Rejoin is coming

Customs union is a distraction. Only full membership offers a compelling vision of Britain's future.

Photo by Oliver Cole on Unsplash

One way or another, we’re moving closer to Europe. It can happen subtly or vividly, slowly or quickly, under Keir Starmer or a successor, but it’s happening. We are no longer discussing whether we should do so. We are discussing how.

As things stand this morning, the government is in an absolute mess, with Starmer still looking like he might be dragged under by the Mandelson affair. Never has a prime minister sacrificed so much in order to achieve so little. But no matter which way it goes, the push for a return to Europe will happen. Chancellor Rachel Reeves made it a core aim of her second Mais lecture. Starmer put it front and centre of his local election campaign. Partly as a result of Trump’s attacks and partly as a result of the UK’s economic stagnation, we are looking eastward.

If Starmer is forced to resign, the movement will likely be even quicker. A new Labour leader would have the confidence that comes with a reset. The leadership contest itself would see candidates fight to prove their EU credentials to the fervently pro-European Labour membership. It could even be a bidding war.

The question is what this return to Europe should look like. Should we keep on edging closer while staying outside its ecosystem, so we don’t upset Leave voters? Should we be more radical and try to join the single market and customs union? Or should we commit to the good old cause and fight to rejoin the EU itself? Each option has advantages and disadvantages.

This is the place where the terms of the debate are set. If we make the wrong call here - coming up with a solution that is insufficiently ambitious, or commands insufficient support - we will waste the next decade of our lives. We will fail to provide solutions which can help drag Britain out of its economic stagnation. This preliminary debate is where the future of the country may be decided.

A report out today by Best for Britain, the group run by my friend Naomi Smith, lays out polling they’ve done with YouGov on where the public sit on these issues.

There are basically four models on offer. Status quo, customs union, single market, and full EU membership.

The status quo means we continue with the government’s existing approach, which is to get as close to Europe as it can without joining the customs union or the single market. It is currently pursuing this model on agri-food, emissions and energy trading and youth mobility.

Obviously Remainers are frustrated by this approach and it makes no sense on its own terms. Once you admit Brexit is a mistake, it is hard to argue against reversing it. But it should be recognised for what it has accomplished. Labour has ended the pathological adversariality of the Tory relationship with Europe and replaced it with collegiate working relationships. The programme is pretty ambitious, aiming for full dynamic alignment in key areas of the economy. It has established proof-of-concept that a relationship with Europe can work and that we will accept European rules in exchange for trade.

Most importantly, it is popular with both Leavers and Remainers. Neither side loves it, of course. We’re not in the business of love. We’re in the business of grudging acceptance. And both sides can grudgingly accept it.

It is also important to state, and state clearly, that you cannot really go beyond this model before the next election. Starmer’s mandate involved strict red lines: no free movement, no single market, no customs union. Contravening those red lines would be a betrayal and it would be treated as one. It would be the worst possible way to start this debate. If Labour’s position changes, it can go ahead and start negotiations with the EU now, but it would have to ask the country to sign off on those plans at the next election before they are enacted.

This model has killed the Brexit issue. Even when news emerged of dynamic alignment, Nigel Farage could barely bring himself to mention it. The basic failure of the Brexit project is never more obvious than in the silence of its adherents. It’s easy to ignore this - people don’t often celebrate the active attempt to kill a national conversation - but Brexit had to go away for a while. People voted for Boris Johnson because he promised an end to the Brexit war. Pledging to reopen it in the 2024 general election would have been suicide-by-polling-booth. Starmer managed to simultaneously kill the issue and improve the underlying conditions, which was no small feat.

Europe has to look like a new idea. If this is about a retreat into the past, the pro-European movement is doomed. If it is a bright, fresh idea that offers economic opportunity, it is not. The Starmer approach created that space. No-one will ever credit it and few people will ever recognise it, but it’s true.

