Tracy Rolfe: Do you think the UK will eventually rejoin the EU? If so, when and how do you think it will happen?

Yes, unless the EU does actually collapse as the Daily Express is hoping, I think rejoining is inevitable. The vast majority of opposition to EU membership is loaded into older people and it’s not a view that becomes more prevalent as you get older, as some political issues do. This is part of a very specific generation of people. So, if nothing else, as time passes, the electorate becomes more pro-EU, the politicians personally linked with Brexit disappear from the scene, and the new leaders have no baggage, we will eventually see the benefits.

However, I’m not a fan of achieving political change through a patient game of waiting for millions of people to die off, so I’d rather we pressed the issue more quickly. Peter Mandelson recently said that he thought we might be getting ready to apply in about ten years. I certainly think that if Labour are to achieve their economic aims, then achieving more growth will have to include breaking down the most obvious trade barriers.

Valerie Chaplin : What do you think of Keir Starmer’s attitude towards Brexit and his slogan ‘Make Brexit Work’?

First of all, Keir Starmer was the most recognisable voice against Brexit as far as the public were concerned. He did not get kicked in the head by a horse when he became Labour leader. His change of position reflected the change in our EU status. Not that his real beliefs on EU membership matter, more what his Government will do.

The “Make Brexit Work” slogan is as meaningless as any other political slogan. It can simply mean that he is going to get our economy in shape outside the EU. But, of course, it will always be hampered by trade barriers as a result of being outside the SM and CU. What Starmer is trying to agree with the EU in practice actually represents the steps which would need to be taken if we rejoined at least the single market. As such, I see no difference between his policies and the policies of someone who was openly talking about joining the SM or EU proper. Of course, he might not achieve them, but we don’t qualify to join the SM or EU right now anyway.

Lisa Burton : What do you think of Boris Johnson’s comments in recent interviews regarding Brexit, particularly it ‘being an argument he wanted to win’ and his continuing blame game?

We know that the real reason Boris Johnson championed Brexit was for political power. He did not believe that he could become Conservative leader, and therefore Prime Minister, without the support of Tory MPs described by a former party chair as ‘swivel eyed loons.’ They wanted Brexit, so he thought that if he became the banner bearer for Brexit, he could win their support.

It’s believed that he did not expect the leave campaign to win, and so did not think he would actually have to deal with the consequences – simply benefit from the support of Brexiteers when David Cameron stepped down, which he was going to do during the second Parliament anyway.

It’s been clear throughout that Boris Johnson understands nothing about the EU, the single market, the customs union or even what a non-tariff barrier actually is. We’ve also seen that he simply does or says whatever he thinks he needs to do in order to deal with tricky problems in the short term with no thought for the long term. So, whatever Boris Johnson decides to say was his reasoning for getting behind Brexit, it was only ever a device to have the easiest possible path to becoming Prime Minister.

Michael Soffe : Earlier in the year you quoted Tory MP Paul Scully as saying a new referendum on Brexit would result in the vote being reversed. Do you believe there will be a further referendum and if so, presumably way down the road? How do we convince the public that we need one?

I believe that we will apply to rejoin the EU, and a referendum is the only credible way of doing that now. I would suggest that in order to maximise the chances of success, we actually have two referenda included in the legislation, as we should have done before. We know that issues like currency will be a big worry for people, but that it’s also possible to negotiate opt-outs, though we can’t expect everything we had before.

So, we should have one referendum which only gives the Government the authority to apply for membership, and then a second referendum, once the terms are agreed, which the public use to give final approval.

But, to persuade the public, we need them to realise that Brexit trade barriers are the cause of problems like getting NHS medicines and staff, food which is less fresh, higher costs of goods and some services. So, we need an official economic assessment of being outside the EU/SM/CU.

Mike Fitzgerald : If you were in a position of power, what would be your approach to a “reset with the EU”? And do you think a ‘reset’ can lay foundations for a future rejoin?

