Andy Burnham’s conference speech was a political blockbuster. It was so crammed with big ideas and soaring rhetoric that his move towards Europe barely even made the headlines. But make no mistake: the Prime Minister laid out a plan which, while not actually acknowledging that he wants to rejoin the EU, has that as its probable final destination.
Burnham pledged to lay out different options for Britain’s future relationship with Europe: our existing relationship, customs union membership, single market membership, or full EU membership. Let’s take each in turn.
The status quo satisfies no one. Britain is poorer than it would otherwise be, more isolated, trapped in a deep ideological malaise. Any genuine assessment of Britain’s European policy will recommend a change.
The customs union idea has often been favoured by cautious pro-Europeans, looking to creep closer back to the continent without triggering too much opposition.
Custom unions get rid of tariffs and – more importantly for us – laborious “rules of origin” checks. But joining would not be easy. There is no off-the-shelf customs union to join. The EU customs arrangement is only open to members of the single market. We’d have to do what Turkey did and negotiate a bespoke customs deal with the EU from first principles.
It would take a long time and involve intense negotiation over tariff harmonisation and technical good regulation. There would also be a political cost. Embedding ourselves in an EU customs union means we’d probably have to give up the trade deals we have with other countries since Brexit.
What would we get in exchange? Comparatively little. According to a rough estimate by the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank, it would probably hand us around 0.5 per cent of GDP, translating to around £15bn a year. Nothing to sniff at, but a modest return on what would be a large investment of time and political capital.
Why such slim pickings? Because removal from the customs union was not the really damaging aspect of Brexit. The real pain came from leaving the single market.
The single market is a collection of shared rules which allow goods to move as freely within Europe as they do in most countries. According to researchers John Springford and Anton Spisak, “the single market accounted for the overwhelming majority of Brexit’s trade impact on UK-EU trade”. The cost came in the form of new certification procedures and compliance checks assessing whether UK goods abided by European standards.
There is, in this case, an existing off-the-shelf model to choose from: the European Free Trade Area (Efta), a tucked away little trade agreement featuring Norway and other lukewarm European refuseniks. But the political consequences are considerable. Freedom of movement comes back. More importantly, we would have to abide by European rules without having a clear say on how they are formulated. It’s a hard sell.
That then leaves EU membership. Economically, practically and strategically, it is the obvious option. Why take all this pain without the advantage of full membership? Why dedicate all these resources without a major outcome at the end of it? Why reopen the Brexit debate without at least trying to solve it once and for all?
Politically, the advantages are also striking. The campaign group Best for Britain found that customs union and single market membership provoked a mixed reaction from voters. They’re technical and confusing and people struggle to get excited about them. But the prospect of EU membership motivates Labour’s liberal-left support base and sparks genuine enthusiasm.
The basic reality is this: once you engage in Burnham’s exercise, the logic of Rejoin becomes inexorable.
A bit of my heart sinks at this. The Brexit years were grim, hateful and divisive, a horrible combination of technical complexity and vicious tribal resentment. It’s like we took a package holiday to Dante’s Inferno. I’m not particularly minded to rebook.
But a country which will not fix its mistakes is a country that has given up on the future. And Brexit was, it’s now clear, a terrible, terrible mistake. It made us poorer and lonelier. It robbed us of a global role. And now, as the world breaks down into competing power blocks, it has left us dangerously exposed.
It has not even calmed the far-right beast. During Brexit, conservative commentators would often insist that it was necessary to put concerns about immigration to bed. In fact, Brexit did the opposite, vindicating and then exacerbating those tendencies, leaving us where we are now: with an increasingly radicalised political right, a deranged hatred towards asylum seekers, and groups of balaclava-wearing fascists marauding through our streets. The best way to kill anti-immigrant views is to challenge them, not submit to them.
This is a battle pro-Europeans can win. Look at the reaction this week following Burnham’s conference speech. There was plenty of kick-back from the right-wing tabloids about the pensions triple-lock but barely a peep on Brexit. Only the Express saw fit to mention it prominently on the front page at all. Reform’s Nigel Farage lashed out at Burnham in the pages of the Mail and didn’t mention Brexit once. Robert Jenrick did so in the pages of the Telegraph with the same glaring omission.
Once upon a time, they would have seized on this as proof of Remainer treason and gone to war. Today, they seem circumspect and hesitant. That is because they know the same thing that Burnham knows, that everyone knows really. Brexit has been a disaster. Their promises of national glory have turned to ash in their mouths.
Things which were once thought impossible now feel entirely plausible. Burnham has made a big change here and presented it as a generic consultation on various ways forward. But the fundamental economic, political and electoral dynamic is clear. A campaign to rejoin is the most probable outcome. It’s also the correct one.
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