British trade minister Chris Bryant said Tuesday he hopes to one day see his country rejoin the European Union, in a further sign the UK is headed for a new domestic fight over Brexit.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cBrexit has delivered enormous problems for the UK economy,\u201d Bryant told AFP in an interview at the European Parliament, against a backdrop of turmoil at home, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer is fighting off calls to quit.\n<\/p>\n
Among Starmer\u2019s challengers for the Labour leadership, his outgoing health minister Wes Streeting called at the weekend for Britain to rejoin the EU \u2014 an explosive stance a decade after a narrow majority voted to leave in 2016.\n<\/p>\n
Starmer has been pushing to move closer to the EU, while stopping short of saying Britain should reapply for membership or rejoin the European single market.<\/p>\n
But Bryant, who told AFP his \u201cheart broke on the night of the Brexit vote\u201d, went further.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope in my lifetime that we would be welcomed back in the heart of Europe fully and solidly as members of the European Union,\u201d said the minister, who is part of the team led by Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle.\n<\/p>\n
In Strasbourg for talks with lawmakers on fostering closer ties post-Brexit, the 64-year-old Bryant cautioned any prospect of rejoining remained a long way off, saying: \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be doing that this summer.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he cited the figure of 16,000 fewer UK businesses exporting into Europe, saying that leaving the bloc had been \u201can own goal for us\u201d.\n<\/p>\n
Bryant underlined that while Britain is pushing to diversify its trade partners \u2014 from South Korea to Turkey to Switzerland \u2014 the lion\u2019s share of its trade is still conducted with the EU.\n<\/p>\n
Other partners \u201cdon\u2019t add up to the 47 percent of trade that we do with the European Union, and that\u2019s what we need to get right\u201d, he said.\n<\/p>\n
Since 2020, when Britain finally left the bloc after four years of fraught negotiations, few prominent figures have dared to revive the question, recalling the political paralysis and bitter division of the time. <\/p>\n
Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage, who leads the hard-right anti-immigration Reform UK party, has already pounced on Streeting\u2019s comments, accusing him of seeking to \u201cdrag\u201d the country towards the EU.\n<\/p>\n
\u2013 EU-UK \u2018reset\u2019 \u2013\n<\/p>\n
Pressure for stronger UK-EU ties has grown as US President Donald Trump rocks Washington\u2019s long-time allies by throwing transatlantic relations into doubt.<\/p>\n
Citing the war in Ukraine, Trump\u2019s \u201cquite serious challenges to NATO\u201d and economic uncertainty because of China\u2019s rise, Bryant argued that the EU and UK were \u201cthrown together more than ever.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
The Brexit issue has reared its head again in the chaos following Labour\u2019s poor performance in local elections this month.\n<\/p>\n
Dozens of Labour MPs have urged Starmer to quit, raising the prospect of a change in prime minister just two years into the party\u2019s tenure.\n<\/p>\n
Pressed on whether the turmoil risked derailing Britain\u2019s push to \u201creset\u201d EU ties, Bryant said he was confident in the \u201clong-term trajectory\u201d, with Labour\u2019s parliamentary mandate running until 2029.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI am absolutely certain that a Labour government under Keir Starmer, or whoever it may be by the end of that time, will want to have a much stronger relationship with the European Union,\u201d he said.\n<\/p>\n
Britain and the EU are due to hold a second summit this summer, following talks in May 2025 that produced a deal on closer cooperation in defence and security, and an easing of restrictions on food trade.\n<\/p>\n
AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"British trade minister Chris Bryant said Tuesday he hopes to one day see his country rejoin the European…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[157,13702,13,499,1469,94,31,19978,431,20,16458,7527],"class_list":["post-41080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-brexit","tag-brexit-impact","tag-britain","tag-chris-bryant","tag-european-union","tag-keir-starmer","tag-labour-party","tag-rejoin-eu","tag-uk-economy","tag-uk-politics","tag-uk-trade","tag-uk-eu-relations"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116604544186140533","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}