NEWS · 31 January 2023
Today marks the anniversary of 'Brexit day', three years since the UK formally left the EU on 31 January 2020.
That was also the month we founded Stay European, as a continuing pro-EU campaign and a statement that all of us who still feel European would not give up.
We have always been optimists for the prospects of the UK rejoining the EU. Yet right now, the popularity of Rejoin is running ahead of even our expectations.
A majority, already?
In 2020, we expected that there would be a long road ahead in slowly persuading Britain of the benefits of EU membership. Support for Rejoin was not a majority in polls at the time – though it was a strong base, above 40%. We simply did not expect that Rejoin would be polling an average of 58% by early 2023.
We cautiously predicted that the economic impact of Brexit would start to change minds. Yet we did not predict that soon a prime minister, Liz Truss, would drive the economy off a cliff, sparking a UK-only financial crisis that caused a rapid shift in public opinion.
We thought that the next general election could hopefully result in a narrow defeat for the Brexit Tories. While we can't count our chickens before they have hatched, the polls have clearly stabilised in a position where the government faces a landslide defeat. Removing the fear of a Tory comeback will remove the fear of talking about Rejoin.
And in the past year especially, Rejoin has shifted bit by bit from being an outsider bet to being discussed even by Brexiters as a serious likelihood, with the Brexit-supporting Telegraph saying "Britain is going to rejoin the EU far sooner than anyone now imagines".
The level of support is far beyond our best-case original predictions for how the early days of Rejoin campaigning would play out.
Shifting sands
Now, on one level this can also be frustrating. If Rejoin is coming down the tracks, why are the political parties still so slow to shift? Why is the media still stuck in 2016? Why does something with majority support still feel somehow 'niche'?
But we say: take heart. All the shifts above are continuing. Support for Rejoin continues to grow, up into the high 50s and breaking out over 60% now in some polls. Politicians are slow but will have to adapt.
Rejoin's support continues to rise. If you count from the end of the transition period instead of the formal leaving date, Britain has only been fully feeling Brexit's effects for just over two years. Brexit's popularity still has plenty of room to fall further.
Stay European is still here, having laid a solid base for our campaign, and we are growing. As Rejoin support spreads we are proud to be part of the early days of a new movement: the Rejoin campaign has begun.
We believe we are on track to rejoin the EU by 2030. However long it takes, though, our campaign will continue.
