Britain would not be able to rejoin the EU on the special terms it enjoyed in the past, veterans of the Brexit negotiations have said.
We didn’t like it even with the special deal. We’ll like it even less without. So, don’t rejoin. Seems simple enough.
It is so deliciously funny to see these half witted Labour politicians tie themselves up in knots like this. Is it any wonder the country is up shitcreek with out a boat let alone a paddle.
This needs Paxman to ask one of them “So, by how much do you want to lose the next election ?”
There’s nothing the Labour Party and the left in general enjoy more than some good old internecine warfare.
My schadenfreude is off the scale.
…and attempts to rejoin will destroy Labour (even more than they are currently), just as it destroyed the Tories.
The idiots inside the London bubble don’t seem to realise that the 52% who voted to Leave weren’t just Tories. Many of them were Labour voters who had received only negative outcomes from our EU membership, none of the positive benefits.
Why should they suddenly support Rejoin? Nothing has changed to make the EU suddenly more appealing.
During its 47 years of EU membership, the UK achieved an unprecedented special status: opt-outs from core policies, such as the single currency…
Both Denmark and Sweden still have their own currency
Much truth. And anyways, if consenting Brits want to trade in Euros they are allowed to. So what’s the point of joining.
But they were opt outs because without them the Euro would never have happened. The EU is quite clear that any country joining has to have a clear plan to join the Euro.
Point of order. UK was member of the EU for 28 years. The EU was formed by the Treaty of Maastricht 1992.
The UK joined the EEC of six Countries in 1973 – 47 years prior to its independence in 2020. To do so it gave up its successful membership of EFTA and abandoned flourishing, trade with most of the Countries of the former Empire. The EEC was a protectionist Customs Union which forced its members to trade internally- a quasi-autarky.
Prior to the euro, Denmark pegged its currency to the DM. Now they have (the same) fixed exchange rate to the euro. It’s an odd arrangement, which I don’t claim to fully understand.
It gives them many of the advantages of being in the euro – ease of trade, removes exchange risk if exporting within the zone – but if they ever up in the situation that Greece did post financial crisis (would have benefited from devaluing but essentially couldn’t) or UK did in 1992 (could and did devalue) then they have the big red button if they need it. Also handy if the Eurozone goes through some severe crisis in future, as seems plausible given the lack of fiscal integration. The US dollar works partly because of federal transfers between states an order of magnitude bigger than the EU can manage and at some point this is going to bite the euro somewhere painful.
The current surveys on rejoining don’t ask the right questions.
And on a more serious note we have this from YouGov.
H/T Julian Jessop who is good on this subject.
https://x.com/julianHjessop/status/2053398533609279590?s=20
Interesting that Denmark still wants us back in, even with opt-outs.
I suspect that’s because they are going off the EU project, getting a lot more sceptical about the benefits of mass immigration, so are trying to get more opt-outs themselves and think that having us back in will help that.
I suspect if they’d included Hungary and some of the other Central/Eastern European countries, they’d have got a similar result for similar reasons.
Denmark joined the EEC with the UK and Ireland in 1973 because the UK was its most important trading partner, and trade would have been significantly lost once the UK joined the protectionist EEC Customs Union. The same applied to Ireland.
and that is yougov, who have a lrgely lefty response base due to how they conduct surveys.
True Rejoiners would say Yes to all those questions. Giving away our country is the entire point of the project.
A question I like to pose is this: “If the UK economy would perform better by being a US state, should we join the USA?” I’ve never heard anyone say yes. Which rather proves that that economics is not the only consideration.
Furthermore, the EU nations are moving significantly to the right. Just how much would a Labour government want to cozy up to leaders whose MP’s have been banned from attending rallies in the UK?
People like Starmer and Streeting believe the move to the right is an aberration, and that before long People Like Them will be fully back in charge again.
