John Stevens, educated at Winchester College and Magdalen College, Oxford, before a career in international banking, was the Tory MEP, for Thames Valley, 1989 to 1999, and stood as an independent pro-European in the 2010 general election, pushing Nigel Farage into third place. He is now offering 70,000 by-election voters a chance to vote ‘EU’ on May 1.
With a countrywide January poll in January 2025 showing 57% of British voters would now vote to rejoin the European Union, Rejoin EU, a small party founded in 2020, has persuaded Stevens, chairman of the non-political Federal Trust for Education and Research, to head north and offer a protest vote to former Labour and Conservative voters dismayed by the way party leaders Starmer and Badenoch are sticking by Brexit. Asked in 2024 whether Britain would rejoin the EU in his lifetime, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said, “I don’t think that that is going to happen. I’ve been really clear about not rejoining the EU, the Single Market or the Customs Union – or return to freedom of movement.”
Polling majority for return to EU
But by January 31 this year, five years after Boris Johnson took the United Kingdom out of the European Union, a Redfield and Wilton countrywide poll ]found 57% for, and 43% against, a return to the EU.
John Curtice, Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University said,
“Leave voters share the widespread view that being outside the EU has exacerbated the cost of living crisis, while on balance they think that Brexit has been bad for the NHS and for the ability of British companies to sell goods abroad. The public policy challenges that have beset the country in the last few years have evidently helped cast a cloud over Brexit.
Meanwhile, with one notable exception, the Covid19 vaccination programme, one of the biggest public relations successes of the Johnson government, those who did not vote in 2016 are critical of Brexit across the board.”
On a Rejoin EU web page Stevens wrote:“The Rejoin EU Party brings together former and present members of all the main British political parties. We are united by the goal of restoring British membership of the European Union. The silence on Brexit by the major parties is unacceptable, as is an airy promise to re-join the single market at some undefined date in the dim and distant future. We know the simplest way to kick-start the economy is by rejoining”.
Stevens stood as an independent pro-European in the 2010 general election and pushed Nigel Farage into third place.
Farage had stood down as leader of UKIP to run against John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, a Conservative. On voting day, Nigel Farage crash-landed in a 2-seater light aircraft while towing a UKIP banner and was in hospital at Oxford when the count showed: Bercow 22,860, Stevens 10,331, Farage 8,401. Labour and LibDem did not contest the seat.
The Runcorn and Helsby political arena
Reform UK, which pushed the Tories down into third place at Runcorn in 2024, by taking 18.1% of the vote, has also selected a former Tory as their candidate, leaving them narrow favourites to wrest control of territory once safe for Labour.
Sarah Pochin, former Conservative Mayor of Cheshire East, posed with the Reform leader Nigel Farage in Runcorn Shopping City last week, April 2025, before walking along Main Street, Frodsham, where Labour MP Mike Amesbury had precipitated the by-election by being convicted after punching his constituent Paul Fellows. Pochin and Farage were heckled as being fascist supporters of the jailed extremist Tommy Robinson, when they passed the Queens Arms in Frodsham.
Stevens is the seventh declared candidate after Paul Duffy [Liberal Democrats], Peter Ford [Workers Party of Britain], Sean Houlston [Conservative], Sarah Pochin [Reform UK] and retired teacher Karen Shore [Labour].
“Brexit: A failure on Farage’s own terms”
The flagship policy of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, the one with which it’s intimately and inexorably identified, is a failure: one so great it undermines the plausibility of every other policy it now proposes. Indeed, Brexit is especially a failure on Farage’s own terms. He sold it, above all, as essential to reducing and even eliminating immigration. By this was meant, though rarely admitted, not primarily culturally European immigrants, but those from outside of Europe, who constituted a greater cultural challenge to a perceived traditional British, or English, identity. But by ending EU freedom of movement, in precise terms a labour mobility – not an immigration policy, since the overwhelming majority of European citizens coming here returned to their home countries after a period – has resulted in an enormous increase precisely in people coming from outside of Europe, the overwhelming majority of whom do seek permanent settlement here.
