A Public Enquiry on Russian Interference
How the UK's new Prime Minister Keir Starmer can change the conversation on Brexit and rejoining the EU over the next four to five years
"General Election campaigning, London, United Kingdom - 29 June 2024" by keir.starmer.mp is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Keir Starmer, the former prosecutor who leads the Labour Party, has won a landslide victory in the UK. After 14 years in power, voters punished the Conservative Party for its multiple failures over Brexit - the Tories won just 121 seats. This was the worst-ever result for the Conservatives.
Under Starmer’s stewardship, Labour won 411 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, in part by taking Brexit (the most significant policy that defined the last decade and a half of Conservative rule) off the agenda while focusing on the need for massive spending on public infrastructure. In the runup to Thursday’s vote, Starmer said that the UK wouldn’t rejoin the European Union (EU) within his lifetime.
This bold statement should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Rejoining the EU is certainly off the agenda for the next four to five years, but Starmer is 61 and the average life expectancy for British men is nearly 81. Twenty years or more is an extremely long time in politics!
With the largest free-trade bloc on its doorstep, many of the UK’s multiple problems could be solved simply by rejoining the EU. The benefits of leaving turned out to be largely imaginary, while the risks were very real. A majority of British voters now support rejoining, while the demographic trend will only continue to go in this direction - older people tended to support Brexit, while younger people hate losing the chance to move to other European countries.
If Starmer wants to create some optionality around rejoining after the next general election (due by 2029) without going back on his word too blatantly, I would suggest a very simple policy. He should implement a full enquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 referendum. We know that Russian bots massively supported the populist project as a way of weakening the West, but the full story has never been told.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is massively unpopular in the UK - less than one person in five accepts the aggressor’s narrative that the war was provoked by the victim. In this context, establishing how and why Russia backed populist lies ahead of the Brexit referendum could be a potentially explosive move that would reset the conversation along more sensible lines. The comments are open. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
The downfall of the Conservatives
Further Reading
What Is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller
How Democracy Ends by David Runciman
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