Yes it’s a good test. Now Lizzy is dead, have to say I would vote yes to an Anglosphere reunion. We’d be big enough to have a significant influence on US election outcomes etc, which if you followed the British media you’d think we were all involved in anyway. Even when we were in the EU there was very little coverage of European politics, I think very few Brits would even recognise Meloni or Merz, let alone most commissioners. But then same for awareness of European culture in general, we seem attached to US cultural output in TV, music, film etc far more than continental stuff. Main thing that would stop me from going in with the Yanks is a suspicion that the Irish lobby would demand we entered without NI. But it’s one of those “never going to happen” things anyway. Perhaps a 1-2% chance that Alberta joins the Union in my lifetime, maybe 1% for Guyana or Belize. Reckon that’s about as far as the Anglosphere is likely to get.
My contacts in Calgary tell me the secession movement’s getting a lot of steam under it. But that doesn’t imply becoming No51. Why get out from under the heel of Ottawa to go under the heel of DC? They’d do better as a sovereign but associated state. They just might take BC with them
There are some significant advantages to being state 51. Not just the tariff thing. US states must follow stricter rules against trade discrimination vs other states than Canadian provinces do. (Weirdly international companies often find it easier to operate across Canada than Canadian companies do, because discrimination against overseas companies *is* tightly regulated in many trade deals.) So there’s a benefit to being on the inside of the US and getting that protection.
With Germany no longer the economic powerhouse it once was, and France’s long-term fiscal outlook even worse than the UK, the free-rider members of the EU would only accept the UK back if they could squeeze greater net contributions from us. Brexit gave the EU a chance to engage in a substantial amount of reform, but the vested interests meant it only doubled down on the politics of managed decline, the people seeking to rejoin are fantasising over an imaginary EU of a golden age that never really existed.
Which is why they are now declining even faster than us. Probably not the result they were looking for. By the time we got around to voting whether or not to rejoin, the EU would probably have dissolved due to it’s own mass of contradictory laws and regulations driving everyone who follows them into penuary.
I don’t think the EU will dissolve on its own. There’s a lot of inertia and a lot of people who depend on the handouts.
True, but because it won’t bend, it will eventually snap. AN AFD Germany, and bankrupt France…. what could possibly go wrong?
Apparently, Andy Burnham intends to “reverse Thatcher’s legacy”.
His lot had 13 years to do that, between 1997 and 2010. He was a minister in that government. Why didn’t he start doing it then?
Scraping the fucking barrel to be blaming Thatcher thirty-six years after she was forced from office.
She’s been dead for 13 years FFS!
Slavery ended in the British Empire in 1838, yet black people still blame it for any of their failures…
But what is there left of her legacy to reverse?
And I have to say that I still blame Attlee for a load of stuff…!
(and Gladstone, and Lloyd George, and Churchill come to that).
Andrew Neil’s response to Burnham after he blamed Thatcher couldn’t be said better:
“The warnings came as senior Labour politicians jostling for the leadership of their party and country talk openly about wanting to return to the union at some point in the future.”
Has Wes pulled a smart move here? Everyone is asking why the fuck he’s talking about it now.
It seems to me there are two things going on. The Labour membership would really like the next leader to promise going back into the EU. But, the seat Burnham is trying to win was 65% leave.
So, Wes starts talking about going back in, and now, it’s all over the press. What does the other contender, Burnham think about this? And now, everyone is reporting that he previously said he’d like to go back in. He’s having to say “well, not yet”. Reform are going to have this all over their leaflets.
Burnham loses, and that removes him as a rival to Wes.
But then Wes is stuck with it, and only the metroleft, Greens, LibDumbs and Tory grifters want to go back in. Greens, LibDumbs and Tory grifters won’t vote Labour; there are insufficient metroleft constituencies to return a Labour majority and they’re all prey to Greens.
Looks suicidal to me, unless Wes believes he can get us locked back in before 2029, then heroically become a European Commissioner just like his pal Mandy. Which is a possibility, I suppose.
That’s tomorrow’s problem
Wes is disliked to hated by the left which includes a large part of the Labour Party membership and has no chance against anyone. If Burnham loses it will be Mad Ed or Ange if Wes makes a leadership move.
From Sam Coates Sky on X:
It may just be a tactical thing. I’m not saying he has the whole thing mapped out. But why else is he now talking about the EU?
Rayner as the top challenger without Burnham is hilarious.
