Since the crushing result of this month’s local elections in the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom has been facing mounting pressure from within his very own Labour Party to step down.
The Labour ‘bench’, in the meantime, is searching for a new mission to sell to British voters, in an effort to rescue the party from historic lows in popularity.
According to a recent piece by Bloomberg, one of the bolder new ideas is a push to rejoin the European Union. The American outlet claims in its reporting that two strong contenders—Wes Streeting, who resigned as health secretary last week, and Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Manchester—are potential successors, and they are both speaking more and more openly within the party about the need for Britain to return to the EU one day.
Streeting, who left Starmer’s government just a few days ago, was particularly outspoken: he called the 2016 Brexit a ‘catastrophic mistake’ and said that Britain’s future lies in Europe.
The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in a referendum in June 2016, defying pollsters and the political analysts’ expectations. A years-long, messy negotiations phase followed the upset referendum result, which saw the resignation of two Prime Ministers. At last, in January 2020, the United Kingdom officially left the European Union, under Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The primary advocate for the 2016 Leave campaign was Nigel Farage, then an MEP for the UKIP Party. Since then, Farage has created the new political party Reform UK. Reform recently gained over 1,500 councillor seats in England in the local elections earlier this month, and is comfortably leading the national polls—making Farage well-positioned to become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Based on the recent Bloomberg report, it seems that the UK’s relationship with the European Union may become a central issue of his campaign again, a decade after the famous Brexit vote.
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