Around half of Remainers still see EU membership in transactional terms: but David Cameron tested this idea of it to destruction. Many of the rest have turned into pro-European partisans, but out of opposition to Brexit, rather than love of European integration.
I found this interesting, because I’d never thought about it in these terms before. If anything I’d say my journey since the referendum has been the opposite - I’m now entirely accustomed to thinking about EU membership as a great deal, in fact the best possible deal, for Britain.
At the same time I also passionately want integration, for the obvious reason that brexit has shown we need to be locked into it lest anyone try to ask the question again.
Do I identify as a member of a pan-European body politic though? I’d have to say no, basically because I don’t
really consider such a thing to exist - and yet, I do to the extent that Europe is a single entity contra external, global threats/opportunities. In that context the UK being better off alone is madness. Do I feel Europe has the potential to be such a threat to the UK? Well I honestly couldn’t say ‘no’, given history, but it’s as far as could possibly be and the way to address the possibility is constant dialogue i.e. being in the EU. But I couldn’t say we shouldn’t have an escape route in extremis.
So I do see, not an inconsistency, but the lack of an overlap, between the way he puts it there and the position that I’d personally feel. And yet the EU is the only game in town and further integration is still necessary. The questions ‘how much?’ and ‘how fast?’ are legitimate, but they’re ones to be addressed from the inside, and certainly not through what the UK is doing now.