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Millions of Keir Starmer’s voters think he is going to unpick Brexit, despite Labour’s plan to embrace life outside the European Union.
The opposition leader has spent years trying to break with his Remainer past — loudly ditching pledges to support EU free movement and explicitly ruling out any return to the single market or customs union.
But despite consistent messaging for the last four years, new polling conducted for POLITICO suggests many voters just haven’t got the message.
The research, conducted by pollsters at the More in Common think tank, found that only 18 percent of voters know, or believe, Starmer’s actual position on EU-U.K. relations — fostering a closer relationship with the bloc, but outside its single market and customs union.
Asked to pick what they thought Labour’s Brexit policy was, far more — 30 percent — thought he had pledged to take Britain back into the single market (11 percent) or rejoin the bloc entirely (19 percent). And Labour’s own voters were little wiser than the general public, a breakdown of the polling suggests.
The fact a large chunk of the public think Starmer would take a hatchet to Boris Johnson’s Brexit settlement doesn’t seem to have done him any political harm. Polls give him an average 22 percentage point lead over Rishi Sunak’s Tories a month out from the July 4 general election, which would hand him a vast majority in the House of Commons....
more at POLITICO