Rise of the Rejoiners: Labour MP Admits Majority of Party Lawmakers ‘Desperate to Rejoin’ EU

Protesters march along the seafront holding placards and waving European and Union flags i
DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP/Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

A former Labour frontbencher has admitted that most in her party “at heart” wants to rejoin the European Union, and advocated considering scrapping the pound sterling to join the euro single currency.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage may have spoke too soon when, after the UK left the EU’s institutions on December 31st, 2020, he claimed the “Brexit wars are over”.

Rosie Duffield, a former Labour frontbencher who has represented Canterbury since 2017, is a hardline Europhile who lobbied for a so-called “People’s Vote” — a Remainer campaign which tried to disguise as a populist movement the push for a second referendum to overturn the original populist revolution: the June 2016 vote to leave the European Union.

Speaking to HuffPost UK’s Commons People podcast on Thursday, Ms Duffield rejected the notion that the Brexit question was settled — not even for a generation.

“No, I’m not giving up. All the groups that I was involved with are already calling themselves ‘Rejoiners’. They’re starting to think about that. I think, maybe it’s a little bit too soon, but we might as well start to build a movement.”

The Commons is not the only place in parliament where Labour lawmakers are already discussing rejoining the EU.

Labour Peer Lord Adonis, who sits in the Remainer-dominated House of Lords, hardly waited 12 hours to announce the launching of a Rejoin campaign, tweeting on January 1st: “The campaign to rejoin Europe starts today.”

“I don’t mourn Brexit, looking backwards. I want to reverse it, looking forwards,” Adonis said.

Labour saw its worst defeat since 1935 in December 2019’s general election after the party backed a second referendum. When confronted with the fact that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer ruled out making rejoining his policy, Duffield laughed and claimed that party “rebels don’t necessarily have to pay too much attention to that”.

She added that Labour MPs who pushed for a second referendum “haven’t gone away”. “Most people on the front bench who voted for this deal last week did it with a very heavy heart and they haven’t given up either. We will try and shift the leadership, as and when it needs to, to shift towards rejoining,” suggesting that by then, there may be a different party leader who would support the UK surrendering itself again to the globalist European Project.

Asked how many current MPs would back rejoining, Duffield said: “The majority of the parliamentary Labour Party wanted us to Remain and were campaigning really hard on that. Towards the end, almost all of those people had signed up to People’s Vote. So, the majority of us. We don’t need converting.”

Describing the “hellish” process of trying to overturn the will of the people, she added that “all of that hurt is still there. We’re still desperate to rejoin if we possibly can, I think, at heart.”

Asked if she would campaign to join the euro, the former teaching assistant said: “Why not? Why not at least look at it. I’m not an economics expert… but it could be on the table, couldn’t it?”

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