Labour already has a playbook for using a first term to lay the groundwork for radical reform in a second term. Tony Blair’s second term in office was dominated by public service reform and the introduction of tax credits (as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) after he used his first term to build support for the policies and to raise the money to implement them by increasing taxes.
Anand Menon, professor of European Politics at King’s College London and director of the independent UK in a Changing Europe initiative, says: “I don’t think there’s any chance of [Labour] talking about rejoining in the next parliament, but it’s certainly conceivable that there will be a debate raging within the Labour Party and I would imagine that, at the first party conference after a Labour win, there would be people trying to get the EU on the agenda.”
Sir Keir wants to extend suffrage to all 16- and 17-year-olds and 3.4 million EU nationals settled in the UK, which Hands previously described as “an attempt to rig the electorate” in order to “drag the UK back into the EU by stealth”. Nadhim Zahawi, one of his predecessors, described it as “the beginning of a strategy to soften the nation up towards reversing Brexit”.
By expanding the electorate with a rejoin-minded constituency, Sir Keir would come under pressure for a second-term manifesto commitment to hold a new referendum on EU membership.
Alternatively, if Labour failed to win a majority but was the largest party at the 2024 election, it would undoubtedly fix up a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Some LibDem supporters would like to see their party taking a bold anti-Brexit stance now, but the LibDems are not currently talking about rejoining because they are making gains in areas that strongly voted Leave, such as the South West, and they are reverting to their standard operating procedure of telling local voters whatever they want to hear, rather than having a coherent national policy. The party’s price for a coalition deal, however, would surely be not only voting reform, but also movement towards rejoining the EU.
Labour rejoiners are also too canny to show their hand just yet. One passionately Europhile Labour MP tells The Telegraph: “Those 200 or so [Labour MPs] who met daily during Brexit votes seem to have abandoned even mentioning it because we appear to be chasing those Red Wall seats [that voted Leave].”
Those who helped negotiate the Brexit deal, or more formally the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), refer to Labour’s “baby steps” towards rejoining. One source involved in hammering out the deal said: “They haven’t ruled out anything involving dynamic alignment or accepting the rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
“They will argue that dynamic alignment [maintaining the same regulatory standards for goods and services] will help to solve the Great Britain/Northern Ireland trade checks, and the next stage on from that is to soften EU/UK checks, and before you know it they will say ‘we are accepting their rules and standards, we might as well just rejoin’.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Brexit opportunities minister, believes that Labour’s opposition to the Retained EU Law Bill, which aims to ditch laws that resulted from Britain’s EU membership, is because Sir Keir wants to “shadow” the EU, which would mean he did not “have to bring in new laws, which would be much more difficult than doing things quietly”.
That would, of course, help to keep his options open if he was minded to yoke Britain to the EU or even seek readmission.
Labour has already started talking about the specifics of how it might try to change the Brexit deal when it comes up for renegotiation in December 2025. David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has said Labour would pursue an agreement on food and agricultural standards, and Sir Keir has said Labour would push for a visa waiver for touring creative artists, such as pop singers.
Brexiteers argue that Labour is being naive if it thinks such changes would be cost-free. “They won’t get everything they want,” says one source involved in the original Brexit negotiations, “and anything they do want will come at a cost. People in the EU are already talking about Labour wanting to cherry-pick, like allowing free movement for creative artists so they can go on tour, but the 27 member states want Bulgarians and Romanians to be able to come here for seasonal work. The gains Labour wants to make will prove more difficult than they think.”
If Sir Keir fails to satisfy the rejoiners, they have already made it clear that they will pursue their agenda with someone else instead. Former Labour whip Rosie Duffield has said in the past that Labour backbenchers would eventually “try and shift the leadership” of the party into backing rejoining, while accepting they would need to “let the dust settle” on Brexit first. She has suggested there might be a different leader by the time that happens. Others aim to exploit his weakness.
Mike Galsworthy, the new chairman of the European Movement UK (founded in 1949 by Winston Churchill), is a Labour Party member who describes himself as the “de facto leader of the rejoin campaign in the UK”, says: “Starmer will be led by the nose rather than doing any leading. He will come under huge pressure from the public and from business to forge closer ties with Europe and he will have to either resist that pressure or cave in to it.
“It’s hard to predict which he will do, because he is a man of pragmatics rather than principles. He is reassuringly inconsistent in his word.”
Galsworthy subscribes to the view that there would be no referendum in the first term of a Labour administration, but that it would be used to make the UK “rejoin-ready” before a possible referendum if Labour won again.
If Labour did decide to explore the possibility of rejoining the EU, it first would have to reach an internal agreement on what was wanted. As the whole country knows from years of brain-numbing Brexit negotiations, there are always as many opinions on what represents the best kind of relationship with Europe as there are people in any room.
We would all have to re-familiarise ourselves with Swiss-style deals, Shengen countries, Canada models, Euratom, Europol, Horizon, passporting, rules of origin, EFTA, GATT, IEM, CETA, EAWs and the rest.
Some would push for a Norway-style arrangement, insisting it offered the best of both worlds by offering access to the single market without full membership. Others would call it rule-taking.
And if Labour did eventually decide to pursue a wholesale “Reversit”, the EU might insist on replacing the pound with the Euro. Few people on either side of the Channel believe that Brussels would ever allow Britain to rejoin under exactly the same terms it had before it left, meaning that its budget rebate and opt-outs on the single currency and Schengen travel agreement might be lost. This would be a tough sell even to 2016 Remain voters.
Rodrigo Ballester, a former cabinet member of the European Commission and now head of the Centre for European Studies at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, disagrees. He says: “The member states and the EU Commission would roll out the red carpet for Britain if Labour asked to rejoin, particularly because they have a natural sympathy for the left.
“If Labour says ‘we made a mistake, we want to go back to mummy and daddy’, they would be very receptive and I think rejoining could be fast-tracked to a three- or four-year process. Most of your legislation is already in line with the EU, and I think it is entirely possible that Britain would be given opt-outs on the Euro and perhaps on migration. I don’t think it would be a take-it-or-leave-it situation.”
Rejoiners rely heavily on opinion polls that show up to 60 per cent of people saying Brexit was a bad idea, with a majority in some polls saying that if another referendum was held now, they would vote Remain.
