Brejoin is in the air in the UK, where Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham, the two Labour politicians most likely to succeed the desperately beleaguered prime minister Keir Starmer, say that they want the UK to rejoin the EU, with Streeting describing Brexit as a “catastrophic mistake”.
Starmer’s government, meanwhile, has offered to join the single market, according to press reports, but has been rebuffed, for the moment, by the EU. The single market offer was probably deliberately leaked by Starmer’s office to show that he, too, wants to bring the UK closer to the EU.
Back in 2016, the Brexit referendum was pitched by then prime minister David Cameron as a ‘once in a lifetime’ event that would definitively answer the question of Britain’s strained relationship with the EU. That was never a convincing claim. For almost all of the past ten years, a majority of Brits have told opinion pollsters that Brexit was a mistake.
But is Brejoin likely any time soon? Probably not.
The Labour party is facing a tough battle against Nigel Farage’s Reform across swathes of constituencies in the north and midlands of England that voted to leave the EU. And despite the pro-EU majority among voters, not many – probably between 10-20 percent of voters – have changed their minds since 2016. The sense that mainstream political parties are not listening to Britain’s ‘left behind’ has not gone away and it is hard to see Burnham or Streeting risking their party’s chances of clinging to power in 2028 or 2029 by sticking up two fingers at those who backed Brexit.
