campaigners, and the problem is certainly not entirely related to the EU (it is also part of the globalisation debate as well as major failures in UK government in evening economic growt). But the EU still has issues to address about the conflict between the benefits of freedom of movement overall versus the poorer economic areas in all countries that do not seem to be benefiting. That has all been obscured by the noise and simplification of the narrative over Brexit. Also there are many other major problems: the broken and distorted CAP, the flaws in the Eurozone which were exposed in the 2011 financial crisis, the failure of the EU to manage it’s outer borders together and the democractic deficit at the heart of the EU. Also just look at the inability of the EU to deal with authoritarian regimes such as Hungary and increasingly Poland.
It’s an easy and lazy narrative to dismiss the UK leaving the EU as “madness”, “stupidity” and “you made you bed, now lie in it”. There are certainly elements of that, but it obscures a truely hugely complex and more nuanced picture and that harms both the EU and the UK. I wanted to remain, and it’s nice to see polls switching from being 50:50 to more pro-EU but that does not mean a referendum in favour of rejoining the EU would succeed. The political will is just no there yet and the
If the UK voted to rejoin and the EU accepted that, there is no chance that they would get all the same demands like last time. Like no Schengen and no euro.
Very true, it is a very complex subject. My original post was mostly a joke, but also the current view of a lot of people in the EU right now. You can’t just leave and then say takebackskies, no matter how unfair and fucked up the situation was that got the UK to this point. I’m sure if the UK would really put an effort into rejoining, the EU would allow it, but not without a lot of concessions and some kind of trust that the UK will be in it for the long haul.
I don’t really know a lot about the culture in the UK, but it seems like a lot of people just stood back and did nothing. From what I understand a lot of older folk in the countryside voted to leave and a lot of the younger folk in the cities voted to remain. Of course it isn’t so cut and dry, misinformation was a big part of it (both intentional and non intentional) . But the part I don’t understand is why the young folk let this happen. They are a huge part of the economy, of what makes the country run and everybody seemed like welp this is the elected government so I guess it’s fine? Why weren’t there massive strikes and protests? Why wasn’t London completely shut down if such a large part of the people there felt like what was happening was not what they wanted. It wasn’t like this was a quick thing either, this went on for years, with the EU saying multiple times the UK didn’t have to leave and could just remain if they wanted.
I’m sure there’s a good explanation, but I can’t understand it.
There were dozens of enormous anti-Brexit protests in London and in cities across the country over the course of several years.
Because the party that was in government had been taken over by fringe Brexit extremists and didn’t care what the British voters wanted. Even then, they struggled to get enough of their own MPs to support them which is why it took many dozens of chaotic votes over several years - plus an illegal suspension of Parliament that the courts had to step in to overrule - before they were able to ram their deal through.
Even at the 2019 general election, a clear majority of voters voted for parties that were committed to a second referendum to allow us to stop Brexit, but the Tories ignored the voters and went ahead anyway.
You seem really uninformed about the nature of the Brexit debate in the UK between 2016 and the UK’s exit in 2020.
I only know the EU side and over here we were all like WTF are you guys doing? It is so insane, we cannot ever understand it. Friends of mine in the UK got their grants revoked, because they were coming from the EU. They were promised the grants would be paid by the UK instead, which was not only too late, but it never happened.
Also I was imagining more like French style protest, burning the whole damn thing down. Plus hurting the bastards where it counts, in their wallets, so for example massive strikes. But maybe that isn’t the British way. I haven’t heard in the news at the time something like “The third week of Brexit protests leave London in lockdown.”
So, fundamentally we’re a democracy. Particularly for the liberal educated middle-class people who accounted for much of the Remain vote, it’s an important tenet of faith that political ends are things that should be achieved at the ballot box, not on the street.
Here’s one narrative on what the culture in the UK is like: since the 1980s the UK has been run a bit like a city state with three inconvenient countries and one really inconvenient province welded onto it, it’s a very centralised system both politically and economically with London and the financial services industry dominating. After the transition to a service economy we literally left a lot of the country to ‘managed decline’ which is a euphemism for leaving a place to rot and saying ‘if you don’t like it leave and get a job in London’. Nobody’s saying coal mining for example didn’t have to end, but these single industry communities were left with nothing in the way of support or retraining at a time the state was being ideologically shrunk as much as possible due to the perceived failures of the post war political norms.
Under Blair some of this started to improve but then 2008 happened and everything went to shit and never really got better in much of the UK outside it’s more prosperous areas. Blairism died mostly because of the 2008 crash and the disaster that was the Iraq War which Blair strongly advocated, after that the Conservatives focused on an austere policy platform with an internal faction increasingly blaming the EU for the fact things weren’t improving as it was a convenient consequence-free scapegoat. The most controversial point of contention was the high numbers of EU migrant workers who were seen as driving down wages which among other fears was capitalised on by the populist party UKIP. Because of our insane FPTP electoral system UKIP had three seats at its peak but was legitimately threatening to collapse the ruling conservatives vote at the 2015 election as a spoiler and having just won the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 David Cameron decided to take another gamble and offer an in-out EU referendum to see off the UKIP threat to his party for good. He did not win this gamble.
I don’t need to tell anyone what happened next, a very effective campaign featuring a lot of psychological targeting through social media was run, lots of people in left-behind areas were presented an opportunity to stick it to the government by taking away something they supported, and we left the EU by the slimmest of margins. Brexit was an internal political crisis that got out of hand, largely because Cameron wasn’t as clever as he thought he was. If you don’t believe me go and look at the data, the most Brexity areas were typically the most deprived and this is no coincidence. Also our age pyramid is pretty fucked (the housing crisis is making this worse), the young people did protest and did oppose it, Parliament tied itself in knots due to the amount of opposition. At the end of the day though the older demographic was always going to swing it strongly.
The reason our politics has been so mad since Brexit is that the Brexiteers in Parliament were never meant to catch the car they were chasing and have no idea what to do now they’ve won. I doubt we’ll ever willingly join the Eurozone (the memories of Black Wednesday run deep enough joining the ERM in preparation would be deeply unpopular plus the symbolic loss of the unique coins) but other than that Brexit is dying as a relevant political force.
TL;DR Brexit was an internal Tory (Conservative) problem that got way, way out of hand and exploited by grifters like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. Also everyone go and read Orwell’s England your England, it’s a bit out of date obviously but a lot still rings true.