Voter attitudes have moved on since Leave voters gave Boris Johnson an 80-seat majority in 2019
trading relationship with the EU than the one for which he and his party voted three years ago.
He is still adamant that Labour should not re-enter the European single market or customs union, let alone rejoin the EU, but both the tone and the substance of his latest remarks are significantly different from Labour’s stance hitherto. Unsurprisingly, the Conservatives have attacked these latest utterances. They have argued Starmer’s proposed deal on immigration would mean accepting 100,000 asylum seekers a year as part of the EU’s “burden sharing” policy, and that Starmer would talk Britain back to “square one on Brexit, reopening the arguments of the past all over again”.
However, the electoral calculus on Brexit in general and immigration in particular has moved on since Leave voters gave Boris Johnson an 80-seat majority in 2019. Rather than taking a risk, it is perhaps surprising that it has taken Starmer this long to be willing to distance his party from the Conservatives on these issues.
Public opinion did not just swing against the Conservatives during their leadership soap opera last year. It also moved against Brexit too.
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