Suggesting that Britain should one day rejoin the European Union, as Wes Streeting did in a speech yesterday, is the easy part – convincing European leaders that the country should be welcomed back is another thing altogether.
“People in Europe will watch this and roll their eyes,” said Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank. “If they want closer relationships it’s going to cost them either in trade-offs or money.”
The mood music of Streeting’s comments on Europe were positive, but Brussels will have noted that it was lacking in specifics – there was no mention of the customs’ union or single market, the two major “red lines” that Keir Starmer promised not to cross during the 2024 general election.
For Europe’s leaders, there are bigger priorities than reopening Brexit: the ongoing war in Ukraine, the threat from Donald Trump’s America, and the challenge of dealing with China, not to mention the rise of populism and the far-right within its own borders.
As Jeremy Cliffe at the European Council on Foreign Relations pointed out, “the UK would not be rejoining the same organisation, on the same terms, as the one it voted to leave a decade ago”. It would require, he argued, “a generational project involving significant concessions that Westminster has not even started to contemplate seriously. There is no ‘back to 2016’ button.”
France may have a far-right president in 12 months’ time, while Germany could have an explicitly anti-EU far-right government within three years. Any future negotiations will also take place in the shadow of a possible Reform government taking power in 2029.
Everyone who runs for the Labour leadership will talk up the possibility of reversing Brexit, but the window to rejoin is far smaller than they imagine.
Photograph by Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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