22-05-2025
Labour has put the EU back on the agenda. Will the party regret it?
Photo byEver since Labour's landslide victory last summer, the party has discussed plans to reset Britain's relationship with the European Union. It seems the UK is condemned to be locked in a cycle of constant re-negotiation with the bloc – voters wanted out, but the economic logic of a closer union is too tempting. The hardest of all Brexits never really conferred the benefits its biggest champions suggested it might.
As my colleague Rachel wrote on Tuesday, Kemi Badenoch's reaction to this run-of-the-mill trade negotiation was a bit histrionic: 'We've got to be a little bit more realistic and a lot less naive,' she told a press conference on Monday afternoon, flanked by Victoria Atkins and Priti Patel for emotional support, shortly after saying she was gobsmacked by Starmer's reset. She called him 'a failure of a Prime Minister' too. The Tory existential doom spiral continues to whirl.
Meanwhile Labour is selling the deal as something that will deliver cheaper food and energy prices for British people. As it should: the party's re-election will hinge entirely on the cost of living. Pretty much everything else – save a completely unforeseen ruction – is window dressing.
But hold on a minute. Labour is polling several points behind the Reform-led right at the moment. That is, the pro-Brexit right. Led by Brexiteer-in-chief Nigel Farage, no less. In fact, Farage said on Monday he would tear up the deal if he made it to Downing Street. On what planet would you trumpet the success of an ever-closer union at a time when your main opponent argues for the very opposite?
This one, surprisingly. Here are the things you need to know about Brexit, the electorate and Labour's political calculations, in numbers.
Brexit regret is real, but inflated
Most Brits believe the vote to Leave in 2016 was the wrong decision. Though a caveat is important: until recently the number of Brexit 'Regretters' was probably inflated. Leave-leaning voters have been feeling pretty apathetic lately, disenchanted with the Conservatives after 14 years. People like this don't tend to be keen on commenting on political surveys, hence the slightly warped figures. Reform's rise has reversed that, and the numbers are steadying at a more reliable point.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
Brexit salience is waning
More than one in ten of those that voted in the EU referendum are now dead. And one in ten eligible voters today were not of age for the 2016 referendum. Young people are overwhelmingly for Remain (or rather, Rejoin) which we might expect to shift the needle and give Rejoin a default majority. This isn't quite the case – these young people are not quite as shaped by 2010 loyalties, the passing of time has numbed them and the EU question is just less relevant now. But this situation still makes it hard to whip up a sense of 'Leaver's grievance' that Brexit wasn't done right, as Farage is trying to do.
All of this is laid out in the graph below. A have-three-cakes-and-eat-them approach was not the position I expected from Reform's disparate support base. But it speaks to the dulled feelings over Brexit, even among the most enthusiastic of Nigel Farage fans.
What now?
It is in Reform's blood to stamp its feet over this EU reset stuff. But Brexit wasn't what rallied its voters. The party, then, will continue what it's been doing already: focus on immigration, on boats, and on a perceived cost-of-living betrayal (winter fuel, for example, despite Starmer's hinted-at U-turn yesterday).
As you can see above, when you poll these voters on what they want you'll find incoherence: they want closer relations, to keep things as they are, and to loosen ties. We can only assume that they like the sentiment of Brexit, but that we are all too far gone from the Brexit wars to care about specifics. Up to one tenth of the current Reform vote looks to be historic Remain voters, by the way.
What Starmer's reset deal can do is rally the middle classes, who are not too stressed by the cost of living, and remind them of their pro-European bent. Labour could exploit this as a means to outpace the growing number of the Reform-curious middle class. Just because the EU is low salience now, it does not mean it won't be exploitable as a fault line in the future.
Related
