On Rejoin

How should the UK approach rejoining the EU?

The movement to rejoin the EU has been gaining some traction lately and the reasons are not hard to find: the now-widespread belief that Brexit has failed; the regular suggestions that Brexit has caused UK GDP to be 4-8% smaller; the turbulent politics - soon to be on our seventh prime minister in ten years; and the division and hate that was unleashed since the Brexit vote in 2016.

Those on the front line of Brexit - people who have to navigate Britain’s international borders, sometimes daily - have borne the brunt of what Brexit means, causing lost business, slow and costly deliveries, raised prices and upset customers.

The free marketeers who supported Brexit have been, perversely, proved right: trade barriers do reduce prosperity. Worse, this has had knock-on effects on generating jobs, tax receipts, and giving space for more public spending. Young graduates, in particular, are discovering it is much harder to find their first job in an economy that is misfiring.

There are various potential domestic solutions here but, quite frankly, the only one that could have a major impact is to forge a much closer relationship with the economic giant on our doorstep - the EU. And, as a rule of thumb, the closer the relationship, the more beneficial. For any Brexiters who may be reading this, the trade-off from reducing/removing barriers again would be to limit what we can decide to do alone (in certain policy areas).

If one accepts these trade-offs to be part of a greater and more powerful whole - which was always the argument for EU membership - then in principle, one must agree with rejoining. According to polls, there is already a significant and growing majority for rejoining.

Why then does the UK not just apply for EU membership under the method stipulated in Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union?

Firstly, the entire body politic, and indeed many voters, are still suffering a form of PTSD regarding ‘the national conversation about Europe’. The referendum and subsequent battles have scarred politics (and families/friends) to the extent that most would rather kick the topic into the long grass. Starmer has done exactly this and it seems likely to continue in similar form after Starmer.

Because a move to rejoin would very likely require a referendum with all the gnashing and wailing that comes with it. Of course, Parliament is not legally or constitutionally bound to offer a referendum, but given we’ve now had a referendum to Leave/Remain in 1975, and another to Leave/Remain in 2016, there is political precedent for EU membership questions to be put to a public vote. If nothing else, joining the EU (or leaving it) is an act of very significant constitutional scale.

It is also acknowledged, at least for Scotland within the UK, that other accession/secession acts should be subject to a referendum. Northern Ireland’s potential secession from the UK is periodically mooted in the next ten years and the linked expectation is for it to be subject to a referendum.

It would be, therefore, morally and politically very difficult to avoid a referendum on rejoining. And advisory or not, referendums are politically actionable, as the 2016 one rapidly became when David Cameron pledged to implement the result, whichever way it went.

There is a question of how a Rejoin referendum should be conducted. Short answer: not like last time, which was a mess. A simple 50%+1 majority was all that was needed in 2016 to take the drastic step of leaving. There was no threshold for either the size of the majority required nor for the turnout. Politically and morally, we ought to learn from that experience and introduce the necessary safeguards. The same is true for any internal United Kingdom secession referendum.

That will make the bar higher, but so it should. If we are to rejoin, the country needs to emphatically back it, fully mindful of the trade-offs and the commitment we would be making. We need, as a culture and a polity, to feel at home in the EU - ‘coming home’, if you like. Without that, the UK is very likely to become awkward and ambivalent about the European project again, and the cultural and historical pulls from other parts of the English-speaking world will continue to be a draw.

It is not wild to suggest that we are a long way from a whole-hearted cultural move to rejoin. The current Labour government doesn’t want to talk about anything remotely close to rejoining, beyond a limited reset (out there in the long grass). And pro-Brexit parties - who actually want to get even further away from the EU - are collectively still very strong in opinion polls.

On the subject of opinion polls, pollsters rarely frame any Rejoin question as being without our old opt-outs and also fail to state that the UK will likely need to declare a principled commitment to joining the euro at some point in future. When the question is framed that way, support for Rejoin tends to drop significantly. In my experience, Rejoiners wilfully ignore this.

But more immediately, we haven’t even begun to address the central pillar of the Brexiter sovereignty argument - namely having greater control over immigration into Britain and rejecting the entire concept of EU/EEA free movement. Everyone in Westminster is hiding from this even ten years after the vote, to the point that even the pro-EU Libdems tiptoe around the subject and focus on wanting a new customs union relationship because it wouldn’t demand free movement (whereas a single market relationship would).

We are therefore in a curious position in which the Rejoin lobby is getting louder, yet is also not confronting the free movement issue.

It seems very back to front.

A hearts-and-minds campaign to start reversing the damage and indeed the mindset behind Brexit is going to take a long time and will have to lean on ‘voter churn’ to some extent. But hearts and minds do need to be engaged. Rejoin will not just magically happen by keep repeating that ‘the economics of Brexit are awful’. That was the failed Remain campaign strategy in 2016, and it also leans into the 1970s view that essentially said we were facing such economic challenges, we should try and get a bit of what they’re having across the channel.