This approach remains the most popular option available. Best for Britain’s poll showed 19% of people strongly support it, 42% somewhat support it, 11% somewhat oppose it and seven per cent strongly oppose it. Twenty one per cent don’t know.

You can see the pragmatic effectiveness of the policy there. It doesn’t excite people and it does not infuriate them. They tolerate it. But it has a nice solid majority.

We are now reaching the limits of what this approach can achieve - and it ain’t much. There simply aren’t that many benefits to getting close to the EU without joining the customs union and the single market. Your goods still have to go through laborious country of origin checks to ensure their tariff status. You’re outside of a large trading block during a trade war. And you are unable to achieve frictionless trade with Europe because of regulatory checks connected to the single market.

Starmer is pushing to now expand the number of areas of cooperation but this is a long slow process to secure minimal aims. Then there are the obstacles. The EU is opposed to cherry-picking access to the single market. It has begun to introduce a ‘pay-to-play’ approach where countries must contribute in order to participate in the single market. This recently demolished UK-EU talks on defence cooperation, with the UK losing the chance to access the EU’s €150 billion Safe defence fund because it objected to the price of entry.

There is also the question of free movement. Look at the insistence of the EU for a youth mobility scheme in its talks with the UK. That is a preamble to a more substantial requirement which comes with a closer relationship. Basically, sooner or later they’re going to demand free movement.

This is not about them being obsessive. It is a natural corollary of the things the UK wants. The economic success of the EU is built on the free movement of four things: Capital, goods, services and people. The trade benefits the UK desires come from the first three, but they don’t make sense without the fourth.

At some point, the existing approach is going to run out of road. It’ll simply not be worth the effort for the gains, or it’ll require too substantial a financial contribution, or it’ll demand too severe a political cost. That point is coming soon.

The second model on offer is to join the customs union.

This is the most popular radical approach available. Speaking last December, deputy prime minister David Lammy suggested Britain would benefit fromdoing so. He caveated carefully - “that is not currently our policy, that’s not currently where we are” - but it was the first time that a senior member of the government had walked up to one of Starmer’s red lines, taken a good long look at it, and then meandered up and down a little bit before retreating back home.

Twenty-seven per cent of people strongly support this option, 22% somewhat support it, eight per cent somewhat oppose and 11% strongly oppose. This seems strong, but it’s flimsier than it looks. A very large percentage - 33% - don’t know. I worry about that percentage, because I suspect they would break anti. This is because once you get into these compromise positions the negative implications are vivid but the positive opportunities are hazy.

Joining the customs union means that we would lose the ability to do independent trade deals. We would lose control of our tariff policy in the middle of a global trade war. These are very effective arguments and they’d get lots of robust expression in the right-wing press and on the BBC, which will inevitably follow its lead. In response we’d say that it’ll be worth it for the economic benefits, but these are actually quite limited. UK in a Changing Europe estimates that they’d likely be around £15bn a year - 0.5% of GDP. It’s just an awful lot of political fighting and risk for limited gain.

The third model is single market membership.

This is where things get serious. We would accept free movement and we would also secure frictionless trade with Europe. This is because the biggest obstacle to trade is not about tariffs, but regulations. And showing you’ve complied with regulations is what holds everything up. Once we’re in the single market our regulations would be the same so there’d be no more need for checks.

Despite the free movement element, this actually has pretty similar support to customs union membership. Twenty-five per cent strongly support it, 21% somewhat support it, nine per cent somewhat oppose it and 14% strongly oppose it. Again, there are a lot of don’t knows, on 32%. Again, I suspect they break anti, because the counter arguments to single market membership are compelling. We would be subject to single market rules which we would not have had a hand in writing. We’d be rule takers not rule makers. Boris Johnson would write columns about how we’re gimps.

