It's complicated, and something to bear in mind if you're American is that our right wing politics is more like your Democrats party. In fact I think the only truly left wing politician you guys have is Bernie Sanders. Happy to be corrected on that though.

Labour are predominantly left-leaning and thus always supported being in the EU. It was the Conservatives (our main right-wing party and who had run the government from 2010 to 2024) that did the Brexit referendum and subsequent negotiations. However, it was Nigel Farage (our far-right, immigrant-hating, russian-backed Trump-lite grifter) who has been pushing the idea of moving away from the EU and closer to the US for decades. Farage is often touted as the guy who painted Brexit as a means for the UK to "take back control" and all the other usual right wing nationalistic bollocks.

Brexit was incredibly divisive but it's been long enough now and there's enough proof that the Brexit that we got has harmed the UK economically. This comes to no surprise to the people who voted Remain in 2016, but hey ho. The conservatives and the far-right somehow succeeded in framing any attempt to question Brexit as "disregarding the will of the people", so the 2024 election Labour were too cowardly to actually speak out against it for fear of hurting their chances at winning.

Now it's nearly 2 years of Labour cleaning up after the mess of the conservatives and they are clearly signalling a push towards the EU as a means to help the UK economically, which most experts are concurring with. That's where we're at currently.

But "rejoining the EU" is complicated. There are different levels of being in the EU, and the UK in particular had a really unique deal with our membership. A deal I doubt we'd get back. Labour would struggle to sell "let's give up the pound and take the Euro currency", and they're also not going to risk another referendum on it.

So that leaves Labour doing what it can to improve our relations with our neighbours, getting the most benefits it can whilst in power, and then in a future General Election they'll run rejoining as part of their mandate (effectively making the GE a rejoin referendum).

Some people think the 2029 GE will be Labour's time to push for rejoining, but I personally think it'll take longer than that and it may be the following term.

The big thing Labour needs to focus on right now is proving to the UK that its economic policies and infrastructure investments have improved the average Brit's life. Trump and Putin are making that a bit easier by highlighting two things - how Farage and the Conservatives would've dived straight into Iran alongside Trump, and how breaking our dependence on fossil fuels is the most important thing to get energy bills down.