The leading contenders seeking to topple Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer have both said that they would overturn the Brexit referendum and rejoin the European Union.
Formally announcing his intention to wage a leadership campaign against Prime Minister Starmer, former Health Secretary Wes Streeting — who resigned from Starmer’s cabinet this week — said that if given power, he would look to rejoin the EU.
Calling Brexit a “catastrophic mistake”, Streeting said per The Times of London: “The Vote Leave campaign deluded itself into thinking that the UK could forge a global free trade nirvana, as though we still had the East India Company at our disposal.”
“We need a new special relationship with the EU because Britain’s future lies with Europe, and one day back in the European Union.”
The position puts Streeting at odds with the current government. Although Prime Minister Starmer campaigned against Brexit, he has said that the 2016 Referendum results should be honoured.
However, Streeting’s rejoin position is quite similar to his main rival in seeking to tear the top job away from Starmer, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham.
Quoted by the Westminster gossip site Guido Fawkes from a Labour Conference last year, Burnham said: I want to rejoin the EU. I hope it happens in my lifetime… I believe in the unions of all kinds. The union of the UK. The European Union, and the benefits it brought this country. Trade unions… People prosper more when they’re part of unions. That’s my belief, and I’ll say it clearly.”
While rejoining the European Union currently enjoys majority support in Britain, it remains to be seen how pushing for the largest democratic exercise in British history to be overturned would go down in the working-class areas of the country that Labour has been bleeding support from to Brexit champion Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.
Indeed, according to veteran Times journalist, Steven Swinford, Reform plans to make the Makerfield by-election — which was sparked by Burnham’s plot to return to parliament to take down Starmer — a referendum on rejoining the EU, which the party plans to argue will only result in more mass migration, and that rejoiners like Burnham would open Britain’s borders to half a billion people.
Such a message is likely to resonate in Makerfield, where nearly two-thirds of voters backed Brexit in 2016.
The prospect of a Brexit betrayal by a Labour government elected on the promise to respect the referendum has sparked widespread outrage.
Reform UK politician Matt Goodwin said: “They really don’t care about you. They don’t want to fix the borders. They don’t want to end mass uncontrolled immigration. They don’t want to respect your democratic vote for Brexit. And they certainly don’t want to stop treating you like second-class citizens in your own country. Vote Reform.”
Meanwhile, at the Freedom Association conference in London next week, former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith is expected to say that the Labour Party does not have an electoral mandate to overturn Brexit.
In comments released ahead of the event, Labour peer and founder of Blue Labour, David Jones, said that the Labour leadership battle is an “ominous” sign for Brexit. However, Jones said that even Starmer — who has sought greater “alignment” with Brussels — would “sell Brexit out in a stroke if he thought it would save his skin.”
“As for the rest of this third-rate field, they all think that the EU flag is the one for the sell-out Left to rally round as they scramble to cling onto power. One way or another, they want to flirt with or actively rejoin such EU shibboleths as the single market and the customs union – while not admitting that the British taxpayer will have to fork out billions for these job-destroying ‘privileges’,” the Labour peer said.
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