As is often said, Britain views - and has always viewed - Europe in a transactional way. We are not emotionally tied. We do not see Europe as home. That needs to change.

This is an enormous cultural and political mountain to bite off - a giant leap - which then raises the prospect of doing this incrementally instead.

A way forward?

So firstly, the case needs to be made for free movement. I’m not sure it has ever been made - it certainly hasn’t been made in the last ten years. Britain as a whole needs to learn that it is not something to fear but a huge opportunity. Without first lancing that very large boil - the one that grew out of all proportion during the 2016 referendum campaign - we are going nowhere. Free movement will need heavyweight champions in Westminster.

Once the country has been persuaded of free movement, one can move on to its connection to the single market’s major benefits. After that, we can start a conversation about a single market-type relationship with the EU. EFTA/EEA is the obvious working operation in this context, but it doesn’t need to be that. The principle here is what we would be striving for - of much fuller market access with all the benefits that accrue but with minimal influence at the EU top table (as a result of not being an EU member).

This is a high principle trade-off that the EU is clear it can work with. With will on both sides, it is then a question of how it can be made to work operationally. Joining EFTA, ‘docking’ to the EFTA court (while remaining outside EFTA), or simply using the European Court of Justice for disputes are three separate possibilities.

The biggest problem is that Remainers/Rejoiners hate this half-in/half-out position but they may need to learn to love it - or at least to tolerate it. Because what we are trying to do here is break down the objections to EU membership, while: (a) significantly improving the UK’s economic situation; (b) buying time for the UK electorate to shift; (c) quietly setting up a ‘tractor beam’ through the long-term unsustainability of a single market-only position, which will pull UK politics and electorate further into the EU’s orbit over time, making Rejoin ultimately appear the most obvious and natural answer.

Put plainly, we are setting up ‘a springboard to rejoin’. At the moment, no such springboard exists and it doesn’t look like it is going to exist for the foreseeable future, in large part because Rejoiners are fixated on the giant leap, just as they became fixated on a second referendum as a way of stopping Brexit completely.

We need to stop looking at this in a classically British binary black-white/this-that way.

Because let us be very clear about this: there is another party in this equation who will have a view on whether and how the British rejoin: the EU and its member states. They will have to be sufficiently satisfied - and sufficiency will vary across member states - that Britain has changed enough to take another shot at membership, only this time a sustainable shot. They may look for a changed national outlook, a recognition among Britons that Europe is home, a much more fulsome engagement with the EU that isn’t merely transactional and constantly seeking opt-outs, and a full-spectrum of politicians and parties in Westminster that back renewed EU membership.

Only then may member states be satisfied and vote for - rather than veto - Britain’s membership.

But it’s also possible that as part of the reassurances Britain needs to give the EU, we may need to set up a full Single Market and Customs Union relationship as an explicit stepping stone to rejoin. [Side note: as an explicit stepping stone to rejoin it is fine; as a suggested ‘fix’ for Brexit - as many keep suggesting - it is awful.]

And perhaps, further, an economic manoeuvre may be requested along the lines of Sterling/Euro alignment as a kind of down-payment on eventual euro membership.

‘That’s all there is to it?’

Most people reading this who are familiar with Britain’s political culture and history will recognise that these challenges in reaching ‘a springboard to rejoin’ (and then rejoining) look eye-wateringly huge. This is why some commentators predict we will never rejoin, or say it is probably three or four decades away. I am one of these people.

What I would suggest is that UK politics leans into Brexit to some extent and takes time to tackle our domestic arrangements and shortcomings. In short, we need to ‘get our own house in order’ before applying to join again. There is a fair amount to reform, including the central-local government relationship and the First-Past-The-Post voting system. The latter may even lead to more European politics.

So by all means, make Rejoin an ultimate objective but it needs a heavy dose of realism, lots of time/patience, and dare I say it, some trade-offs along the journey.

Any less and I fear that Rejoiners are simply running towards a knock-out punch - the punch of a Cummings-esque Stay Out campaign that will say hourly that ‘we will have to join the euro’ and ‘we will lose all control over immigration again’. We are not ready for that and will lose.

Rejoin needs some serious realism. And after ten years, I still don’t see it.

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Disclaimer

History rarely moves in linear or predictable ways so there is always the possibility that something comes along to hasten a move to rejoining the EU. But one can’t bank on that.

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Postscript

Should it be ‘Rejoin’ or ‘Join’? A thread here on Bluesky:

Short version: While ‘Join’ is attractive, it’s hard to beat ‘Rejoin’ as a statement of historical truth.