Jeremy Corbyn’s eye-swivelling about-face on the EU – he once wanted to leave, now he wants to stay – has become a source of mirth for Eurosceptics and a sign of hope for Europhiles. To the anti-EU lobby, the fact that Corbyn voted against staying in the common market in the 1975 referendum and against EU treaties as an MP, yet now wants us all to vote to stay in, shows what a slippery character he is. For the Brussels-loving brigade it confirms that even the most heathen of EU haters can see the light. The ‘sinner who repents’ – actual words used in the Guardian‘s editorial on the newly pro-EU Corbyn – could be a useful tool for swinging the vote, apparently.
Yet even as we muse over, or mock, Corbyn’s tectonic shift, we mustn’t overlook the bigger story here. Which is the strange death of left-wing Euroscepticism. It isn’t only Corbyn who’s done a 180-degree turn from viewing the EU as a democracy-stifling monolith we should run a million miles from to saying ‘Oh, what the hell, let’s stay in, I’m sure we can make it work’.
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