Why there are still many in our region who will never welcome rapprochement with the EU - Jayne Dowle

Boris Johnson, ever helpful, describes Starmer as the “orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels” for stepping up to the challenge.

Unveiling his major reset on Monday, the Prime Minister argued it was “time to move on from the stale old debates”. If the evidence from news coverage, vox pop and social media are any measure, there are many in our region deeply affronted by this.

They do have a point; under this Labour PM, the UK has now agreed to open its fishing waters for 12 more years to EU boats, significantly more than the five years initially wanted. But really, in these turbulent times, the balance is in our favour.

To the naysayers, I would say, what has Brexit ever done for us? If you voted Leave, can you honestly say that your life has improved immeasurably since that fateful summer day in 2016? Have your wages gone up considerably? Has your access to NHS treatment – remember the erroneous maths of the Leave campaign? – improved? Do you really find travelling abroad with your shiny blue British passport so much easier? And have ‘the boats’ stopped? I think you’ll find it’s a ‘no’ to all of the above.

I expect a robust counter-defence. After all, self-interest was a major driving force harnessed by the Leave campaign. Fierce Brexit-supporters here in my hometown of Barnsley seemed blind to the millions and millions of euros in investment the EU pumped into regenerating our former coalfields.

They refused to accept the irony of buying a second home in Spain, but voting to curtail access to their own property – not allowed to stay for more than 90 days in any 180-day period, unless you apply for a visa.

They couldn’t see – key point – that ‘immigration’, the super-divisive calling card of the Leave campaign, was a global issue, and that perhaps joining forces with your European neighbours would help protect our own borders.

Whether Starmer wants to draw a line under the past or not, it’s worth reminding ourselves of what we voted for – and our two biggest Yorkshire cities illustrate the dichotomy perfectly.

Against a national background of 52 per cent of people voting Leave versus 48 per cent supporting Remain, Sheffield followed the consensus. In the South Yorkshire city, 51 per cent supported Leave, on a voter turn-out of 67.3 per cent.

Leeds however, voted to remain by a narrow margin; 50.3 per cent supported staying in the EU. Voter turn-out here was 71.3 per cent.

The pedantic will argue about those percentage points forever, but it is clear that as a general rule, half of us wanted to stay and half of us wanted to leave.

Moving forward with half the country in agreement with Brexit and half against was never going to be easy. There will be many politicians who will wish that it never had to happen.

However, the world is changing, rapidly. Whilst Starmer has been castigated for allowing fishing rights as part of this new rapprochement, we must also consider the context.

Important new steps towards trading agreements and defending our realm with the help of our nearest neighbours have been made. Whilst details of the proposed UK-EU security and defence partnership remain sketchy, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

It was always going to be inevitable that, almost a decade after the event, voters would reconsider their personal decision.

According to a YouGov poll in January, more than half of voters now think it was wrong to leave the EU bloc, including one in six (18 per cent) of Leave supporters.

Just three in 10 British people who voted (30 per cent) said that it was right for the UK to vote to leave the EU, compared to 55 per cent who said it was wrong for the country to vote for Brexit in 2016. This, the pollsters revealed, was the lowest proportion of the public saying we were right to vote to leave since YouGov began asking this question in the aftermath of the referendum.

Importantly, among the youngest Brits, who were unable to vote in the 2016 referendum, YouGov found little conviction that the referendum went the right way. Three-quarters of 18 to 24-year-olds (75 per cent) said that the UK was wrong to vote to leave the EU.