I could tell you at length how simplistic this picture is, that there are ways to shape the rules within European structure and above them at the level of global standards. I could point out that we are already rule-takers without a voice simply by virtue of trade dynamics in the real world, where we will make things to the specification of a large neighbouring market. And I could bang on all night about how Jacque Delores’ old vision of a two-speed Europe perfectly suits this idea of an outer ring which should be given more voting rights on trade so that other countries can pursue closer political cooperation. I believe all these things. But what’s the point? Those arguments are never going to win in a battle with ‘rule-taker-not-rule-maker’. It’s like bringing a butter knife to a bazooka fight.

The final model is the most intuitive. It is membership of the European Union. Rejoin. A complete reversal of the Brexit vote.

There are downsides to this. I suspect the former two options could be pursued simply by putting them in an election manifesto and treating a Commons majority as a mandate. EU membership would probably require another referendum.

People sometimes say that we would struggle to enter again on the terms we had before, with the rebate and the exemption from the need to join the single currency and all that. That’s true, but equally, things are extremely volatile and flexible in the EU right now. Council decisions are signed off without the support of the 27, all sorts of informal networks were created to sidestep Viktor Orban, many countries patently have no intention of joining the euro. Things are currently possible which might not have been possible before.

Crucially, EU membership provides effective counters against the objections we saw before. Britain would have a voice in trade deal negotiations with third parties. It would have a firm and clear-cut role in deciding on regulation. It would have judges on the European Court of Justice. It would have a seat at the table.

Of all the models, rejoin is the second most popular, after the government’s existing approach. Thirty-seven per cent of people strongly support it, 16% somewhat support it, eight per cent somewhat oppose and 24% strongly oppose. That means that the overall levels of support and opposition are broadly similar to Starmer’s current strategy, but the sense of enthusiasm and aversion are more profound. This is an idea that people love or hate, rather than tolerate. It is, in a way, the complete opposite of the existing approach. In this case, just 14% of people said they don’t know.

Rejoining the EU is the cleanest political argument and the strongest economic argument but it has a weakness. It would repolarise the electorate. Look at this graph, from the Best for Britain report. Starmer’s existing policy is up top - nice and cosy, harmless, doesn’t upset anyone, uniting Leavers and Remainers in a world of tolerability. Then look what happens when you opt for rejoin. The line expands aggressively, with Leavers very unhappy and Remainers delighted. That’s what polarisation looks like.

This promises another big fight where the country is pitched against itself once again. No-one much loves that idea, but it is hard to see how we can avoid it. Economic suffocation is killing us. The pain is making people more likely to vote Reform, whose entire programme is based on pitching voters against one another.

The question Labour will ask itself is necessarily self-centred. It saw its electoral coalition torn apart by the Brexit vote. This is why Starmer was so desperate to stitch it back together with a compromise position everyone could broadly accept. Would that happen again? Would it be consolidated or shattered by a repolarised electorate?

The former is much more likely. The key to this lies in the way that British politics has fractured into two blocs. On one side you have reactionary eurosceptic voters and on the other you have progressive pro-European voters. The Remain-Leave split fossilised and defined our political life. Voters tend to now move around within those blocs, switching from Tory to Reform or from Labour to Green for instance, but they rarely move between the blocs themselves. The old Labour to Tory switcher is largely a thing of the past.

This means that the key to winning the next election is not about winning over ideological converts. It is to establish a monopoly over your bloc.

Labour is failing at this. It is losing votes all over the place, and particularly to the Greens and the Lib Dems. It needs an offer to bring them back. Rejoin would be a strong way to do that.

Remainers have stayed strongly united on their view of Brexit. Eighty-seven per cent of those who voted Remain in 2016 think it’s a failure. Leavers, however, have splintered. Thirty-five per cent think Brexit has been a failure, 32% neither success nor a failure, and 25% think it has been a success.

