Brexit revisited

This is an unscheduled post because, for the first time in a long time, there has been an important development in the Brexit saga. In my most recent post I bemoaned the drift and decay which seemed to characterize British politics, not least in terms of UK-EU relations, and the lack of Mark Carney-like strategic leadership. Rather confounding that complaint, Andy Burnham has now given an unusually wide-ranging and effective speech to the Labour Party Conference.

I’m not sure I was as hugely impressed by it as, for example, Ian Dunt, partly because, as Rafael Behr noted in the Guardian, it was more rooted in a domestic vision than a geo-political analysis. In that sense, it didn’t have the strategic heft of Carney’s recent interventions. Nevertheless, it was very different from anything we have heard from any British Prime Minister for a long time and, as regards the specific focus of this blog, was genuinely significant in what it said about Brexit. That has been recognized by many commentators, not least Denis Staunton of the Irish Times, one of the most astute observers of Brexit.

What Burnham said

Its significance was partly because Burnham said, though not for the first time, that Brexit was one aspect of the way that Britain is “on the wrong path”. But when he has said this before, as when Keir Starmer began, rather belatedly in his premiership, to talk about the damage caused by Brexit, the obvious difficulty was that it made little sense to recognize the extent of the problem and yet to propose no commensurate solutions. So what was really significant about the speech was the promise to:

“… lay out to the country what I believe the different options are for Britain’s long-term relationship with our European partners. And there are different options. And I will see if we can find consensus around one which will give us clarity about our position, and the future of the continent we live in.”

These options are to be set out at the time of the next UK-EU Summit, for which there is still no date set but which should be before the end of the year.

It might perhaps be asked why these options cannot be laid out now. After all, we really should know by now the extent of the (realistic) options that might be agreed by the EU and, in fact, in a subsequent interview Burnham pretty much identified them: something like the status quo, some form of UK-EU customs union, some form of single market membership, an application to join the EU. It can also be questioned whether the Summit is the best place to launch this conversation, unless the intention is for some kind of joint announcement of what are mutually agreed to be the possibilities.

Why it matters

Those questions notwithstanding, it is important to record just why what Burnham has said is so significant. It is because it is the first time since the 2019 general election result that there has been any realistic possibility that the decision made by the referendum might be revisited. For as I wrote at the time of that result, “its consequence so far as Brexit is concerned is clear. It marks the end of any lingering hope that it might be avoided. Ever since the referendum that hope has waxed and waned. As of today it is stone cold dead.” Now, as of September 2026, revisiting the decision to leave the EU is, unequivocally, on the agenda of mainstream politics.

That, in turn, means that, quite apart from any other ways in which Brexit has failed, it has failed politically. On this blog, I have several times quoted David Frost’s criterion for the success or failure of Brexit because it is perhaps the only time a leading Brexiter has actually articulated any meaningful test. He said that “one piece of evidence of failure [of Brexit] would be if we are still debating this in five- or six-years’ time in the same way. I think [if] it is to succeed it needs to settle in the British polity.” That was in June 2022, and although technically that means there are still six to eighteen months to go, it has been obvious for a while that Brexit would fail this test. With Burnham’s announcement, that is not just obvious: it is certain.

There was something else in Burnham’s speech which was almost equally significant for Brexit, and that was the announcement that electoral reform is also now on the political agenda. This matters, because one of the biggest blocks to pursuing any version of re/join (whether single market, or EU) is the possibility that it would in quick order be reversed by an incoming government, making it effectively certain that the EU would reject the UK. If (and it is a big if) electoral reform comes to pass then it is far less likely (though not impossible) that such a reversal would happen. So if (and it is another big if) the eventual outcome of what Burnham announced this week is a version of re/join then it is far more likely to be acceptable to the EU.

