Off We Go: Why Rejoining the EU Is Fashion’s Most Urgent Political Conversation
As Labour Leadership Candidates go on the record this weekend about Brexit, by Tamara Cincik.
This weekend, something significantly shifted. Not quietly, in a parliamentary committee room or within a think tank briefing paper, but publicly, and on the record. The same weekend that two rival rallies in Central London showed a very divided vision of Britain’s future, one led by Tommy Robinson, the other by those marking Nakba Day, Wes Streeting, the former Health Secretary who resigned from the Cabinet last week, stood at the Progress conference and called Brexit a “catastrophic mistake.” Andy Burnham said this weekend, that in the long term, he wants to see the UK back inside the European Union. Burnham, of course is currently the Greater Manchester Mayor and its widely believed he will be the Labour candidate for the Makerfield by-election, in a route back to Westminster. He must be aware he is on a tightrope between his principle for the UK to return to the EU, and the pragmatics of a local electorate, where 66% voted for Leave and more recently Reform won most of the Makerfield council seats earlier this month, in a constituency that therefore seems to have left Labour for Reform, Meanwhile, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, told CNBC the next Labour manifesto should promise that Britain joins the EU.
Three senior Labour figures. One weekend. One direction of travel.
For those of us who have spent the years since the 2016 referendum watching the British fashion industry slowly haemorrhaging our exports, talent, confidence, this is not an abstract political argument. It is intensely, practically real. And the question is no longer whether we should be having this conversation. It’s why it took us this long?