this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
233 points (96.8% liked)
Europe
8484 readers
3 users here now
News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures
Rules
(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
- Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
- No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
- No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.
Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's worth saying that both major parties are way out of line with the electorate on this - polling of whom shows:
there were consistent majorities for Remain from about mid-2017 until Brexit happened; and
there has been a consistent polling plurality for Rejoin pretty much since that point onwards (and sometimes outright polling majorities for Rejoin).
So neither of those parties are currently speaking for a large (and possibly majority) share of the electorate on this issue. When such situations arise, it's rare for the electorate to be the ones who have to change their mind and accord with what the politicians think...
What I expect will happen in the coming years (particularly after Labour go into government next year) is that the Lib Dems will get increasingly bolshy on this issue and probably build towards announcing a Rejoin manifesto in the run up to the 2028/9 general election, and Labour will start bleeding votes to them. That will force Labour to shift its position (in the same way they shifted their position on a People's Vote after the Lib Dems trounced them in Labour strongholds at the 2019 EU elections).
By the end of this decade, Rejoin will be a very mainstream position among British politicians in the way it already is with British voters.
Still, that means it is probably not going to happen until the last years of the following decade at the earliest and that is if a significant effort is made to reduce the gap on standards and regulations introduced in the last few years.
Nah, they'll begin the candidacy talks, the U.K. will say "soo same deal as before, maybe we compromise on the color of the passport?" the E.U. will say "LMAO. To start with, the Euro is non-negotiable" and that will be the end of that until 2050 at least.
Having a Rejoin movement in the UK is one thing, good on them for rubbing the Leavers' noses into their own shit stains, but everything I know about the UK shows that you will never get a majority of voters in favor of the new accession rules, that have been repeatedly stated by the EU as non-negotiable (for obvious geopolitical reasons of fairness towards other EU member states as well as fear of precedent-setting).
8 EU-countries are outside the eurozone, though.
Either because they joined before that was a requirement and have a special exemption (what the UK had before they left and what Denmark has), don't meet the economic requirements, or are Sweden and meet the requirement but haven't started the procedure which is a weird loophole nobody cares enough to patch... yet.
Nobody really cares that Sweden isn't using the Euro even though going by the spirit of the law they should, but the U.K. is a much more important economic player that I don't see the EU allowing to keep absolute control over its currency.