We don’t look back 10 years. We look forward

As this magazine has argued for years, the idea of returning, retreating… rejoining … is dangerous and delusional. The goal now is to argue to join something new, not rejoin the thing 52% voted to leave in 2016. 

Join, as a statement of intent, should be the launchpad for a forward-facing, progressive debate about the UK’s national interest, not some tatty, apologetic retreat to an arrangement resented by so many of our fellow citizens.

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Farage wants to dodge the blame for Brexit. We can’t let him

Alastair Campbell

No. We don’t look back ten years. We look forward, making the exciting case for the possibilities of the next ten.

And just as Britain stands at a crossroads, so too does the EU. It must (and it is doing so) reconfigure itself for the reality, not the fantasy, of the second quarter of the 21st century. 

Ultimately, the truly necessary debate is continental, not national. Britain, quite literally, cannot afford to be a bystander in that conversation. 

So while we can argue the toss about the immediate timing of Wes Streeting’s intervention, what is not debatable is the content: “The biggest economic opportunity we have is on our doorstep. We need a new special relationship with the EU, because Britain’s future lies with Europe – and one day back in the European Union,” he said. 

Some recoiled from what they see as re-litigating a topic Britain has already decided. It antagonises, they say, the voters who are fed up with the mere mention of Brexit. 

But this is wrong. What the voters are fed up with is a paralysis of government and a chronic erosion of living standards and Britain’s place in the world. Not all of it, but a damn good part, thanks to Brexit.

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Is Wes Streeting the man to take Britain back into Europe?

Matt Withers

The great Neil Kinnock wrote recently in The Observer that there is now an inevitability about rejoining the EU or, as he wrote, “to be more accurate and forward-looking about a changed Europe: Joining again.”

He ended his article like a Welsh Moses returning to the people from the mountain top: “I am 84. I will probably not see it.” I believe, at least I heartily wish, he is very wrong about that. 

Such is the velocity of our politics, such is the frustration of the electorate, such is the urgent desire for a bold alternative to the corrosive nationalism touted by pocket-lining populists, that it seems entirely possible we will reach the promised land together.

Sooner, perhaps, than even we believed possible when we launched this magazine in the days after that catastrophic event, ten miserable years ago.