Britain's PM floats rejoining the EU — he's barred until 2029

Britain’s Prime Minister Says Rejoining the EU Is “Definitely an Option.” He’s Legally Barred From Trying Until at Least 2029.

Ten years after a referendum that was supposed to settle the question forever, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister spent a Wednesday morning radio interview cheerfully listing the various ways Britain could one day stop having left the European Union — then confirmed, almost as an afterthought, that his own party’s manifesto bans him from pursuing any of them for the rest of this Parliament.

The Union Jack flying over Britain, a decade into an exit its own Prime Minister now calls up for discussion

A Three-Course Menu of Walking It Back

Speaking to BBC Radio 4, Andy Burnham did not announce a policy so much as read out a menu. “We could stay as we are. That’s definitely an option, if people think this is the right place to stay,” he offered, in the tone of a man pricing out kitchen renovations. From there the options escalated: a customs union, borrowed from former Chancellor George Osborne; the single market, borrowed from the Liberal Democrats; or, as Burnham put it, “we could go all the way” — full EU membership, the thing eleven million Leave voters were assured in 2016 was being settled permanently.

It was the first time in a decade that a sitting British Prime Minister had floated reversing Brexit in public. The United Kingdom, in other words, has reopened a national debate it spent ten years insisting was closed, and is doing so via a bulleted list on morning radio.

The Fine Print Nobody Mentioned at Conference

The menu, it turns out, is not actually on offer. Burnham remains bound by Labour’s current manifesto, which commits the government to staying outside both the single market and the customs union for this entire Parliament — meaning nothing discussed on Radio 4 can happen before the next general election, scheduled for 2029. He was, in effect, describing a meal the kitchen is contractually forbidden from cooking.

That didn’t stop him from grading the original decision at Labour’s conference a day earlier: “Brexit has done more harm than good,” he told delegates, adding that Britain had “lost some of the control we had over our economy” and “lost some of our control over immigration” — the precise two things Brexit was marketed as restoring. A UK-EU summit, postponed since July, has now been rescheduled before the year is out, presumably so everyone can discuss the options that cannot yet be chosen.

The flag of the European Union outside its Parliament in Brussels, the destination on a menu Westminster cannot yet order from

The Receipt Arrives, Ten Years Late

Behind the rhetorical menu sits an actual bill. Bloomberg Economics puts the cumulative cost of Brexit at 2–4% of UK GDP, a central estimate of roughly £30 billion, and reckons that closer EU ties could claw back somewhere between 0.4 and 1.2 percentage points of that lost output. Nobody printed those numbers on a bus in 2016.

Opposition came fast. Reform UK’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, offered the rebuttal: “Andy Burnham has barely been prime minister five minutes and he’s already trying to sneak us back into Brussels.” It is, notably, an objection to the speed of the suggestion rather than to the number attached to it.

Ten years, one currency’s worth of lost GDP, and a change of Prime Minister later, Britain has arrived at a conclusion most diners reach after a bad meal: send it back, loudly, then spend the next three years arguing about whether it’s even allowed.