By Bev Haigh-Jones
Most if not all of you reading this will have been against Brexit since before the 2016 referendum, but there have been many others, including much of the mainstream media, who have either disagreed or haven’t been prepared to speak out. Thankfully, that now seems to be changing.
Encouragingly, some well-known figures have voiced their opinions on the matter recently, helping to bring the issue of Brexit and Rejoin into the public awareness. The first was Lord Alan Sugar, a person not known for holding back his views, who stated in an interview that “’The biggest disaster in my lifetime was us leaving the EU’, and “If I was PM, I’d be coming along on my bended knees asking to be allowed back in.” This was followed by Jeremy Clarkson, not someone who always backs the right campaigns in my personal opinion, but who has always been extremely critical of the Brexit fiasco, recently calling it “the biggest mistake of a lifetime.”
Surprisingly, even the BBC has now begun to admit that perhaps Brexit wasn’t the great idea that it was claimed to be, as in this article, “Five key impacts of Brexit five years on.” Also, as The New Statesman tells us, the Liberal Democrats are prepared to go a stage further by openly calling for a return to the EU customs union and, more surprisingly, even Kemi Badenoch has been criticising the previous government’s (her government) action in triggering Brexit without a proper plan in place.
We “Remoaners” have always known the negative issues, of course, and thankfully more and more people now share our opinion, as demonstrated by every poll for the last couple of years. A Guardian recent headline, “Move closer to Europe – not Trump”, cites the poll carried out by Best for Britain which showed a majority in favour of a closer EU relationship in every constituency of the UK, including Farage’s seat in Clacton. The full MRP poll can be found here. All this was not particularly good news for Nigel Farage, of course, especially when a fisherman being interviewed by his pet news channel GBNews, said that it was a mistake. He himself had difficulty responding coherently to BBC Radio 4 presenter Emma Barnett – who was brilliant – to offer any true ideas for a way forward, it was all bluster and what we shouldn’t be doing. Things didn’t get better for the Reform UK leader on 10 February, when despite their constant criticisms and complaints about immigration and border control in the UK, not one of the Reform MPs actually attended parliament to take part in a debate on the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. This fact was not missed by Labour, and Kenneth Stevenson MP suggested that perhaps it was because they had “too many jobs.”
A final positive was the fact that Keir Starmer recently attended a meeting in Brussels with other EU leaders on defence and security, the first time a UK Prime Minister has done this since Brexit. One of the encouraging things to come from the meeting was a suggestion that the UK might join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention, a facility that removes some of the customs restrictions between member countries.
