Major study finds public see ties with Europe as more important than links with US and many ‘exhausted’ by ‘toxic’ debate
Of course they do. It makes sense.
It’s been clear for a while. Forgot merely closer ties - the opinion polling on the UK rejoining the EU has shown consistent Rejoin leads for the last two years (after a neck-and-neck period in the immediate 18 months after Brexit, albeit that being a time when normal politics had been upended by the pandemic and so Brexit wasn’t front of mind for many people).
And if you go back further, by the time Brexit actually happened there had been consistent Remain leads over Leave for several years, as well as an outright majority of voters backing second referendum parties at the 2019 general election, all of which the Tory Brexit fanatics in office simply chose to ignore.
One of the great tragedies of Brexit is that the British were essentially pulled out of the EU against our will because of a very slender majority that happened to exist on one particular day in June 2016 - and we’re going to have to spend years or even decades trying to reverse the damage done by that senseless act of political, economic and cultural vandalism.
What exactly would the UK need to do to rejoin the EU?
I remember there was discussion that would be difficult, but I don’t remember exactly why. I also remember the UK originally actually had an exception to keep the Pound instead of the Euro. Would that still be on the table to rejoin?
Notionally every EU member state agrees to a direction of travel towards euro membership (only pre-Maastricht Treaty members were able to negotiate formal opt outs). If the UK rejoined then in principle it could try to renegotiate the old opt out as part of the accession talks.
But in practice it’s purely symbolic - plenty of newer EU member states like Poland are signed up to hypothetically one day joining the euro but their governments are making no effort to do anything about this and nobody is able to compel them otherwise (or cares). There’s good reason to imagine that France wouldn’t want the UK in the euro anyway (since the French tend to view the euro through mercantilist eyes, as a means to drive financial services business from London to Paris).