It’s always tactical with politicians, they can’t comprehend strategic or long term if that means beyond the next GE.
Wes is talking about the EU now because its a way of:
Cutting Burnham’s legs from under him – might work
Ingratiating himself with the membership – probably won’t work
Reminding his leave voting constituents he’s still one of them – might work at next GE although his biggest threat is Gaza independents if the last GE is anything to go by as he nearly lost to them.
But bring it on. It gets the collapse out of the way faster. Then we can move on.
Even if being leaders gives Wes some kudos, I don’t see him winning his own constituency where is majority is just 528.
I wonder what his local by-election results would suggest?
What about Rachel Reeves? Anyone who cries at having to implement Labour policy seems to me to have a much better grasp on reality than most politicians.
All aboard the sinking ship.
With a crew of diversity hires.
We NEVER joined toytown austria-hungary. We were taken in (pun ABSOLUTELY intened) to what we were told was a simple free trade zone.
Over the decades this became the life sucking catastrophe it is today, created by arrogant, imbecile globalist morons.
In 2016 they tried to get approval for their enabling act (and never forget, they didn’t really need to) and it blew up, spectacularly in their faces.
This is just labour sewer politics (imagine being outsmarted by wes streeeting! Assuming it was his idea of course).
Burnham must be a bigger cunt than he looks!
Mark, Burnham is an enormous gash. I have not forgotten that after the handgun bans, he boasted of getting the guns off the street.
The thing that a lot of the blob can never grasp is that this country never wanted to be in the EU. We were OK with the EEC.
As I have said many times, mainland Europe is different. If you live in Basel, you can go for Colmar in France for an afternoon. You can go Calais to Canterbury, but it’s a more expensive trip. That also applies to goods or the sort of things where humans have to move. People commute into Geneva from France. So Britain can’t really compete on low value manufacturing or on services requiring humans to move because of the extra costs of getting across the channel. Which is why we shifted to specialist manufacturing and services. But once you shift to those, you can trade them globally. If the cost of shipping luxury shoes is fuck all of the price to Rotterdam, it’s also fuck all of the price to Shanghai.
It’s why this “trade gravity” thing is kinda bollocks. It matters if you’re shipping raw materials and food. But if you’re selling Lagavulin 16, not so much. It’s about 25p/bottle to ship to China. 15p/bottle to Rotterdam. For something costing £50+.
Trade gravity? Total bollocks for services. Bulk of my trade for the past 10+ years has been with Japan.
“Trade gravity” is misrepresented as geographic distance, but by its very name it’s *TRADE* distance not geographic distance. And that includes things such as spreching the same linga.
Indeed. Perhaps I misworded it, but I meant the definition they were using, how the government was working out the impact.
Obviously I voted Leave, and I would again in a fraction of a heartbeat, but hear me out.
I’d be happy with an EU that put a fucking ring of steel round Europe and kicked out every single foreign criminal.
I love the French – shoot me, but I do – and France.
I don’t even mind the Krauts.
The beaches of Spain, Portugal in summer, the Alps in winter, Florence in spring and Venice in the autumn.
The churches of Vienna.
The art galleries of Paris, without the vibrant North and sub-Saharan African lingerers.
The women, pretty much everywhere.
What could be better?
Maybe we should have tried taking the fucking project over instead.
Sobering to think of it that way.
We actual Europeans will have to find some common cause, and I think that is happening. Then maybe head to the north and west, and to the islands.
The ruins of Cardolan, Arthedain and Rhudaur and their daft inhabitants will have to look after themselves. I’m too old and too knackered to patrol the marches, so I’m building a library to survive the dark ages.
It’s stacked to the gills with copies of the Beano and old Peter Simple columns.
Didn’t this fail the last time you tried it. In 407 AD??
If we really wanted to rejoin the EU (No! No! Hear me out!), the only legitimate method would be to negotiate the terms of re-entry and put the result to a referendum. Negotiating (assuming the EU would even agree to do so on such a basis) would take years and suck all the energy for anything else out of our political system (possibly a benefit – discuss) and, as the poll linked in this discussion shows, the chances of the EU agreeing to terms likely to convince a majority of voters are ‘slim’. A colossal waste of time and effort.
