So, how long will it be before we join again?

[BlackForestCake]

Will you be supporting the campaign to join the EU?

It will be good for business to do away with a lot of pointless red tape at customs, and our people will benefit from being able to travel, study and work in 28 countries.

I'm not even sure there would be another referendum. I can see a return to the 1992-2009 ish (esp post EU constitution in 2005) strategy where the EU made incremental changes designed so as to avoid future referendums.

I know that this can't be the case. Each EU nation is sovereign. Germany bans Referenda outright, having learnt the lesson the hard way from the 1930s. Italy does not allow Referenda if they impinge on international agreements. Ireland has them but knows how to conduct them and inform their citizens. The UK system is a total mish mash of rules seemingly written on the back of an envelope.

I can see the SNP winning in Scotland this year, and calling for an Independence Referendum and if successful there, take that as a mandate for rejoining the EU.

Omg give it up we are hardly going to re join anytime soon are we
You also can't just say oh by the way we want to re join now , changed our minds ffs

From my POV the EU changed its approach after the Dutch and the French held referendums on the constitution and rejected it. Anyhow that's really old ground, sorry for the diversion. Got us some way off the "campaign to rejoin" question start of the thread.

I was agreeing with LQ that a move towards rejoin will be small steps, not another "big bang" referendum. Agree on Scotland btw, that referendum will be held whether it has legal force or not.

@sally067 you can still do these things same as you can in nz or aus
We never had huge amounts of people doing this though it was more the other way

@heyahun you couldn't just fly there and just stay just like that , you needed to get a job etc as well
You make out you could just wake up and go I have a ticket I will just fly to france and live there tomorrow
People have managed to live and work in the eu before freedom of movement which is actually not that old

@GCacademic but countries shouldn't be staying only because its hard to leave !!

By the time we get round to thinking about rejoining it won't exist.,

Also those saying re: scotland it will take years before scotland can become independent even if yes vote at least 2 years then more years to join eu assuming they are eligible and allowed , so all talk of scotland will be in the eu , even of it happenss it yeArs off

@miljea I love how all remainers know exactly what leavers think about
I know many who voted leave who are highly intelligent and wavered between which way to go who did extensive research and have very valid reasons for voting leave
It seems its ok for scotland to vote to leave uk but not ok for uk to leave eu
We had one referendum leave won, scotland had one in lifetime leave lost , but they now want another one and people are saying who disagree with brexit that they should leave -hypocrites really

Louise, I doubt whether your POV or mine is what governs the way the EU behaves. We have well informed Irish voters on these threads who may be able to tell us when Ireland last held a Referendum on an EU issue, and if it's later than 2005 then it would show that what you think is true is not the case.

I don't think we'll ever rejoin again.

My concern is that all rational government is now under threat by populism aided by the MSM and social media. Business, experts, and anything in the way of evidence based strategy is out of the window in favour of mobilising emotions by blaming others, and the EU and remainers will always be on the list to blame along with Islington lawyers, judges, Scots, Irish. Meanwhile as the economy contracts cronies will continue to prosper. You only have to look at the mismanagement of Covid sidelining the existing public health infrastructure and established infection control strategies in favour of allowing death rates to rocket, extreme economic harm and cronies to prosper compared to countries with inferior public health resources and all manner of political systems who managed to suppress the virus. And nobody is up in arms because they have been set against each other. Look at all the threads on here blaming another section of society instead of where the blame should lie. That is the model for what is to come

The academic, medical and scientific brain drain has already started, certainly in my family the next generation has either already left or will certainly do so, and is clearly going to escalate so the base of liberalism will be weakened anyway.

I suppose Biden offers some hope that this could be reversed by more rational leadership in future but equally there are plenty of examples in history to show where populism can lead.

So no I don’t think we will rejoin the EU or that the future of the U.K. is worth investing in.

So no I don’t think we will rejoin the EU or that the future of the U.K. is worth investing in.

Yet again a sensible and well informed post from you Emily. I hope the first part of your last sentence doesn't come true. Who after all thought in 1989 that e.g. Poland would be in the EU 15 years later? I certainly didn't. As to the last part of your sentence - time will tell, but I suspect you are right.

I find it interesting how angry many of the Pro Brexit folks seem to be.

