Where have all the "Remainer" leaders gone

HGV drivers shortgage, butchers shortage, shelves empty, Xmas looking dismal, 45,000 care homes vacancies, NI border issues, cross border trade issues, fast deteriorating relations with our nearest neighbours …and there are more without even mentioning the life experiences for Brits in EU and their nationals in GB.

So where have all the cheerleader for Remain gone?
Why is their no debate? Given an increasing number of Project Fear predictions are catalysing why no political stiring?

This political abrogation just plays into the continuing domination of those who want even more distancing from Europe.
The lack of any political leadership to say “we told you so” in a none confrontational way pushes further into the future any chance of a change of direction and to rebuild the UK (will it continue) EU relationship.
So why no rise of a pro Europe movement?
Don’t look to Labour to do this, they are gutless and the LibDems as ever are obsessing with dog pooh on local pavements!
What is needed is charismatic leader, without baggage of the previous Remain campaign…(as did Farage :japanese_ogre: :japanese_ogre: for the long Leave journey).
Who could that person be?

They have all laeft.
They had more sense than to be tarred with the BoJo brush.
Dominic Grieve works for the European Movement within the UK and would make a wonderful PM.

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Well, except that he’s a Tory :slight_smile:

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Any party that promotes ‘re-joining’ the EU is onto a loser.

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In the short term I would agree.

The biggest part of the problem is that if your party is not called either “Labour” or “Conservative” you are onto a loser anyway.

For the Tories to advocate rejoining we can assume that it would be snowing in hell, so improbable in the extreme.

Labour also would be unlikely to espouse this as policy but I think that it would have difficulty being taken seriously if it did. They definitely have a problem with Brexit because of the tainted legacy of Corbyn and need to handle it carefully - I do wish they would handle it though, rather than just ignore it.

The fact of the matter is that small, single issue, parties do badly in British politics - FPTP magnifies this but they’d do badly anyway. Even UKIP/The Brexit Party struggled to meaningfully get above 10% support despite the Brexit furore reaching fever pitch in 2017 and 2019.

Longer term we might come to our senses, at which point some rapprochement should be possible - but right now I don’t see us getting closer than single market/custom union membership this side of the middle of the century.

Labour is too busy sending any party members that believe that biological men can’t be women to Woke Gulag.

Quite frankly, the reanimated corpse of Jimmy Savile could form The Nonce And Necrophile Party and take seats away from Labour at the moment.

Already in office surely?

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Quite agree, and as for Dominic Greive and also Dominic Gauke, good ex (Tory) mps but lack the raw killer instinct to lead a new movement.

@billybutcherWell, except that he’s a Tory …I’m no true blue but I will support anybody who puts their head over the parapet willing to get shot at by the Brexiteer toxic uk media.
…the only extreme outside chance is that things deteriorate badly in the UK (but many of us have family or financial assets there) that a pro Europe movement gets significant and quick traction.

So …does the UK have to have a Weimar Republic and something like what followed, to get out of this mess?

If that happens it will harm lots of us here too.

One of the problems with the ‘remain’ campaign was that it never really had any ‘leaders’. The official remain campaign was led by Stuart Rose - that well-known personality, who was an obscure businessman before, and indeed still is. In reality - and disastrously - it was led by the government - mainly by Cameron and Osborne, who we all know disappeared after the brexit vote.

The fact is that brexit was always about the Tory party and its networks - it was both a schism inside the Tory Party and a fracture in the UK ‘establishment’.
For Labour it was very different - although there was a range of opinions in the labour movement, it was never a defining issue - indeed whatever view of the EU they took, almost all labourites thought it a low priority (as indeed did most people in the country as a whole - until the Tories and their media whipped it up to a frenzy).

In my view most labour members took a pretty sensible view of brexit. It was more of a conflict between the centre and the right - certainly the extreme remainers were centrists. Most labour people were remainers simply because they judged living standards were more likely to be maintained or improved inside the EU - but the ideological issues that so impassioned the centre and right - like ‘Sovereignty’ or ‘Europeanism’ - never did and do not loom large on the left.

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Not since the Tory/Lib Dem coalition ended.

That’s an interesting viewpoint because my impression (perhaps coloured by what has happened since, especially with the collapse of the “red wall”) was that many people at the bottom of society felt left behind by globalisation, large faceless power blocs like the EU (so the Right put faces onto it so they could mock) and being disregarded by those in power (or seeking it) in their own country. So they were not at all keen on the EU.

One of the problems for the remain campaign was that the economics of this are complicated. Leave - or rather the UK press over decades - succeeded in associating the EU with globalisation, and the ‘export of jobs’. In fact the real problem with globalisation is multinationals siting operations and procurement in low-wage and poorly regulated countries (both poor employment and poor environmental standards). It’s true, of course, that this happened to some extent within the EU when the former communist transition states were admitted, BUT in the long term the single market will address this, through common standards and - wait for it - free movement (because people can move from low wage to high wage areas within the market, just as the always have within a country, discrimination (eg. by accent) notwithstanding. In this sense, the EU is in fact an anti-globalisation construction. But try explaining that in a soundbite!

