Lame duck Burnham’s EU fantasy

The Guardian reports that Andy Burnham has opened the door to the UK rejoining the EU, saying Britain could “go all the way”, as he prepares to reconsider Labour’s post-Brexit red lines. The prime minister used a series of interviews after his emotional Labour conference speech to spell out how wide-ranging his consideration of Britain’s future with Brussels could be because Brexit had caused “more harm than good”.

Burnham said the government could keep the current arrangements, seek a customs union, return to the single market or “go all the way” in what would be full EU membership. Speaking to the BBC, he said ministers would examine “what is doable” and the “pros and cons” of each option.

He has also said that a second Brexit referendum is a possibility as part of his review of Britain’s relationship with the EU. He said that the UK’s position in Europe “isn’t good enough” and that he would consider a “whole range of options” including rejoining the EU, returning to the customs union and a Canada-style “associate membership”. Ironically, Andy Burnham's Business Secretary told BBC viewers just six days ago that an EU customs union would be "the worst of all worlds"

For my part, this is a giant nothing burger. It is not going to happen. The EU is barely inclined to change the existing relationship without major (and deeply unpopular) concessions on fishing and free movement, and has zero interest in taking us into a customs union. There is no re-joining the single market without joining Efta and the EEA. There’s even less enthusiasm for a protracted accession process that will be reversed by the next right wing government. There is also no such thing as a Canada-style “associate membership”.

It is conceivable that Burnham could make it a vague manifesto commitment regarding the EU but there’s nothing he can actually deliver on short of a clunky SPS deal nobody cares about.

Essentially, this is a PM who is promising all things to all factions of the left, with a view to uniting them to beat a fragmented right. He won't do half the things he says he will, but he's just smart enough to know that the median left wing voter was born yesterday. Consequently, I still wouldn't rule out an early election. He'll go for it before he gets found out.

Lembit Öpik, meanwhile, reckons that by proposing to rejoin the European Union, Burnham has just turned the next General Election into a second EU referendum. But in a sense, it already is. Whether either side recognises it or not, the next election is a continuation of Brexit politics. The question of who actually runs Britain and in whose interests was never properly resolved. Certainly the Brexit treaty arrangements did not satisfy anyone, and were only ever going to be temporary. Reform is apparently set on demolishing the lot of it (if Danny Kruger’s scribblings are anything to go by).

The idea, though, that we can simply re-join without referendum is for the birds. In my view this is the thing that would bring us to the brink of civil war, not least because I will start it. If we end up back having to write about customs unions and aubergine marketing standards again then I'm just going to skip straight to the suicide vest stage. I can't go through all that again. My poor brain can’t take it.

Either way, re-joining the EU doesn't rebuild power stations. It doesn't rebuild oil refineries or steel mills. Quite the opposite in fact. It doesn't make any facet of our decrepit governance function any better. Re-joining isn't a magical time machine that takes us back to 2016. It doesn't undo the costs of lockdown or reverse the Boriswave. In most practical respects you would be hard pressed to notice we'd re-joined, not least because we never set about dismantling the regulatory constructs of the EU. All it would really do is bake in the decline.

In some respects, re-joining would be quite entertaining since Euro-elections would likely result in a full house of Restore Britain MEPs just around the time Germany falls to the AfD. Regardless of what the British progressive left thinks, time does not stand still on the continent.

I think it safe to say this is all little more than a feel-good conference gimmick, because nothing Burnham has said stands up to scrutiny, and the fact that we’re talking about it at all tells us how little else he had to say about anything. These days the EU is a space filler debate we have when there’s bog all else going on.

To take this remotely seriously I would have to take Burnham seriously, but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that he is a man of intellect or substance. Nothing he says or does is sincere. Everything about the man is fake. Most of what he believes can, should or will happen will crash into the reality barrier before the next budget. He's already a lame duck PM. He just doesn't know it yet.