Plenty of reasons: Key voters don’t want to relitigate Brexit. Either they support it in principle (yes, these people still exist), or they fear reopening the

Plenty of reasons: Key voters don’t want to relitigate Brexit. Either they support it in principle (yes, these people still exist), or they fear reopening the blazing rows they had over it, or they’re not ready to admit they were wrong. To get into a strong position, Labour needed to come out strong on “Brexit is decided” in 2019. Remember that they just lost a catastrophic election on exactly this topic. To tell the public they were all wrong was to guarantee electoral oblivion. They had to come out so strongly, in fact, that it would be decried as a huge U-turn if they did that now. And it would stick. The EU won’t let the UK join until the Conservative Party are also pro-EU. They don’t want to negotiate reentry only to have the Tories rip us straight back out after they get reelected. Rejoining takes time in any case. The UK is in an absolute shambles, so Labour have to focus on those immediate improvements if they want to get elected then reelected.