I hate to say it, but I don’t think rejoin EU is going to help labour much in an (the next) election. We already have 2 lefter parties that are calling for it, and a right wing party that’s desperate to bleed labour voters away - and ‘they’ll take us back into the eu’ is a battleground they are ready to fight. They’ll lose ultimately, but not before taking a lot of labour voters away on the strength of brexit alone. As for the other way, rejoining the eu isn’t the reason people have been jumping onto the greens from labour, but if labour weren’t saying rejoin, then yes more would go over.

I think the lib dems will just continue to pick up crumbs, a few lost tory voters here, a few wealthier labour voter there, and dissolutioned greens (however innocent zack may be in the boat thing, still has bad optics).

So in my mind its:

Explicitly Rejoin EU:

• fewer voters moving to parties that do offer it
• a tiny, tiny amount returning to labour from the above

• a potentially strategically dengerous level of voters leaving to reform
• nothing labour have done to ‘stop the boats’ or reduce asylum backlog will matter to the above

Vague ‘closer ties’ promise instead:

• getting the argument back to policy will get voters back from reform
• being able to publicise successful border control stats and syl;um backlogs etc will greatly help the above

• not as worrysome as the first - in rejoin, but a significant level of voters leaving for greens and lib dems
• people also more likely to do they above because they really don’t mind the idea of a labour + green or LD coalition
• we don’t actually rejoin. This has to be listed, obviously.

I think, that labour really, really needs to get our borders sorted out and also learn how to get proper information about it properly fed to the public too. The right engineered this situation, and made everyone panic about it. Yes, this country faces plenty of problems, but getting the backlog gone, the millions of pounds a day on hotels gone, and a system that deals with boat crossings quickly and effectively it will show everyone they really can be trusted on immigration. Thing is labour are the sort of muppets that could achieve this and still, somehow, hardly anyone knows they’ve done it, I guess the media don’t help here either. It’s about optics on the situation, they need the results AND the yelling of them from the rooftops.

Then they will be believed when they say the best thing for us, is to rejoin the EU, not just for the economy, but the best thing for our immigration stats too.

I think labour need to do this first, the wind need to be taken out of reforms sails. If labour manage to achieve on the border, reform’s headwind is going to be exposed for the dirty saturday morning wet chilli fart that it is.