Yes. And if the same procedure had been followed when voting to leave, Remain would have won as the explicit terms would have prevents large numbers of people thinking they all agreed on the same thing when they didn’t.
Ultimately this is the problem of any specific position, isn’t it? “This exact thing” rarely gets 50%+ of the vote against “anything else, whatever you’d like it to be”.
If there had been a second referendum on Brexit after the negotiations, I’m sure Remain After All would have started the campaign as favourite given how tight the first referendum was. But I don’t think that the lack of a second referendum swindled the electorate. Leave always meant leave, it was never sold as “vote leave even if you really want to remain, there’s a second vote later”. Many people might not like the terms of our new relationship with the EU, but it’s hardly as if they’re set in stone. Successive governments were always going to mess around with them, and (uniparty consensus aside) that can be influenced at the ballot box.
Realistically we know pretty much what the terms would be for reentering the EU. I would be surprised if Rejoin won a vote purely by fooling people about what it involved, and if they do then more fool the Great British electorate. Speaking as a Leaver, and at the putative next referendum a Stayer Outer, I wouldn’t feel too swindled if there wasn’t a second referendum once the final terms were known. I would quickly become an active supporter of Brexit2.0 before some idiot signs us up for the euro, though. That would be a nastier mess to get out of.
Obviously, it was never sold as a vote which needed later ratification, but the way to handle a situation like this is to use STV. Having done some negotiating, present the people with a list of possible options which they rank 1, 2, 3 etc. and run STV over it. Likely no option gets 50% of first preferences, but it ultimately reveals what option is most preferred.
I’m generally sympathetic to STV for elections, but for referenda I’m not sold that it (or more specifically AV / instant runoff) would have the necessary popular legitimacy. If anything needed a system like this, probably best to have a sequence of refedenda, starting with a broad question and followed by a more specific one once the choices are narrowed down. Preferably both choices being binary. I know in principle it’s cheaper and more efficient to just instantly run off based on preferences, but the complaints will never end if a 45-35-20 split goes to the middle option 48-52-0 once the 20 votes are transferred.
If it’s the result of people’s outright votes then it would be rather more accepted. Does this give undue power to the government since it can sequence and structure the referenda to make its preferred outcome more likely? Yes and that’s unfortunate, but I’d take it. Particularly given it’s an elected government and I accept that confers some power, but we can always (hopefully!) vote it out again.
Anyhow, the electorate was allegedly far too thick to cope with an in/out Brexit vote so however will their poor brains cope with ranked preferences and more than two sides in the campaign? (I jest, but we’ve all been told this a lot.)
A common mistake by Remainers is to claim that there was never any statement of what would follow a Leave decision. How could there be*? The sole point of leaving the EU was to ensure that decision making was in the hands of people who could be removed by a popular vote. What they choose to do with the power we give them is their choice, bearing in mind that they will need to seek re-election at some point.
* and what policies would the Leave crew have in common anyway? Farage, Gove, Johnson and Gisela Stuart couldn’t agree on what to have for lunch.
If Labour put rejoin in their next manifesto, and win, no matter how many other things are in it they will take it as a mandate to proceed and they’ll never ask us to endorse it, they’ll take any terms and join. The EU will have to die before they give up this perverted dream.
You’re reminding me of the proposal for a separate Voice for abos here in Oz. It was the first thing Labor put up after they won the election.
But it needed to win the referendum. So it lost.
And could then be reversed by the next government (although joining the euro would make that a lot more difficult).
The procedure for joining the euro lasts so long that it would require more than one parliamentary term, and that’s after rejoining – which itself would take years to negotiate. So it’s not an immediate threat and can be cancelled or postponed indefinitely pretty much right up until the slated changeover date. The main problem I can see is if the EU starts taking a harder line on laggards like Sweden, Poland and a rejoined UK for not making any progress towards the euro despite a treaty obligation to do so. Some eurocrats have talked up having sanctions for long term offenders (fines, voting rights?) and in the UK case that may be inserted into a re-entry deal (particularly if it suits the negotiating government to force the hand of its successors).