So, we have to be mindful of two things when it comes to closer moves to the EU. The first is that a significant number of key voters are still not convinced Brexit is bad, and the second is that the Conservatives will loudly proclaim that they will reverse any major alignment with the EU that Labour implements.

So, although I think my approach would be a bit different to Starmer’s, I don’t think it would be very far away. When EU policy experts criticise Labour’s moves it tends to be along the lines of being clear about what they want from the EU. We know Labour wants a veterinary deal, mutual recognition of qualifications and a deal that sounds very like freedom of movement for performers. But Labour haven’t been clear about the precise details, or what they think we can agree to give the EU in return.

So, I would say that I think what I would do in power is to have those detailed proposals worked out as a priority so that there was the basis for discussion. I would also have bitten their hand off at the prospect of re-joining Erasmus, because nobody wanted us to leave.

Lawrence Renaudon Smith : There is a lot of discussion about university students and Erasmus etc., but I hear very little about the effect Brexit is having on the attitudes and education of schoolchildren. Are they becoming more inward-looking and nativist due to Brexit? Gen Z are pro-EU membership, but are Gen Alpha going to see other Europeans as “the foreigners”? 

I’m not a sociologist, but I don’t think the next generation will be anti-EU. Anti-EU sentiment worked largely on people who were lied to on the basis that bad things in the country were blamed on the EU. This doesn’t work on a generation entering adulthood outside the EU. I would also say Brexit sentiment worked well on many older people because of classic nostalgia. You think things were better when you were young and ascribe it to society being better at the time. In reality, it’s because you were young, fit and healthy, and didn’t have to grunt every time you got out of a chair.

Again, this doesn’t really work on the youngest because their young, fit and healthy times are in the Brexit years. I gather the younger generation use the word Brexit to mean something that’s been cocked up. I think they’ll be pro-EU on balance.

Helen Johnston : Most recent surveys show that Labour Party members and voters believe Brexit was wrong for the country and would like to see more progress on the UK moving closer to Europe. Do you get the impression that the Labour leadership is listening to its grassroots at all, e.g. at the recent party conference?

So, Labour are listening to the grassroots, but we vote for them even when they’re losing. They have to listen more closely to key swing voters and, as a Labour member, I want them to do that. But people also misrepresent polls as well. A clear majority do believe Brexit was wrong, but that’s not the same as wanting a Government to say we will rejoin.

We know that more people would like to rejoin than stay out, but when you ask even if that means adopting the euro, all of a sudden, the answer goes the other way. The issue is also less salient for pro-EU voters than pro-Brexit voters. Finally, the moment we ask to join the SM or EU, the Conservatives will say they would scrap it when they come back to power. So, the EU will not waste its time when it has so many other priorities.

We will know when the public really wants back in the EU because the Conservatives will have to start talking about it seriously. There are currently zero Conservative MPs doing so. There was Tobias Elwood in the last Parliament, standing alone, but he’s gone now.

Fi Cooper : What do you think about the future of farming and fishing if Labour continues to refuse to join the CU and SM?

Fishing and farming both seem to have very different attitudes towards Brexit. If reports are to believed, there was overwhelming support for a hard Brexit from fishermen, who are now moaning that they have been screwed over, and yet they still insist that the hard Brexit is the right decision. I don’t know what you can do to help an industry that doesn’t understand that it was never going to get access to the EU market (where most British caught fish goes) whilst denying access to EU fishing vessels.

Farming is different, because many farmers did understand the damage that would be caused and, I think, welcome any moves that ease trade barriers, including rejoining. They will also be keen on the veterinary agreement, if the Government can arrange it.

There is also currently a risk that, without proper standards controls, which we still do not have, that we are at a higher than acceptable risk of importing a disease which could devastate whole sections of our farming industry.

But without help, there’s a worry they will have to scale back, meaning we are forced to import yet more food, or farm more intensively.

Lisa Burton : The recent riots were difficult to watch, but also not unexpected, considering certain media reporting and the political environment for the past few years, particularly since Brexit. Will Labour consider press reform going forward, and how will the government respond to reform UK MPs intent on stirring up further division?

