What is Rejoin for?

Fighting the right campaign

The debate around the UK rejoining the EU is not set to go away any time soon. Between the UK’s poor economic performance and continued political instability, everyone will keep looking for ways to restore some kind of order and vitalism to our country. For growing parts of the centre and the left (and the odd exception on the right) reversing Brexit is perhaps not the only answer to our malaise but at least a very important part of the answer. It is that logic that drives the government’s ‘Brexit reset’ agenda and it will only be pushed further as it becomes apparent that a reset within the red lines that were set post-2016 is never going to deliver the major gear shift that Britain needs.

As a result, ensuring that this debate is conducted in the right way is only going to become more important. There is a real risk that those at the top, who have the power to make the policy changes necessary to set Rejoin in motion, are simply pushed towards this decision and in the process fail to appreciate what the actual motivation and purpose of this policy must be for it to succeed.

Already, we are seeing the spread across British media and politics of the old rhythms of our policy towards the EU in previous decades. Only a background music for now, it is nonetheless possible to pick up the narrow focus on economic benefits, the siren song of opt-outs and the cringing away from overt signs of pro-Europeanism. This may be enough for the short-term, to win an election or even a referendum, but it would fail to build the solid consensus that we need for the long-term.

Some might push back on this and say that this method worked well enough for the 40 years of our previous membership – is that not long-term? First, in the life of a nation, it is not particularly long. Indeed, there are people who lived to see both our entry and our exit. By this measure, our ship is still zipping this way and that, when what it needs is a steady course.

Second, the organisation we joined in the 1970s and which steadily developed in the years since is not the same as the organisation we would be joining today. The EU is entangled in its members’ systems of laws, it has firmly established institutions which play pivotal roles in international forums, it defines and helps maintain the norms of liberal democracy such as it has grown in Europe, in ways distinctive from the systems and values we find elsewhere. More than ever, the UK would not be returning to an agreement on trade relations but to a project for all Europeans to live together in a shared community of values and identity.

Where the mistake is sometimes made is to imagine that the job of our leaders is therefore to convert Britain over to this vision of Europe and ‘Europeanism’ in order to bring along a recalcitrant people to a brighter future. More often than not, it is actually the reverse that is true. It is the leaders of Britain who are the reluctant foot-draggers and the average citizens who more intuitively grasp the driving forces of the EU and of the pro-European movement in the UK.

After all, whatever the importance may be of SMEs being able to easily send parcels to the EU or supermarkets finessing their supply chains, this is not what has animated people to write letters to their MPs or sign petitions. It is not what motivated hundreds of thousands of people to come out on marches year after year. It is not what made the EU flag a common sighting at the last night of the proms. And it is not what drove the mass, grassroots solidarity with Ukraine since 2022, that brought people to open up their homes and made the blue and yellow flag a common sight across the UK.

All of these things come from a large-scale, widespread, existing sense of European identity. The sense that Europe is not merely beneficial but that it would be a part of us even if it weren’t. The conviction, driven by many centuries of history and culture, from the royal lineages of the past to Eurovision today, that we maintain a special relationship with the rest of Europe and a connection that cannot be matched by other places.

The purpose, therefore of Rejoin, as a campaign and as a policy, is to give expression to this movement and to accomplish the desire, so widely felt in much of this country, to recompose our identity and to heal the wound that was left by a one-off fluke ten years ago.

This is why full EU membership is and can only be the goal of this movement and why only this will produce a satisfaction and social peace in Britain. As long as we avoid this issue, try to work around it, find too-clever-by-half alternatives or cunning compromises, then the frustration and the division will never go away. No matter how good a deal we negotiate outside the EU, even the most successful Brexit reset will never resolve the matter, because it will never actually restore the thing that people are searching for. It will never be the feeling of coming home.