Rejoin EU: the polls and the marches

Photo: Martin Thomas

A 59%-41% majority would vote to rejoin the EU. 78% of Labour voters are for rejoining. A 62%-to-12% majority thinks Brexit has been a "failure", and a 60%-29% majority now says it was always going to be a "failure".

Yet the third "National Rejoin March" on 28 September drew at most a few thousand, and almost entirely white and middle-aged or elderly. (Middle-class? I don't know. The shrinking of heavy manual work, and changing dress norms, make it hard to say. The small crowd did not look posh.) Another Europe Is Possible had printed left-wing placards - welcoming refugees, opposing austerity, demanding green transition - and they were received well, but it was a quiet march, stressing (so far as it stressed anything) the bourgeois "economic advantages" of EU membership rather than a working-class internationalism.

I sold only five copies of Solidarity and one of Women's Fightback. I would have sold more if I had stayed longer, but I concluded that my many other Workers' Liberty tasks today were a higher priority.

The first of these "Rejoin Marches", in October 2022, around the time of the Liz Truss episode, drew tens of thousands. The organisers claimed 50,000. The second, in September 2023, was estimated by The Independent at 3,000, and this third one was smaller.

I guess in October 2022, politics seemed to be in flux, and options open. Since then horizons have been closed. Keir Starmer talks of a reset, but has rejected even the EU's offer of a youth mobility scheme, and the Lib Dems have dropped "rejoin" as an active policy.

A continuing big majority wants rejoin, but also sees it as beyond reach.

However, horizons are closed only as long as we can't see far enough. There will be other times when millions of people can see politics as in flux. We can prepare by pushing the reverse-Brexit, pro-free-movement, open-borders, rejoin-EU message in unions and the Labour Party.