Whatever comradeship and fraternal fealty remain within Labour, the debate that has suddenly ignited in the party about Britain rejoining the European Union is hardly helping it.<\/p>\n
Two men who actually agree on that eventual goal, Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham, have fallen into a tedious briefing war about whether raising this distant prospect right now is a cynical plot by Streeting to undermine Burnham\u2019s chances of winning the Makerfield by-election, and thus the Labour leadership, according to The Independent.<\/p>\n
Streeting claim that he is simply pointing out the lasting consequences of the \u201ccatastrophic mistake\u201d the nation as a whole made in 2016, and that it cannot be ignored.<\/p>\n
Burnham doesn\u2019t dispute that, but finds it unhelpful to raise it where some 65 per cent of the electorate voted Leave, and where Reform UK will provide formidable resistance to Burnham\u2019s return to Westminster. Speaking at the Great North Investment Summit in Leeds, he said he would not try to \u201crerun\u201d the Brexit debate, since Britain would be stuck in \u201ca permanent rut if we\u2019re just constantly arguing\u201d.<\/p>\n
This chatter has provoked the highly combustible Labour MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, Jonathan Hinder, to comment that \u201cthe idea that we can reconnect to our working-class base by reopening this debate is just a staggering level of out of touch\u201d. It is, however, also true that the European cause is extremely popular in Labour\u2019s middle-class membership, and it is they who will be choosing Britain\u2019s next prime minister and influencing their priorities.<\/p>\n
The issue is not going to be settled in this leadership campaign because the 2024 Labour manifesto pledged to stay out of the EU and ruled out rejoining the single market, the customs union and the reintroduction of freedom of movement. The debate, though, is going to be relevant for the whole country at the next election and for years afterwards, because Brexit has proved to be at least as big a disaster as the experts warned. As Britain approaches the 10th anniversary of the EU referendum, it is as good a moment as any to revisit the greatest act of self-harm in history.<\/p>\n
If nothing else, the experience of the last decade, including the relatively short time since Brexit actually did \u201cget done\u201d, shows that the case for Leave has been proven wrong. It has not made Britain better off. The economic and geopolitical world of 10 years ago was very different to the increasingly protectionist and dangerous one in which Britain now has to make a living.<\/p>\n
In 2016, making some heroic assumptions, it was possible to envisage the UK indeed becoming a beacon of free trade able to conclude a range of lucrative free trade deals with dynamic, fast-growing economies \u2014 America, China, India and the smaller emerging economies of East Asia. We could even, it was posited, pursue trade opportunities with the benign assistance of the World Trade Organisation\u2019s rulebook.<\/p>\n
Such a swashbuckling future has only been partly achieved, it is fair to say, and Donald Trump has displayed only minimal indulgence of British interests. Meanwhile, and again due to the second coming of President Trump, Britain can no longer wholly rely on the transatlantic alliance to defend itself and its partners from Russian aggression, and has been forced to try and build ad hoc, primarily European, defensive alliances.<\/p>\n
So, for good or ill, and for reasons that could and could not be foreseen, the 2016 referendum did not settle matters for decades to come in the way the Common Market version did in 1975. The European question that has bedevilled British politics since the late 1950s has not gone away, even if few want to relive the national nightmare that followed the 2016 vote.<\/p>\n
The overall European dilemma remains pressing, but the questions have changed and quite dramatically. Should the UK negotiate to rejoin sooner or later? Should the process be subject to a referendum, before or after a bid, or left to a general election and parliamentary decisions? Should Britain join the euro?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whatever comradeship and fraternal fealty remain within Labour, the debate that has suddenly ignited in the party about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":971742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,42309,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,70337,118045,254,6093,16,15],"class_list":["post-971741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brexit","tag-brexit","tag-britain","tag-discussion","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-union","tag-great-britain","tag-hold","tag-needs","tag-on","tag-to","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116603097755514373","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/971742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}