Stella Creasey :My community was directly affected by the threat of violence. We didn’t have any violence, but we did take to the streets as a community, and stood round our local mosques. We stood together because people were so divided, and this didn’t happen in a vacuum. For some time now, I’ve been very worried about the rise of the far right and of far-right rhetoric, both online and offline. It’s been shaping a number of debates locally, and it was an incredibly scary time. I’m very proud to represent a very diverse community. I’m very proud of the fact that when that pressure came, people were very clear that it was not welcome here, but acutely conscious that we don’t want to get to the point where these things are happening in the first place.

It’s not that we should simply be proud that if put under pressure in the UK, people reject this type of politics. We shouldn’t get to the point where the pressure is coming in the first place. With that in mind, one of the conversations I’ve been having with people for some time, as Chair of the Labour Movement for Europe (LME) is that you are talking about what President Trump is doing. You’re talking about who he’s talking to in British politics. But have you seen what’s happening in Europe? Have you seen what’s happening with Orban, with Le Pen, with Meloni, and what’s happening in France?

I am very concerned that the left has been complacent about the idea that far right extremism, Islamophobia, racism, wouldn’t take seed in our political discourse. For too long, the left has that said these are extremes, just ignore them, don’t platform them. We have to confront them. But I don’t think this is about press reform, though there are other reasons why we need to talk about press reform.

The reason my community was put under pressure was because somebody circulated via WhatsApp a list of 60 immigration lawyers that were going to be targeted next. That is not the traditional print media, or even a forum that has some modicum of regulation.

I’m not suggesting that there isn’t an issue about press reform that we need to address. I know people have very great concerns about GB news, for example, and its impartiality. I think there are questions about where you blur the line between opinion and fact, and that’s online and offline. It’s to recognize that the way in which the far right is organizing is not through traditional forums and media. So that debate, that discourse, is late to the mainstream media rather than generating the mainstream media. What do I mean by that? I mean it’s as much as in your local Facebook groups. It’s in the Telegram groups. It’s in the WhatsApp messages that calls for a necessary different response.

If we load this solely onto press reform, I fear we will be too late. We’ll be too late in calling for a defense of free speech that recognizes if 50% of the conversation is terrified, because there is violence, because there is intimidation, because there is this constant drumbeat that whatever the problem is, the answer is, immigration is the issue? Actually, we’re not getting to the source of it, and we’re not challenging where that’s coming into modern political discourse. And I say that as somebody who now spends more of her time in WhatsApp groups with local residents than actually on even Twitter/X, I mean, X feels, you know, 10 years ago now, for me now.

A separate issue is regarding the role of politicians and the questions of standards. And I think there are some very interesting questions about our roles and our responsibilities. In terms of leadership of that debate, I have called for a national conversation about accountability for all of us. We all have to be accountable for what we are doing, to challenge the rhetoric, to challenge those ideas. Hope not Hate have got some very interesting research on this that is also an accountability for all MPs of all elected professions. I am somebody who has already debated, discussed and disagreed with the Reform MPs in Parliament, but I will hold them to the same standards that I will hold politicians in all political parties for the consequences of their actions, as I expect myself to be held.

Clarissa Killwick :Thanks to Brexit, I, for a number of years, lost my vote, but I was able to vote again in the UK. In the past, Labour were not in favor of lifting the 15 year rule for overseas voters. So has there been a change of heart now, or are we at risk of losing this important right again?

Stella Creasey : The absolute honest truth is, I suspect, that the debate around electoral reform in this country will be more rooted in wondering about electoral registration and about voter ID than the 15-year rule. We saw quite a marked impact on certain groups in society about their ability to take part, and I know the Electoral Commission is looking at that.

I think we have to see what the Electoral Commission comes back with in terms of whether or not this is a practical solution. I understand and appreciate what you’re saying about you had a vote. It would be remiss of me not to say I want to see what the Electoral Commission says first.