However, when you crossreference people’s 2016 vote with their voting intentions in a general election, the picture reverses. Suddenly it is the Leavers who are united, with most of them consolidating around tReform, and it is the Remainers who have splintered, with their vote going to Labour, the Greens, the Lib Dems, the SNP and Plaid. This is why Farage can win. Not because he has some unassailable lead. He doesn’t. But because the reactionary voting bloc is monopolised while the progressive voting bloc is fractured.

A call to rejoin therefore gives Labour a solid way of changing this dynamic. It might repolarise the electorate, but it provides a chance to bring the progressive voting bloc under a Labour leadership.

It would also provide an opportunity to shatter the reactionary voting bloc at least a little bit. Look at how firm the numbers are within the progressive voting bloc.

Ninety per cent of Green voters think Brexit is a failure, 88% of Lib Dem voters, 86% of Labour voters. But then look at the numbers for the Tories. The party’s voters are split between Cameronite pro-Europeans and Johnsonite Purge Brexiters. You can pit Tory voters against each other. You can force Farage to talk about Brexit again, to attach himself to it, and better yet - to restate his very unpopular view that we should distance ourselves even further.

There are very few downsides to Labour from pledging to rejoin. There are considerable upsides.

There’s no escaping this conversation. The damage that Brexit has done to this country is obvious now to everyone. We wasted years of our lives pursuing a project whose only possible outcome was to mutilate and embarrass us. Now we are poorer for it on its own terms and because we did not spend that time doing something worthwhile.

The era of detent is coming to an end. You can see the signs of it everywhere, not least in the sudden enthusiasm of the prime minister and the chancellor for change. But the aim of that change must be meaningful. If we spend the next five years debating customs union membership and then another five negotiating it we’ll have wasted another decade on something which simply does not make much difference to the economic picture. It’ll alienate those who are opposed without sufficiently galvanising those who are supportive.

We need to pursue the clearest, simplest approach - electorally, politically, logically and economically. That is the campaign to rejoin the European Union, without complication or caveat. This is the pledge that we should be pushing for in the next Labour manifesto. It would put the party in the best position to win, and it would put the country in the best position to succeed. It can be stated confidently, the case can be made easily, and it does not involve the number of complicated half-hearted technical explanations that other options entail.

It is the bravest course, but it is also the safest course. Whether it’s Starmer or his successor, Labour should grasp it.

Odds and sods

This weeks newsletter is available as a podcast at the top of the page, on Substack or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Two columns for the i paper this week - one on how Donald Trump’s mates have all left him and another on the crucial role of Rachel Reeves in pulling the UK away from the US. My report from the UK on Late Night Live covered the defeat of Viktor Orban, relations with the EU and Starmer’s relationship with Trump.

Thanks to anyone who came to Origin Story Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre this week. That night was a delight. It’s kind of incredible how far we’ve come really. Our first live show was in the basement of a tiny pub with a few dozen seats. Now we’re selling out theatres with hundreds. We’re cooking up another live show soon and will be - shock - leaving London at some point this year for a mini tour. Details coming shortly.

I don’t know what we did to get so lucky that we deserve The Boys, but by Christ I’m glad we managed it. The anti-superhero show, which by some absurd ironic twist is on Amazon, remains the single most powerful and clear-sighted political drama on TV, or anywhere else for that matter. It takes aim at left and right, certainly, but it fundamentally recognises that the right are the main target in the present moment, given that they have control of the most powerful country on earth and have collapsed into outright fascism.

There is nothing else out there - no music, no novel, no high quality award winning drama - which comes anywhere near to this level of insight and moral indignation. It is in a class of its own. It is also consistently the funniest and most outrageous thing you will ever see. There comes a point where you barely even clock that someone is being beaten to death with a twelve foot controllable penis.

I don’t know what we’re going to do without it. If we survive this period, they should put it in a museum as an artifact that perfectly encapsulates our age.

Right, that’s me done. So far this week I’ve written two newsletters, two columns, recorded three episodes of podcasts, and done a live show. I am beat and it’s time for a very thorough approach to the weekend. See you next Friday. Oh and fuck off obviously.