Those of us who think it was, is and will be a bad thing have every right to protest and campaign over the coming years
(as Cash, Chope, Lewis, Redwood and Farage did over the last decades)

Those who think it was a good thing should be getting on and making it so

Yes, I support rejoining wholeheartedly! Plus joining the euro and Schengen which will be rightly asked of us to rejoin! My DP is Dutch, out kids will have Dutch nationality and so we are very inconvenienced by being outside the EU.

Well by then the £ might be worth less than the €.

I was a remainer, but now we are out I think we need to give it a good go. I think the eu will eventually fall apart, in a few years it won’t look like it does now. It can’t. Too many countries are unhappy and th cost of us leaving and the additional costs the other countries need to pick up is unsustainable for them,

Besides the ref result, we've seen Nigel Farage's anti-EU party sweep the EU elections and a thumping majority for the political party who want to "get Brexit done". I see very little basis for your rather nasty views about brexit voters.

False "facts" there

Farage's Brexit Party won 29 out of 73 seats in the most recent EU Parliamentary elections. They won 30.5% of the vote. That is hardly a "sweep" of the EU elections . Even if you add in the 4 Conservative seats, that only takes the number to 33, which is still not a "sweep" (and some of the Conservative MEPs were/are pro-EU anyway ).

And as a further comment, the Brexit Party only won a single seat in Scotland - the SNP winning 3 (with c38% of the vote) and Conservative and Labour one each. The single MEP for the Brexit Party (and before it, UKIP) were the only ever elected representatives for either anti-EU Party in any capacity in Scotland. So even in previous EU elections, Farage's party never "swept" the elections

Pesky facts

I think this is quite interesting to see...

The survey, conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and YouGov, had more than 60,000 respondents across 14 EU member states.

It found that in every member state except Spain, the majority of voters believe the EU will fall apart within the next 10 to 20 years.

In France, 58% of respondents said it was realistic that the bloc would collapse within two decades, with 57% of Italian and Polish voters agreeing to that. Even in Spain, 40% of respondents said it was a realistic possibility that the EU could fall apart.

Admirable sentiments Bluntness100. T

here will in my view, be no long, slow, gradual, micro, tippy toeing back towards the EU. Given how Nigel Farage , Brexit Party, Leave. EU, ERG et al will be keeping their beady eyes on the project.

The only way the UK could ever go back in is for Rejoin to do what Brexiteers had to do. Make their own single issue party, get it to 15% in the polls and scare the big two into adopting their main plank.

Good luck with that!

Peregrina Perhaps I should have added to the end of that sentence that the future of England (as it won’t be a United Kingdom) will not be worth investing in if you are an ethical investor. There will obviously be plenty of opportunities for the unethical. I know many people in the City who are looking forward to being released from those pesky regulations Barnier imposed on them as a result of the lessons learned from the financial crash. This government don’t bother with lessons learned......

I find it interesting how angry many of the Pro Brexit folks seem to be. They really are, the amount of hatred and vitriol I have heard spewed at the EU, Junker, Tusk by family and friends. It might have been appropriate against the Nazis and Hitler during wartime when there was real suffering and evil but towards a partnership of nations during peacetime it is downright weird. They have a whole pantheon of figures to HATE including BLM and Lewis Hamilton now as well. These are not people made bitter by deprivation. They are middle class and work / worked in professions like teaching. I long ago stoped bothering to engage as it is emotional and the ignorance is wilful.

I cannot envisage any politician with a modicum of a chance at becoming Prime Minister will advocate rejoining. The matter of the EU has been toxic for 50 years, not just the last decade. It has terminated more prime ministers than not.

On top of that, I cannot even envisage the EU would have us back given the pain, although it would be different as we would have to sign up to every chapter we were previously opted out of, and also join the Euro to which we would bring a lot of clout

It won't happen though

@Emilyontmoor the remainers have the biggers moaners going even now they cannot accept the result
You are aware bame people would of also voted brexit, don't make assumptions about what else people believe in when you have no facts to back you up

@cyclingmad please don't post things like this as you have obviously made it up , because the whole of europe is in love with the eu surely you know that, no one in any eu country wants change
Many remainers can not seperate europe and the eu as being separate things

That survey is 18 months old - unless you're quoting a different one to the one I found And importantly - it's what the respondents feared - not what they wanted.

The ECFR's most recent one, covering 9 countries, is more positive - although not uncritical, given the difficulties of dealing with the Covid crisis.

https://ecfr.eu/publication/togetherinntraumaeuropeanssandtheeworldafterrcovid_19/

I thought that this table was particularly positive