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.
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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.
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So, fundamentally we think of ourselves as 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.
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