Questions

So this is a genuinely significant moment in the Brexit ‘story’. But there are some worms in the apple. One of these is that, at least so far, there is no indication what process Burnham envisages, and especially what the process would be to “find consensus”. Unlike the electoral reform announcement, there was no suggestion there will be a cross-party commission to explore options. Unlike the National Care Service or youth unemployment policies which have been announced, no equivalent of the Casey or Milburn reviews has, as yet anyway, been proposed.

With or without such a review, there are many questions left unanswered by Burnham’s speech. He didn’t say whether another referendum was envisaged, although has subsequently said it is possible. But on what terms? Majority or super-majority? With what requirements for consent in all four constituent parts of the UK? Would it offer all of the various “options”? Would there be a two-stage process, as many argue should have happened with Brexit itself, whereby, first, a vote to initiate negotiations with the EU would be held and, then, a vote on whether to accept the outcome?

It may be too early to ask these questions, but if, unlike the 2016 referendum, this process is to yield a durable answer to the UK-EU question it is vital that it is carefully designed so as to do so.

Concerns

The deeper concern about Burnham’s announcement relates to immigration and asylum. It is a concern with several dimensions. One is the specific way in which, in this speech and elsewhere, he suggests that Brexit meant that “control over immigration was weakened when we lost collaboration with our European partners.” He is obviously referring to asylum-seeking and the Dublin Regulations, and the fact that, like many other politicians, he conflates immigration and asylum is a problem in itself. But it is also a problem that he at least overstates the significance of Brexit in relation to asylum.

This is a complicated issue. It has become a widely made claim by those opposed to Brexit, including LibDem leader Ed Davey, that the increased numbers of ‘small boat’ crossings are a result of Brexit, and it is a claim which has found some resonance amongst those who support, or formerly supported, Brexit. From an anti-Brexit perspective, some might argue that there is little point in being finicky about the accuracy of claims, given the dishonesty of those made by Brexiters, but I have always been uneasy about that. Truth matters, whatever ‘side’ you’re on, both as a matter of principle but also because, just as dishonesty is one reason why Brexit has not, in Frost’s terms, ‘settled in the British polity’, so too will dishonesty undermine the durability of any future form the UK-EU relationship may take.

The truth of small boat crossings is that numbers began to rise in 2019 and 2020 (partly because it became almost impossible to stowaway on lorries), during which time Britain was still part of the Dublin III Regulations. It may well be true that, after that, when crossings rose much more sharply, Britain being outside those regulations provided an incentive to asylum-seekers to try to reach Britain, as Professor Thom Brooks suggests in his 2023 study, which is the main source for many of the claims about this. It is probably also true that being outside the various EU databases (e.g. EURODAC, the EU biometrics database) had hampered Britain’s ability to manage irregular migration, as Keir Starmer claimed last year when dubbing the small boats as “Farage boats”.

However, the reasons for the routes and volumes of asylum-seeking are complex and multi-faceted, for countries within the EU as well as those outside, and it is difficult to disentangle causes and correlations between the different factors. This is the key criticism of Brooks’ analysis since, as Professor Madeleine Sumption, Director of Oxford University’s Migratory Observatory and perhaps the leading authority on migration to and from the UK, commented at the time [warning: link to X] of its publication: “the report presents no empirical evidence for this claim [that Brexit caused the small boats crisis] other than that they happened around the same time.”  

Moreover, it is very difficult, because, by definition, much of the activity is clandestine, to establish the motivations of the actors involved (specifically, in this case, whether knowledge that the UK was outside Dublin III acted as a motivation to seek asylum here). It is certainly true that Brexit has done nothing to help the management of asylum-seeking, but it is far from certain to what extent it is possible to ascribe asylum-seeking volumes in general, and the ‘small boat’ numbers specifically, to Brexit. Perhaps the most that can be said is, as a report from the Migration Policy Institute puts it, that Brexit is “one of several factors” in the mix.

This matters in the present context because, if one of the key drivers of the vote to leave the EU in 2016 was the wholly confected fear of the ