There is an empty space where Britain’s largest mass political campaign once stood. The two most-signed online petitions in parliamentary history; the biggest marches on Whitehall since the Iraq War; blue berets. All gone, like European tears in the cold British rain.
Our collective memories of the campaigning years of 2016 to 2019 are fading. Brexit as a cultural phenomenon—as a vibe, if you will—still divides us. Between the dual shocks of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, however, we have developed amnesia about the heady days of the Brexit battle.
And yet, for several years, the hard Brexit we ended up with was only one in a set of possible future scenarios. In early 2019, a mass pro-Remain movement felt close to forcing a second referendum. A soft Brexit outcome fell just a handful of votes short in the indicative votes of March 2019. The marches, petitions and letters to MPs almost worked.
But now? The pro-European Union campaign—once a Remain campaign, now a movement for Rejoin—is a whisper of its previous glories. This seems both odd and inopportune. According to recent YouGov polling, 53 per cent of Brits support rejoining the EU, with just 27 per cent happy with the current relationship.
What’s more, a Labour government, elected with the votes of the old Remain coalition, is now in power with an unbreachable parliamentary majority. True, Labour claims to have “red lines” around rejoining the single market or customs union, let alone the EU itself. But parties are there to be persuaded. There is (potential) public support. There is a party in power with pro-EU leanings and members. So where is the pro-EU campaign?
Keir Starmer and Ursula von der Leyen recently agreed a reset in UK-EU relations. For the Rejoiners still around this must have been pretty thin gruel—an agreement on veterinary standards, a security pact, further conversations on youth mobility and Erasmus. Oh, and the chance for British tourists to use e-gates at the airport but not until after the summer holidays. All very worthy, but hardly “Ode to Joy”.
Every political movement becomes self-parody once it loses momentum
Why are there not armies of blue berets outside Number 10 pushing for more? After all, the skeleton armies of Leave have climbed out their graves to hum old battle tunes of betrayal and surrender at Starmer’s milquetoast deal.
Part of the answer is that every political movement becomes self-parody once it loses momentum. Morgan Jones’s forthcoming book, No Second Chances, is a deep dive into the sectarian wings of the second referendum movement. As the hopeful days of early 2019 turned to the cold winter of Get Brexit Done, she argues that the remaining Remain movement “became so insular as to be completely impotent as a political force”.
Every mass political movement must rely on ideologues, and true ideologues will strike most people as oddities, especially as the glow of initial success fades to failure—just ask Ukip. The Remain campaign was left with eccentric activists, such as Steve Bray with his megaphone, and the initials #FBPE (for “Follow Back, Pro EU”) still embedded in supporters’ Twitter aliases like a faded SPQR in a Roman ruin.
That’s not the whole story, of course. The organisations behind the second referendum still exist, with their gold-dust email lists of pro-EU Brits. Beneath the calm waters of a bureaucratic minor reset with the EU lurks the Rejoiner Kraken. But it has a new plan.
Open Britain was one of the largest groups lobbying for pro-EU causes. But its website today betrays little evidence of that past, other than the group’s priority to keep Nigel Farage out of power. Today it has a new mission—reforming Britain’s democracy. In particular, replacing its electoral system with a proportional one.
A cynical political scientist might wonder if proportional representation is the best way to stop Farage, a man whose success was built on European elections using that electoral system, and who has so far been kept on the margins by first-past-the-post.
But Open Britain and its supporters have a point. If there is a pro-Rejoin majority in the UK, it is too thinly spread across parties. The fabled “progressive coalition” cannot manifest under current Westminster elections. And if Labour continues to shrink away from Europe, perhaps electoral reform is the only road to Brussels.
There is, however, one fatal flaw in this plan. The last time the UK had a referendum on electoral reform, its advocates performed even worse than the Remainers did in 2016. If there is anything more off-putting to the public than blue berets, it may well be electoral reform campaigners doorstepping people with breathy pleas for the Alternative Vote system.
I suspect that if the UK is ever to Rejoin the EU, it will not be through a long and purposeful pilgrimage, with stops at electoral reform. It will happen through stagnation and humiliation, as it did in 1973, when the UK joined the European Economic Community. The backdrop to that was the drip, drip, drip of disappointing economic news; unreliable American economic leadership; summer holidays when we met with wealthier Europeans with nicer cars.
Perhaps the Rejoin movement, like its Remain ancestors, is doomed because Brits don’t want to hear the positives about joining the EU. If they are to rejoin, they want to do it reluctantly, begrudgingly—and without blue berets.
