Rejoining Europe: the policy which could ironically unite Britain

“Ten years after Brexit, this is the UK: a divided nation frozen in time,” ran a headline in the Guardian on April 9, above a piece by Aditya Chakrabortty. Over at the Telegraph a day earlier, the politics was different but the sentiment the same: “Britain more divided now than at time of Brexit” ran the headline over an article by political editor Tony Diver. Two very different world views; one conclusion.

Chakrabortty’s evidence comes from a new book by politics professors Sara Hobolt and James Tilley. For Tribal Politics: How Brexit Divided Britain, they conducted and analysed surveys of large numbers of voters over many years. Their argument is that while prior to the referendum the public hardly gave any thought to the EU, that all changed once it happened. Your individual position on Brexit turned into an identity-based habit, and that tribalism remains strong today, even if it is now focused on wider culture wars.

The Telegraph’s argument was forged from its own exclusive poll of 4,900 people across England, Scotland and Wales, which found that more than three-quarters of voters and a majority of all social groups think the country is more fractured than a decade ago, with the country split by identity, age, geography and political views.

It all makes for depressing reading – and yet elsewhere there’s empirical evidence of an issue on which the message from the British public is actually now clear and consistent. With a delicious/grim (delete as applicable) irony, it’s the one where everyone seems to agree kicked off this decade of division in the first place: on Britain’s place in Europe itself.

Pressing Reset is a new publication from the Fabian Society which brings together experts and policymakers from the UK and Europe to explore what a new relationship might look like. And it features recent YouGov polling on the topic – from February, but little-reported – to see quite how clear the desire is to forge a new, closer one.

By a margin of 63% to 16%, those surveyed were in favour of having a closer relationship with the EU in the scenario where we do not rejoin any of its formal apparatus (whether the single market, the customs union or the bloc itself). By a margin of 49% to 20%, they would support the government seeking the UK’s re-entry into the customs union. The story is much the same for rejoining the single market, which 49% of the public support, compared to 23% against.

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And a decade on, such is the strength of the demand for a closer UK-EU relationship that 55% would support the UK fully rejoining the EU, with only 34% opposed. 63% believe Brexit has been more of a failure than a success, while only 10% believe the opposite.

“Be under no illusion that we are no longer the Britain of the Brexit years,” writes Labour MP Chris Ward in the publication’s foreword. “We want a closer relationship with the EU. We want deeper integration. We want to work with, not against, our EU partners. And we will choose – as is our sovereign right – to align with the single market where it is in our national interest.”

You might ask, not entirely unreasonably, “Chris who?” But Ward is a Cabinet Office minister who, under Nick Thomas-Symonds, has responsibility for the EU reset. And he’s finally saying this stuff out loud (in a Fabian Society publication, yes, but, you know… progress).

“Progressives should welcome this,” he says, and he’s right, although the argument could have been made louder 10 years ago (at the time Ward was a political advisor to the relatively new Labour MP for Holborn & St Pancras, Keir Starmer). But finally a positive case for being in lockstep with our European neighbours is once again being made.

And compare this to the Brexiteers, who no longer bother making a case for their cherished project and just deal in personal insults. This week alone you can read “Don’t believe this latest Remoaner excuse to undo Brexit and shove UK back in EU”, in the Daily Express (“Frankly, stuff the EU!,” writes a commentator based in, er, Singapore), and “Snake oil Starmer strikes again – this is Brexit reversal by the back door” by Mark Dolan in the same paper (“If only we could flush him away”). You won – get over it.

No, it is time to be confident in our arguments, positive in our case and welcoming to those newly joining it. Wrenching the country apart from Europe tore our body politic in two – might repairing the relationship actually be the one goal that paradoxically repairs it?