'Whisper it - but Britain might be about to rejoin the EU'
Your immigration is running at 500,000 a year.
Your new blue passports are made in Poland by a company majority-owned by the French state.
Your economy is £33billion in the hole. Your boy Boris is out of power and going on trial. Your sole border with the EU is not being controlled, nor can it be. Your fishing industry, your farmers, and your trade deals, are all worse. The left behind are still there, and living standards have slumped.
Your Parliament was illegally closed, then told what to do, and your NHS still hasn't seen that £350million a week. Brexit just isn't working, and no-one's doing bugger all about it.
"But... but... well that's not MY fault!" (Getty Images)A survey on the day of the 2016 referendum to leave the EU found that half of those who voted out did so to restore Britain's sovereignty, and a third wanted to control immigration. Studies found that poorer, less-educated voters backed it because they were losing out, and gambled on change to try and break even.
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A survey this week by Redfield & Wilton Strategies has found 61% would vote to rejoin the EU. If you include the 'don't knows', there's still a healthy 56% majority. More than half of people polled want a referendum in the next five years. While some on both sides who've changed their minds, more of those who voted to Leave have switched to Rejoin.
But perhaps the most telling fact is this, from a poll for More in Common and reported by Politico: only 22% of people who voted Tory in 2019 want to rejoin, but the figure is 82% among those who backed Labour. Throw in a few million under-24s who didn't get a vote last time, and it becomes politically vital we go back to the EU and ask them to try again.
The only question is for how long after he takes office could Keir Starmer afford to keep saying the matter has been settled.
"Well, um, er, it's not my priority to prioritise the thing voters want me to prioritise. Not yet. Maybe in a bit" (PA)The boats haven't been settled. Deterrence hasn't worked against irregular immigration since Labour banned asylum seekers from working in 2006. It didn't work when we set up border posts in France, didn't work when we fenced off the Channel Tunnel, and didn't work after Brexit forced us to re-establish border posts in the UK.
In fact the only way to truly smash the people trafficker's' business model is to have a returns agreement with France - like the one we had before Brexit, and which the Tories can't ask for because it would show that Brexit was based on a lie. We had more control over our borders as a member of the EU than we do outside it.
But the current batch of Tories only know how to win elections using dog-whistles and fear, and cannot get their heads around the fact immigration has an economic dividend. So they have to keep banging the angry drum about a thing they cannot, and will not, fix - forced into campaigning to make themselves look worse.
The Leave campaign said we'd have sunlit uplands, the easiest trade deals in history, and a financial boost worth billions. In fact we've lost 4% of our gross domestic product, signed just four new trade deals and duplicated another 71 from the deals we had in the EU, and haven't even bothered to use our new-found independence to cut the VAT on energy bills.
We did cut the 5% VAT on period products - but prices dropped by just 1%, with retailers pocketing the difference. Although it was announced before the referendum, it's the only post-Brexit vote success anyone noticed - tuppence off a packet of tampons, for half the population, for 12 weeks a year. Don't spend it all at once, ladies!
Ardent Leavers will say the war in Ukraine and Covid had an impact on how badly it's going. Maybe. But other countries who suffered from those things aren't doing as badly as us, and are bouncing back quicker. Britain is, by comparison even with Michael Gove, more sluggish.
Didn't put that on the bus, did they (Sean Hansford | Manchester Evening News)Read more similar news:
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