Brejoin\u00a0is in the air in the UK, where\u00a0Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham, the two\u00a0Labour\u00a0politicians\u00a0most likely\u00a0to\u00a0succeed the desperately beleaguered prime minister Keir\u00a0Starmer,\u00a0say that they want the UK to rejoin the EU, with Streeting\u00a0describing\u00a0Brexit as a \u201ccatastrophic mistake\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Starmer\u2019s government, meanwhile, has offered to join the single market,\u00a0according to press reports, but\u00a0has been rebuffed, for the moment, by the EU.\u00a0The\u00a0single market offer was\u00a0probably\u00a0deliberately\u00a0leaked by Starmer\u2019s office\u00a0to show that he, too, wants to bring the UK closer to the EU.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Back in 2016, the Brexit referendum was pitched\u00a0by then\u00a0prime minister David Cameron as a \u2018once in a lifetime\u2019 event that would definitively answer the question of Britain\u2019s strained relationship with the EU. That\u00a0was never\u00a0a convincing claim.\u00a0For\u00a0almost all\u00a0of the past ten years,\u00a0a majority of\u00a0Brits have told opinion pollsters that Brexit was a mistake.<\/p>\n
But is\u00a0Brejoin\u00a0likely any\u00a0time soon? Probably not.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Labour\u00a0party is facing a tough battle against Nigel Farage\u2019s Reform across swathes of constituencies\u00a0in the north and midlands of England that voted to leave the EU.\u00a0And despite\u00a0the pro-EU majority among voters,\u00a0not many\u00a0\u2013\u00a0probably between\u00a010-20 percent of voters \u2013 have changed their minds since 2016.\u00a0The sense that mainstream political parties are not listening to Britain\u2019s \u2018left behind\u2019 has not gone away\u00a0and it is hard to see Burnham or Streeting\u00a0risking their party\u2019s chances of clinging to power in\u00a02028 or 2029\u00a0by sticking up two fingers at those who backed Brexit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Besides,\u00a0given how the 2016 referendum campaign poisoned the well of British politics for years, it would be seriously brave for a prime minister Burnham or Streeting to hold another plebiscite.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then there are the terms of rejoining. Britain, like Sweden and Denmark, would\u00a0probably never\u00a0be expected to join the euro\u00a0\u2013 it is hard to imagine that a \u2018Rejoin\u2019 campaign could win if euro membership was part of the deal. But London\u00a0couldn\u2019t\u00a0expect to keep the rebate\u00a0from the EU budget won by Margaret Thatcher in 1981 and clung on to by successive governments. The UK would\u00a0likely return\u00a0as\u00a0the\u00a0second largest net contributor behind Germany, though the Netherlands and several others would be higher contributors per capita.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And, of course, all this is predicated on the assumption that EU leaders would welcome prodigal Blighty back.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On Saturday (24 May),\u00a0leading members of\u00a0Marine Le Pen\u2019s\u00a0Rassemblement, which opposes enlargement of the EU,\u00a0said that the UK should not be allowed to rejoin without a referendum.\u00a0That would need Rassemblement to win next year\u2019s presidential election, but it is\u00a0a reminder, if nothing else, of how unpredictable the process of EU accession\u00a0can be.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What is more likely that\u00a0Brejoin\u00a0\u2013 if it happens \u2013\u00a0becomes a process, not an event, and the culmination of years of closer co-operation across the breadth of EU policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During\u00a0Rishi Sunak\u2019s premiership, the UK agreed to cough up\u00a0\u00a32.2bn\u00a0per year\u00a0for\u00a0access to Horizon Europe, the EU\u2019s flagship\u00a0research\u00a0and development\u00a0programme. To that,\u00a0Starmer\u2019s\u00a0government has\u00a0added \u00a3570m\u00a0per year to\u00a0access the Erasmus student exchange\u00a0scheme\u00a0and\u00a0\u20ac766m\u00a0to France as part of a\u00a0three year\u00a0agreement to limit small boat crossings on the Channel.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A\u00a0defence\u00a0co-operation deal that would allow UK firms to access\u00a0defence\u00a0procurement contracts as part of the EU\u2019s\u00a0\u20ac800bn SAFE\u00a0programme is likely to be next followed by an agreement on phytosanitary standards to boost trade in agricultural produce.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brejoin\u00a0is in the air in the UK, where\u00a0Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham, the two\u00a0Labour\u00a0politicians\u00a0most likely\u00a0to\u00a0succeed the desperately beleaguered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":984309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5226],"tags":[217083,802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,225602,245341,225600,245339,225601,245340,16,15],"class_list":["post-984308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brexit","tag-typedefinedterm","tag-brexit","tag-britain","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-union","tag-great-britain","tag-identifier4437","tag-identifier4599","tag-namebrexit","tag-nameeuobserver-voice","tag-termcodebrexit","tag-termcodeeuobserver-voice","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116636591491267493","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=984308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/984309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=984308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=984308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=984308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}