Leadership contender Owen Smith had supported the campaign for Britain to remain in the European Union, in the referendum on Britain's membership in June 2016. During an interview with the BBC, Smith opined that those who had voted with the Leave faction had done so "because they felt a sense of loss in their communities, decline, cuts that have hammered away at vital public services and they haven't felt that any politicians, certainly not the politicians they expect to stand up for them, the Labour Party, has been standing up for them."