Steve Wilson : Do you believe proportional representation would be a prerequisite for rejoining the Single Market, the Customs Union and/or the EU and what’s the position of the Labour Movement for Europe on that particular subject?

Stella Creasey : As to whether proportional representation will be a prerequisite with the EU in order to rejoin the single market, or would be part of the negotiating discussion, I’m not aware of any examples in which the electoral system being used has been part of the negotiations, e.g. in discussions that other countries taking part in the accession process are having.

As for the position of LME, we are an affiliate organization, so we don’t take a particular position on policies. I can tell you what my position as the national chair is and say, I have always campaigned for electoral reform, not because I think it makes a single person vote, but because I think it is the right thing to do. I prefer AV+ because I do think the constituency link is important in our politics, especially with devolution, and I’ve always voted for electoral reform policies within the political process.

I also don’t think you can single out just the voting system. I think you’ve got a broader question about how you win the argument. I don’t think you can make Brexit work. We’ve always been clear about that. We can, we do think that you can resolve quite a lot of the problems that it has created in the first instance, and that should be the priority. We are around the edges of the single market, and we are affected by the single market. So, I always think it’s a bit of a canard to say that we’ve completely left it in the same way that inevitably, the trading decisions made in Europe affect what we can do here, because we are interconnected. You know, you can fight many things in life, but you can’t really fight geography. It’s just a thing.

The British public are far ahead of the political debate. They’ve moved on in 2016 and 2019 and they are also very clear that this was a democratic decision. As a result, you would need some kind of democratic moment to change it substantially. That doesn’t mean that that might not happen. Nobody can rule out anything, if we’ve learned anything in the last couple of years of politics, that things go up and down in all sorts of ways you never expected, not least Liz Truss becoming Prime Minister.

But it does mean that we face a very hard choice. What do you focus on? I talk to the businesses who can’t import things into the UK anymore, who are sitting with lorry loads of food sat in Calais, the people who are missing out on school trips, the businesses thinking about where they invest. They haven’t got the seven or eight years of negotiation time and a referendum that we need. What we have to ruthlessly do as people who recognize the damage that Brexit has done is work out how we can save what is essentially already on fire.

I’m very passionate about the Pan European Mediterranean convention, so passionate it probably puts people to sleep, frankly. But that is something I think we could negotiate to be part of, again, relatively quickly. Talk to the people in the Ukraine – they are on a fast track. That’s still a 7-8 year process. British businesses, British workers, do not have that length of time before damage that Brexit has done is going to be so great, we’ll never be able to do anything about it.

But I also think we do have to respect and recognize that if you are the European Union, you know, I would say Brexit is like the terrible man your aunt married 20 years ago, and you put up with him at Christmas every single year, and finally she divorced him. You know, you’re not going to invite him round for Easter cake, anytime soon. We have to respect and recognize just how much we trashed our status, the goodwill, the general sense that the UK was somebody you want to work with through Brexit, and the idea that we could very quickly get the time and energy and effort that our European partners would require for any sort of rejoin effort, I just think it’s a bit disrespectful to them. It is so important to me that we try and save what we can save, because any future conversation will be harmed by what is lost.

One of the things I worry about is if we spend our time still prosecuting the debates of 2016 and 2019 –  that means we’re not talking about what is possible in 2024, so we’re not giving people hope that you can actually sort some of these problems out. You can sort out the madness at the border, you can sort outwhat happens with Erasmus, you can sort out youth mobility. I believe that, I wouldn’t be doing this role if I didn’t.

We have to be really clear about the timescales, because we owe it to our European counterparts to recognize we’ve got a lot of ground to make up with them. That’s what’s really good about what the Government is doing right now. They are going round and proving not just that they’re not Liz Truss – which I know sounds like quite a low threshold – but that they are actually people you want to work with, that they get the concept of mutual interest, that they understand we’re asking a lot for people to pay us attention again because, we have been that awful man your aunt married.

Helen Johnston : All the recent surveys say that Labour voters and members overwhelmingly believe Brexit was a mistake and would like to see it reversed. Will the leadership come under pressure at the Labour Party Conference this autumn from grassroots members?

