It was only a matter of time before the B-word came crawling back into the room.
With whispers of a Labour leadership contest growing louder, and a by-election looming in Makerfield following the death of MP Yvonne Fovargue, the party’s uneasy relationship with Europe is suddenly looking like a live grenade again. Whoever fancies their chances at the top needs to decide pretty quickly which way they’re going to lean on this one.
The Makerfield seat, a solidly working-class constituency in Greater Manchester, voted Leave in 2016. Convincingly. That makes it exactly the kind of place where any Labour candidate waxing lyrical about closer EU ties could find themselves on the wrong end of a pointed conversation on the doorstep.
But the party’s activist base and much of its parliamentary wing tell a very different story. A growing number of Labour MPs are openly backing a customs union, or even a return to the single market. Some go further.
“The political weather has shifted,” one senior Labour figure told journalists last week. “The public have moved. The question is whether the leadership moves with them.”
Polling does suggest a softening in anti-EU sentiment since the cost-of-living crisis bit hard. A More in Common survey from earlier this year found that around 55% of 2016 Leave voters now believe Brexit has made the economy worse. That’s not nothing.
Still, translating that vague buyer’s remorse into a coherent policy platform is a different challenge entirely. Rejoining the EU isn’t on the table, not seriously. But “reset”, “closer alignment”, and the ever-slippery phrase “making Brexit work” are all jostling for position in internal briefings.
The leadership hopefuls, whoever they turn out to be, will have to square a circle that has confounded British politics for the better part of a decade. Promise too little to Remainers, and you haemorrhage votes to the Liberal Democrats in the south. Promise too much, and Makerfield starts looking shakier than it should.
Whether Brexit becomes a dividing line in this contest or gets quietly buried under NHS waiting times and energy bills is perhaps the more interesting question than who actually ends up winning it.
