The Europe Burnham wants to rejoin is gone
The Europe question is back at the centre of Labour politics. The omerta over Brexit and its consequences that prevailed during the Starmer premiership has been shattered. As he prepares for the UK-EU summit in Brussels on November 20, Andy Burnham wants a new relationship with Europe and, unlike Keir Starmer, is ruling nothing out, and he has even raised the possibility of a return to free movement.
Under Starmer’s leadership, the Labour government worked assiduously to rebuild relations with the EU. The aim, as Nick Thomas-Symonds, the former minister for the constitution and EU relations, explained to me, was “as close as possible without freedom of movement”. Burnham has no such red lines.
One of the reasons Burnham is popular on the Labour benches is that he speaks with an attractive candour so different from the stilted contortions of Starmer. Kemi Badenoch may accuse him of “putting his foot in his mouth”. But the prime minister knows exactly what he is doing when he relitigates the Europe question: it is fundamental to his wider political strategy of seeking to unite the pro-EU progressive bloc of British voters.
Starmer won a general election by accepting that Brexit was a settled matter. For Burnham, it is very much unsettled. He believes Brexit has hugely damaged Britain’s standing and economic fortunes. He also believes public opinion is on his side; polls suggest a majority of voters now think Brexit was a mistake.
Why wouldn’t a Labour prime minister determined to build a cross-party progressive majority in the country want to reintegrate Britain with the bloc? The answer is another question: what kind of Europe would Burnham want Britain to rejoin? The EU as it existed before Angela Merkel unilaterally opened Germany’s borders to more than one million Syrian refugees in 2015, and before Brexit, is gone. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission since 2019, may still be around to greet Burnham with her familiar, performative air kisses at the forthcoming summit. But behind the business-as-usual façade serious disorder seethes.
The EU is not a haven of stability and economic growth but increasingly a crucible of political conflict, as Icelandic voters understood when they rejected the resumption of EU accession negotiations in a referendum in August. Its dominant powers, Germany and France, have been destabilised by civil unrest, economic stagnation and political fragmentation. The riots in France have exposed a French republic in crisis.
Emmanuel Macron, the self-styled centrist Jupiter, was once seen as the inspiration for a more liberal European political order. He is now utterly discredited and will leave the presidency with France as close to civil war as it has been since the general strike and student protests of the late 1960s. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the hard-right National Rally who wants to slash France’s financial contributions to the EU and reduce support for Ukraine, was nearly 20 points ahead of her closest rivals in a recent poll. What price the return of freedom of movement into Britain in a near future in which Le Pen occupies the Élysée Palace and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the hard-left leader of France Unbowed, is mounting an insurgency against her presidency?
Meanwhile, the fracturing of German politics reveals a country more unhappy and divided than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The old political centre cannot hold.
This is far from the Europe of Burnham’s political dreams. It is something novel and much darker: a continent destabilised by mass immigration, anxieties about Islam and integration, the shadow of war and the threat posed by Russia, as well as a lack of economic growth, innovation and productivity. Support for centre-left parties that were once aligned with Labour, such as the German Social Democrats and the French Socialists, has collapsed. The social democratic parties of Scandinavia have embraced social conservatism and introduced much tighter controls on immigration. The old European project of an open, borderless Europe has faded. What matters today is national sovereignty and the integrity of the nation state on which democracy depends. Yet one should never underestimate the delusions of the progressive mind. Perhaps the most consequential decision on the road to Brexit was Tony Blair’s failure to introduce the maximum seven-year transition controls on freedom of movement when ten member states joined the EU in 2004. Britain was one of only three countries not to impose controls. The Blair government’s provisional forecast was that as few as 5,000-13,000 migrant workers a year would arrive in Britain from eastern Europe. What followed was the largest unplanned migration in British history as 1.2 million people arrived over the next few years.
A new racialised politics has seeped into the mainstream
“The European Union and immigration had ceased to be an issue by 2004,” Nigel Farage told me in 2017, reflecting on how the Labour government’s mismanagement of EU enlargement enabled him to reopen the immigration debate that he believes had been closed down ever since Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968.
There was a reason Starmer considered Brexit a settled matter: Labour’s loss of its red wall heartlands in the 2019 election when Boris Johnson promised “to get Brexit done”. Never again, senior Labour ministers said to me, would we neglect the interests of our traditional voters who opposed free movement. Burnham said something similar in May. He declared then that “Brexit has been damaging, but I also believe the last thing we should do right now is rerun those arguments”. But rerun them he will.
Burnham has united a previously fractious parliamentary party behind him and Labour is leading again in the polls. But his politics are a strange fusion of soft-left populism, nostalgia for pre-Thatcher social democracy and Blairera progressive orthodoxies.
Of course he wants to rejoin the EU and bring back freedom of movement. He would be foolish to attempt to do so. Britain is not as socially riven as France but, in the aftermath of the “Boriswave”, trust in politics is exceptionally low and social cohesion has been eroded. A new racialised politics, far darker than anything imagined by Farage in 2017, has seeped into the mainstream.
I voted to remain but the last thing the country needs now is a return to free movement, open borders and a long, protracted debate about Brexit and then a second referendum. The Europe Burnham wants Britain to rejoin does not exist. It is a fantasy of the Panglossian progressive mind.
Rishi Sunak is away
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