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Coffee House Shots: would Brexit voters really accept the return of freedom of movement?

Best of the Spectator

The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4785 Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2024

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

New research last week suggested that a majority of Brexit voters would accept the return of freedom of movement in exchange for access to the EU single market. The poll, conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), found that 54% of Brexit voters – and 68% of all respondents – would accept this. Facing their own changing domestic concerns, how close can the UK and EU governments really get? Could Defence hold the key for collaboration? And how much is this driven by a more volatile geopolitical landscape ahead of Trump’s return as US president?

James Heale speaks to Anand Menon, director of the think-tank UK in a Changing Europe, and Mark Leonard, director at the ECFR.

Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You can get three months of The Spectator for just £15, plus a free bottle of Paul Régé champagne

0:05.5

if you go to spectator.com.uk, forward slash, fizz24. This offer is UK-only and subject to availability.

0:25.5

Hello and welcome to this special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots.

0:29.4

I'm James Hill and I'm joined today. I'm Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council of Foreign Relations and Alan Menon, who's the director of the UK and a changing Europe.

0:33.6

Now Mark, on Thursday, you had some polling out talking about the changing UK and EU attitudes towards each other.

0:39.6

Talk us through some of the top lines from this.

0:41.5

So what we found is we did this polling just after Donald Trump was elected.

0:45.8

And we think the combination of his election and the full-scale war in Ukraine has really scrambled attitudes towards UK-EU relations on both sides of the channel.

0:56.3

And what we found is very large majorities on both sides of the channel who want to have a

1:00.7

closer relationship.

1:02.6

And that is something which cuts across different areas about economics, about migration,

1:09.0

but above all about security.

1:10.3

And it's led a lot of the red lines which

1:13.4

define the relationship in the past to start fading. And we found really quite remarkable things.

1:20.6

On the UK side, we found that large majorities of people would be willing to accept free movement of people,

1:29.4

youth mobility schemes and things like that as part of a resetting of relationships,

1:33.3

including a majority of lead voters.

1:35.9

And on the other side, we found that in spite of all the talk about cherry picking,

1:40.1

most European citizens would be quite comfortable giving Britain more access to the single market in exchange for a security partnership.

1:47.9

So, I mean, I was very interesting in these findings. And of course, the number of Brits who seem fairly relaxed about strengthening ties.

1:54.5

But then, of course, there's also the contrast with the fact that I think just less than 30% want to kind of go back into the EU formally.

2:00.7

Where does Labour stand to sort of

...

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