Why are Remainers so weak in post-Brexit Britain?
It first became obvious that Sir Keir Starmer wanted to be prime minister on September 25th 2018. The Labour Party was holding its annual conference in Liverpool. Theresa May’s government was slowly disintegrating over Brexit. Under Jeremy Corbyn, Sir Keir’s predecessor as party leader, Labour was keeping its position on holding a second referendum purposely opaque. From the stage Sir Keir shattered that ambiguity, departing from his approved script with the words: “And nobody is ruling out Remain as an option!” Pro-EU delegates gave him a long, defiant ovation. A year and a half later, they would elect him as their leader on a promise to “defend free movement”. Unreconciled Remainers did not stop Brexit; they did shape the Labour Party.
These days Sir Keir is ruling out quite a lot: not just rejoining the EU in his lifetime but the single market and customs union, too. His “reset” with European leaders this summer has been energetic and sincere. But on a visit to Berlin in August, a suggestion from Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, for a youth-mobility scheme was frostily rebuffed. The opportunity to spend a fortnight awkwardly hosting your teenager’s German penfriend (“Wie heißt das Meerschweinchen deiner Schwester?”) is not much compensation for Brexit. But it is not one Sir Keir is yet ready to grant.
Therein lies one of the stranger puzzles of British politics. The pro-European cause is popular; its advocates are ineffective. It has millions of supporters but little hard influence in Westminster. Its power is latent, not manifest. Why?
A mass movement in favour of EU membership was mostly absent for Britain’s 47 years in the club; it didn’t materialise in the referendum of 2016. But the chaos that followed the vote radicalised a class of diffident, comfortable voters, who turned out for huge marches in odd berets. At its peak, People’s Vote, which ran the campaign for a second referendum, raised £100,000 ($130,000) a week, a fortune in British politics, from email donations alone.
Rather than melt away, hostility to Brexit has since risen: voters think it was the wrong decision by a wide margin. For some it has hardened into a resilient new form of political identity. More than a quarter of Remain supporters still say that criticism of their cause “feels like a personal insult”, according to the 2023 British Election Study, a survey. At 13% of British adults, this tribe of hard-core Remainers is much larger than its equivalent among Leavers or Labour and Conservative voters.
Such folk are concentrated in Sir Keir’s electoral coalition. Some 78% of Labour voters say they would rejoin the EU, and 69% of them would favour a referendum within five years. Only a third say the matter is definitely settled. It is true the issue has fallen as a priority for Labour voters since the Brexit years, but they still rank Europe alongside immigration and education, and ahead of crime and tax, as a national priority. Sir Keir contends that Britain is tired of hearing about Brexit. For many of his supporters, that is just not the case.
To see how a passionate tribe, sitting deep in the base of the governing party, can jolt government policy in their favour, consider how Nigel Farage mobilised the once-fringe cause of conservative Euroscepticism. What would it take for Remainers to do the same? Clear objectives would be a start. Britain’s constellation of pro-EU groups disagree on whether to support a gradual softening of Brexit, or go for the panacea of seeking to rejoin. They differ too on whether Sir Keir is their best ally or about to sell them out.
Some of Mr Farage’s ruthlessness would help. Before it even had a chance to defeat Brexit, People’s Vote defeated itself in a feud between followers of Peter Mandelson, a smooth former Eurocrat, and Roland Rudd, an even smoother lobbyist. The British chapter of European Movement, a pressure group founded in 1949, is more disposed to “lurking in the corridors of power and persuading people to go a bit further” than “being a Faragist street movement”, says Sir Nick Harvey, its head. The Remainer brigade is good at churning out PDFs on the future of chemicals regulation but rather less effective at getting politicians to read them. That ought to be a soluble problem in Westminster, a place awash with professional lobbyists employed by everyone from cat shelters to the sun-cream industry.
Don’t mourn. Organise!
What they lack most is a toehold in Parliament. The Liberal Democrats dialled back their support for Europe as they pursued Tory voters in the election in July (though that may shift again during this Parliament). Labour has lined up behind Sir Keir thus far. Many MPs found the Brexit schism traumatic; the Labour Movement for Europe, a caucus, has been marginalised. But that can change. It took 18 months before David Cameron experienced the first big EU rebellion of his premiership. Imagine that Sir Keir’s reset flops, his polling further decays and his grip on the party weakens; then the pro-European banner may be a tempting one for a disgruntled rival to pick up. If Labour’s left were as cunning as Sir Keir, says one wag, they would develop an interest in Brussels.
The mere fact of Sir Keir’s visit to Berlin prompted headlines including “Fury erupts at Keir Starmer’s EU capitulation” (the Express) and “Labour’s Brexit betrayal will lose them the next election” (the Telegraph). The emotions of Eurosceptics were vital to understanding the Tory government. But for the Labour government, whose supersize majority rests on a fragile 34% share of the vote, the thing that matters is not the fury of tribal Leavers but the disappointment of tribal Remainers. For them, snubbing Mr Scholz over youth mobility speaks not of caution but of recklessness. A movement that helped make Sir Keir’s career can also unmake it. Were they more organised and more ruthless, Remainers would be dangerous. ■
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