Stella Creasey : If you’re a member of the LME, you’re just about to get an email about our conference rally – we’ve got some really big hitters coming to speak, including Nick Thomas-Symonds, the person doing the negotiations with Europe. We’ve also got the new chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Emily Thornberry, who’s going to play an absolutely key role, because of a challenge in Parliament, since the European Scrutiny Committee has been disbanded. Sunday evening at conference, we have got a big, serious rally, which we are organizing to make sure that discussion of Europe is part and parcel of what goes on in the Labour movement.

If you join the LME, you can help strengthen my ability to keep those debates going and keep the discussions happening at a grassroots level. But just to blow our trumpet a little bit, there are now more LME parliamentarians than there are Conservative parliamentarians in Parliament. We are affiliated – formerly affiliated. If you’re a Labour Party member, you’ll know how serious this is to over half the constituencies across the country. We’ve got 1000s of members now. So that shows there is the interest and appetite. Absolutely, conference is a key event. That’s why we’re doing this rally. We haven’t been able to be upfront because of the election. It completely kiboshed the conference motion process for us to do a conference motion.

There’s an opportunity, if you are going to be in Liverpool, to show how serious you think this is, and that that relationship is there. And I cannot tell you how different that is to say a year and a half ago. It sometimes felt a bit of a lonely endeavor to be the person saying, can we talk about this? And people across the political spectrum felt wrung out. They felt so frustrated, so emotionally drained by the discussion. I understand why people didn’t want to have it. I just think we do need to do that now, and that is happening

Ruth Woodhouse : Keir Starmer has repeatedly stated, there will be no return to the single market, Customs Union or freedom of movement. Do you not believe that in an ever-changing world and political landscape, it is a mistake to rule out anything? 

Stella Creasey: I say we should absolutely look at all options, including the timelines. My concern about things like the Customs Union and the Single Market is the timeline, because I think of small businesses in my constituency who just said the point about Brexit for them is paperwork, and can they hold on for another 18 months? Possibly. Could they hold on for five years? No, that’s what I’m really worried about.

So, it’s a question for me. I think it’s right to look at everything. That’s why, for example, I have challenged the Labour Party to look again at the idea of youth mobility, because whilst what I thought the European Commission came up with wouldn’t work for us, because it wasn’t actually youth mobility – what it was was just one country. It didn’t include apprenticeships, for example, which I think is really important in all of this. The idea that there could be a scheme, I think, is something we should be exploring, and we’ll continue to have that debate and discussion within the LME.

Anon : How do we persuade those that believe immigrants are the cause of all their problems, that the fault lies elsewhere? 

Stella Creasey :One of the things I feel really passionate about, if we say and do nothing else, as progressive people, we have to be clear that the problem is not immigrants. The problem is politicians. It is politicians failing to show that in a world that is so complicated and that changes so quickly.

We have lived through lots of very destabilizing events, and at every turn, there have been people on the left and right who have looked to find somebody to blame. The right is very effective at blaming, starting with immigrants. Then it moves on to trans people, to people who need welfare support, then women. The challenge with that blame culture, that politics can thrive in, is absolutely it might win you a vote at the ballot box, but it doesn’t win you the consent for the change that needs to happen. So yes, it is a frustration for me that we have come to a point where people blame immigration when they really should be blaming politicians for being so problem focused rather than solution focused.

I came into politics to change the world. I think change is possible, but I’ll be honest with you, I sat on the Council of Europe refugee and immigration committee and used to bang my head in frustration on the desk because the conversation was long on an analysis of why immigrants were causing problems, and short on how could we collaborate together to make sure it was possible to help people equally and not put a burden on anybody. That conversation is not just a challenge within Europe, and tackling the far right politics. It’s a problem across politics. It’s not okay for politicians to just to tell us who’s caused the problem – rather they must say what they’re going to do about it.

Update 13 Oct 2024 – video now available for viewing from our You Tube channel by clicking here.