I do agree that there was an element of protest against the status-quo in the brexit vote - some people saw it as an opportunity to kick the establishment (unlike voting in a UK general election, where most votes don’t really count). But the main factors in the subsequent ‘collapse of the red wall’ lay elsewhere; in fact, Labour votes (indeed all votes) in these areas had been declining for decades (except in the exceptional 2017 election) mainly for a simple reason (though again one not easy to explain!). There are a lot more older home-owners in these seats - and old home-owners tend to vote Tory whatever their former occupation. This will surprise nobody who has read Marx, because he never defined social class in terms of occupation, education, etc - all the nonsense that anglo-saxon sociologists now employ. For Marx, it was about asset ownership, and in the UK now home ownership (once the mortgage is paid off of course) is the absolutely key asset.
Many former miners, etc, bought their council or coal-board house decades ago and now own it outright, and have pretty good pensions too thankyou. They see the world through privileged eyes, and are natural Tories. Their kids have moved to the big cities for different jobs - but actually whether you are child of a miner or of a teacher you will now struggle asset-less to pay astronomical rent in the city, and you’ll vote Labour for a fairer deal.

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I think this timescale is far too long Billy - remember the old adage ‘a week is a long time in politics’.
But the main issue here is actually not politics (if you see that in terms of opinion or ideology) - it’s reality. As Greta Thunberg says, ‘nature doesn’t care what people think’.

In the 2021 Per Jacobsson Lecture at the IMF yesterday Christine Lagarde laid out what’s going to happen over the next decade - the decline of globalisation and the increasing ‘continentalisation’ of trade. This is for 2 reasons:

  1. Climate/ecological breakdown means that long-distance travel and trade has to be curtailed, and
  2. The pandemic has shattered confidence in the long-supply-chain just-in-time business model.

She laid out evidence that governments and businesses were already moving to more local supply, and trade already moving to regional/continental trade blocks. She was, of course, advising Europe to focus on internal and near-neighbour trade - but her remarks apply even more to the UK, which undertook brexit and the ‘global Britain’ fantasy at precisely the wrong time - when the world is in fact moving in the opposite direction.

Neither public opinion nor political ideology will alter this. The coming decade will be a period of change unprecedented in our lifetimes, and I suspect that before it’s over it will be obvious to everybody in the UK that brexit was a mistake, and there will already be moves to reverse it.

Given that it takes many years to go through the application and negotiation processes I just can’t see how the UK re-joins before the mid to late 2030’s at the earliest and of course that relies on the ditching of a Tory government and a ‘Yes’ vote in any new referendum before even applying.

I’d like to agree with you - well I do as far as the tumultuous decade goes, but not that sanity will prevail before the end of it.

For one thing it is by no means a given that Labour will prevail in 2024. The Left is split, the Tories lag behind the centre/left but are ahead of Labour in the polls and boundary and ID changes work in their favour. Johnson could well employ the tactic of an early election to wrong foot Labour - which is likely to work.

Throw in a few sweeteners in the budget and we could be stuck with the Tories until 28 or 29 (depending when the GE is called).

Possibly then things will be so bad that Labour will win - but it is equally possible that the Tories will have manoeuvred into an unassailable position with legislative changes which make it impossible to get them out. Don’t think this will not happen - they are not playing the old “gentleman’s agreement” game of politics.

However if Labour DO get in in '24 they will still be wedded to the “make Brexit work” thinking, so the best we might hope for is CU/SM membership and the EU will, rightly, be wary of us trying to rejoin anyway. Mid 2030’s is probably the shortest timescale for SM membership in practice.

One thing is certain - Labour will not fight the next GE on a rejoin ticket.

Oh I agree it’s highly unlikely that Labour will win in 2024 (or earlier). I know lots of people in the UK Labour Party, including a couple of MPs - my sister is a branch chair - and believe me it’s in more of a mess than even its public appearance would suggest! There is a slim possibility that things will get so bad Starmer will win ‘by default’, but what I actually expect to happen is that Starmer will lose, hopefully to be replaced by a competent leader, who will go on to win next time.

But I don’t see this as crucial. Most climate change deniers (including Boris Johnson) ultimately found it impossible to actually deny reality - and suddenly became vanilla delayers-of-action-on-climate-change - or in Johnson’s case possibly even a mild advocate of action. Johnson took only about 5 years to change his position on this - a much bigger issue than brexit. Once the way things are going becomes crystal clear to the public, and to most MPs of whatever party, they will change before they actually get voted out.

1) is there such a person waiting in the wings 2) even if there is do you think it is actually possible to unite Labour and get some coherent policies which might win an election? 3) how will this person deal with the fact that the centre left is fragmented 4) how will this person deal with the fact that the loss of 40-odd labour MPs in Scotland was a body blow to the party (basically further splitting the votes that Labour are chasing and seats in parliament they are not going to win back)

Propaganda of course came into it. You can fool some of the people all of the time. Many of them even now have been led to believe that there are also shortages in the EU like those they are seeing in the UK.