{"id":5600,"date":"2026-05-08T16:12:48","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T16:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/5600\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T16:12:48","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T16:12:48","slug":"forget-it-rejoiners-the-eu-will-never-offer-terms-that-britain-can-accept","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/5600\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget it, Rejoiners. The EU will never offer terms that Britain can accept"},"content":{"rendered":"

To those who want to go further and rejoin<\/a> (in truth, virtually the entire Cabinet), he points out what we all know: \u201cBritain will not get the same deal that it had before.\u201d He tells the British political class to \u201cinternalise … the fundamental European deal that you get more benefits in return for more pooling of sovereignty\u201d. He underlines our past opt-outs<\/a> from the Schengen passport-free area and from the Euro (let us pass lightly over the fact that Poland has no such opt-out but has still not joined) and our budget rebate. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t get that kind of deal today,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

I am sure he is right about that. But I\u2019ve yet to hear many in the Rejoin campaign talk about this. Obviously, the screw would be turned on a supplicant Britain if we ever seriously tried to rejoin. The EU would absolutely be in a position to make us pay \u2013 which is one good reason why we should never try it.<\/p>\n

The other good reason is that British voters are not ready or willing to do it anyway. A poll last autumn from Queen Mary University of London showed that<\/a>. Asked about 20 different policy areas relevant to EU decision-making, including some of those Sikorski mentions, clear absolute majorities of voters wanted decisions on 17 of them to be taken by the UK government only. Even among Labour voters that was true of 15 of them. That\u2019s why Sikorski is right to say \u201cyou probably would reject the deal\u201d.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Sikorski would regard all this as some form of false consciousness. But the problem is he exhibits it himself. His claim that the fundamental European deal is \u201cbenefits\u201d in return for \u201csovereignty\u201d is surely coloured by ideology. In truth, the fundamental deal is loss of national power and democracy in return for more power for the EU institutions. The \u201cbenefits\u201d are much less obvious.<\/p>\n

Which national voters were asked whether they wanted a central bank ready to bail out the reckless or for their taxes to guarantee EU-level borrowing for others? Who was asked whether they wanted the EU Commission to tell their governments what they could spend or borrow? More importantly, if they don\u2019t like these things, how can EU voters change them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To those who want to go further and rejoin (in truth, virtually the entire Cabinet), he points out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4590,268,75,101,2556,9,4591,331],"class_list":["post-5600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-poland","tag-comment","tag-european-commission","tag-european-union","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-poland","tag-top-story","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}