British Remain party?

Is there any Party in Britain who favors Remain? OK, the Scottish National Party, but I’m looking for a less regional party. AS far as I can tell from this side of the pond, both major parties, or at least their leaders, want some species of Brexit. But a rather large fraction of voters don’t want to leave. So is any minor party’s position to ignore the Brexit vote and just call the whole thing off? If there’s another election soon, it could be their opportunity to become a major party, even if they don’t get a majority.

The Liberal Democrats are strongly pro EU

Yes; The Liberal Democrats as well as The Independent Group, who broke off from both Labour and the Conservatives recently partly over Brexit.

However, according to Wikipedia’s polls, Lib Dems have not increased in popularity much: maybe a couple percentage points. TIG on the other hand, according to the chart, has a percentage in the chart as well, so when you combine the two you have prominent anti-Brexit parties polling at around 15% and furthermore, these parties are trying to not contest each others elections in order to not dilute the anti-Brexit vote.

However, UK districts are first-past-the-post, and so a nationwide party polling 15% will often result in very few seats. American third parties sometimes peak at a high single digit popularity and get no seats at all!

[Caveat: I’m American and thus not much more informed than from reading this MB and Wikipedia.]

LibDems, Greens and the new Independent Group/ChangeUK.
But the next electoral tests are local elections in some places (off the top of my head, more likely to be Brexit-leaning areas) in early May and (probably?) European Parliament elections in late May. But traditionally those attract low turnouts from only the most committed.

The EP elections are interesting because they use list PR in large regional constituencies rather than FPTP, but in terms of who’s elected it does not help if there are multiple parties fragmenting support for a particular viewpoint, albeit to a lesser extent than with FPTP.

As things stand, the Brexiteers are split between Farage’s new Brexit party (which may attract the largest single vote), his former party (now wandering off into far right nutjobland), and Tories, a fair number of whom are threatening to boycott the whole thing anyway. On the anti-Brexit side, there is no sign of an agreed single list between LibDems, Greens and TIG, although the LibDems had signalled some possible openness to the idea.

Meanwhile Labour is still ambivalent*, but there are internal manoeuvrings which might change their position: on the other hand many of them are swayed by the fact that they represent Brexit-voting areas and don’t want to jeopardise the party’s chances in the next general election. And there are indeed other issues that need an urgent change of direction.

  • I’m reminded of a speech in which, over 50 years ago, the then Tory PM, Harold Macmillan, mocked a similar ambivalence in the then Labour leadership about applying to join the Common Market, in the words of an old music hall song:

“She didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no,
She didn’t say “Stay!”, she didn’t say “Go!”:
She wanted to climb, but dreaded to fall -
So she bided her time and clung to the wall”

Labour is a mess right now. Their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is a lifelong Eurosceptic. But, his Eurosceptism is more out of the 1970s, being afraid of the EU as a massive capitalist scheme rather than anti-immigration. Most Labour MPs are remainers but they don’t pick party leaders. I think most Labour MPs are both worried about a backlash from Leavers but also worried that their vague position on Brexit might hurt them with Remain voters who may not be enticed with Sweet Uncle Jeremy in the next election.

And I think they’d be right!

One thing to note is that Remainers in general have a significantly lower level of intensity of support for their positions than Brexiters: for Brexiters there is no other policy area as important than Brexit; thus they are quite willing to support separate Brexit parties. For Remainers the National Health Service, the environment, and other areas are as or more important than Remaining.

Sounds like they need to have a revolt in the party and elect someone else. Do they have to wait for a general election loss to do that? I would expect there’s some other mechanism to force a vote on party leader.

They did that, and Jezza won it easily as it was voted by the members of the party, not MPs. If they did it again he would win again. There’s no way for rational Labour MPs to remove him at the moment.

Why are they the “rational” Labour MPs? Labour actually has a lead in GE polling at this point after endless doom and gloom predictions. Jeremy Corbyn’s been placed in an impossible situation regarding Brexit due to contradictions within the Labour coalition but its the best he can do unless he wants to change the party into some sort of a upper middle class social liberal party whose main electoral plank is Europhilia not social democracy.

Labour are only doing well because the Tories are being catastrophically awful.

And the Conservatives are only doing well because Labour are being catastrophically awful. This is modern Britain.

I’ve been assuming that this would happen for a couple of years now as part of the natural evolution of parties. I have been very wrong.

Perhaps next time someone who actually has some name recognition, leadership skills, policies, principles and/or charisma might try it. I mean - Owen Smith? Angela Eagle? That was just pathetic. (That said, Smith was right about the party being at risk of splitting.)