When I hear that word again, a shudder runs down my spine. I want to groan, hold my head in my hands and wail. The horror! No, never again, not another referendum. But the idea is back in play as Andy Burnham looks for ways to reverse a decade of economic stagnation.
As the prime minister dared to unlock the door to a Brussels reunion you could hear Ode to Joy burst out from all remainers. But the prospect of a re-run of the most self-destructive vote in our history is dismaying.
Remember that morning a decade ago. First came Sunderland’s 12.20am result, a 61.3% vote to leave but there was still hope for remainers … until the BBC’s 4.40am verdict that leave had won. In that second a great rift tore across the country. Remainers, dubbed remoaners, never recovered. UK politics became a circus: we who paraded as the west’s strong and stable “mother of parliaments” ran wildly through seven prime ministers in 10 years. Both Labour and Tory parties were wrecked by the most shattering event of our political lifetime. It is a wound neither has dared to reopen.
Only now Burnham has finally broken the spell of Brexit silence, aiming to rejoin, while the Tories will stay in the wilderness until they repent the Brexit disaster they inflicted on the country.
As Burnham sets out to explore all the options, outriders scout the way back in. Making the strong case for full EU membership, IPPR, the thinktank closest to Labour, has published a weighty report this week on how it can happen and why it must: we need it for prosperity, security and democracy. It has left us dangerously alone and friendless in a world of great power blocs. Our once reliable ally, the US, is never to be fully trusted again now we know what its people are capable of voting for. And so the warmth of familiar democracies across the Channel looks welcoming (at least for now). Make this bid to rejoin about who we are, bonding with where we belong, emotionally and historically. We have discovered “sovereignty” is a mirage: every treaty and trade deal requires sharing it with allies.
Within a year, a majority of people in the UK thought Brexit was a mistake (not quite the same as regretting their own vote). Now we know that Brexit has robbed us of a walloping 8% of GDP. IPPR and Persuasion UK polling finds 52% want to rejoin, 29% stay out. Support grows by the year, partly as older people drop off their perches and young pro-Europeans join the electoral roll. As the IPPR tested every option from Keir Starmer’s slight reset to full membership, the least popular was leaving things as they are. The current Boris Johnson/Lord Frost deal is so dysfunctional that Burnham says keeping it would be a “dereliction of duty”. As ever ignoring the public mood, last year Kemi Badenoch wrote to the EU ambassador warning that, if elected, she would repeal any change, an act of near-treason that could sabotage negotiations in Brussels that start next month. Watch Michael Gove, arch-Brexit manipulator, telling the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty he regrets nothing, blaming others for failing to capitalise on those illusory Brexit benefits. Would that bleating work? I think not.
But is this shift to 52% v 29% strong enough to dare throw the dice and risk everything? No, not quite yet. The IPPR admits it is still “soft”, and there are familiar echoes of what happened last time. After years in which it felt as if we could talk about nothing else, the EU now has reassuringly low salience. But that’s just as it was until Ukip and Tory Brexiters turbocharged what had been a non-issue. As before, polling figures that encouraged David Cameron to breeze arrogantly into a referendum looked sufficient to someone who assumed he would win. This time we know better. Prepare for Dominic Cummings et al rising from their coffins with Brexit defibrillators to shock new life into the issue. Nigel Farage was at it on Sunday, claiming the EU would charge Britain £42bn a year to rejoin.
Testing arguments for both sides, this report reveals traps to avoid and what people like about rejoining. Red lights flash over joining the euro, scrapping our other trade deals, giving up fishing rights and high contributions to the EU budget. Top of the most effective reasons for rejoining is passport queues. Second comes security: Ukraine has exposed this dangerous Trump/Putin world. Third is the need to bring lost foreign investment back to Britain.
But reasoned, fact-based focus groups in a calm and rational atmosphere can’t begin to replicate the monstrous lies, fabrications and devilry of a TikTok, Instagram and X referendum campaign. Remember the £350m-a-week bus, the Turks are coming, immigration will end and best of all, “take back control”. Of what? Everything! That’s what referendums do.
So not yet. The case for joining has to be powerfully made, the argument won overwhelmingly for allied EU forces to circle the wagons against what Peter Ricketts, ex-national security adviser, along with the head of MI5, warns are “more reckless, more dangerous” cyber-attacks on vital services, such as energy, water, transport, banking or air traffic control. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, meeting with the EU home affairs commissioner today to restore data cooperation on crime and migration is a reminder of how insanely self-destructive Brexit was.
In a decade, Britain has changed. Though Brexiters will threaten floods of migrants storming the border on joining the EU, IPPR polling shows freedom of movement no longer alarms voters as it once did. The cost of living is now the top national concern, not immigration. Look how poorer countries have caught up to us: per capita income in Bucharest, Romania’s capital, is far higher than Sunderland’s.
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But the EU has changed too. The question is what kind of Europe we would join if Marine Le Pen and the Alternative für Deutschland became its new axis of power. Here’s the answer: that would make joining even more urgent, to be inside to influence what we can, bolstering the democrats. Staying out leaves us powerless.
This report sets to work on the campaign Burnham ignited when he proposed going “all the way”. The goal is clear and the need is growing urgent. As the EU ambassador told the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour, the ball is in our court. Brussels, he said, is “ready to engage”, once Britain decides what it wants.
Let’s decide, but proceed with extreme caution. Would you risk the next general election by putting this into Labour’s manifesto, certain to become the right’s battle-flag? Yes, when a strong pro-EU campaign makes it winnable. But there should be no referendum until public opinion is so solid that it would be a mere rubber-stamping of the overwhelming public will.
