Ed Miliband gave an interview this week in which he decided it would be a good idea to bring up the topic of Brexit. The interviewer spotted an opportunity and asked Miliband if he had ‘embraced’ our departure from the EU. ‘You’ve got to embrace it because that argument is over,’ was the former Labour leader’s response. That one sentence was a perfect demonstration of the way Labour’s top figures keep getting Brexit wrong, and continue to fail to understand why the issue hurts them as it did in Hartlepool a month ago.
Labour now have two basic ways to go on Brexit. One is to become the soft anti-Brexit party they were before the last election – and that a lot of voters still see them as, deep down. They could pledge to re-join the single market if elected or aim to renegotiate the current Brexit deal with the EU to get something better.
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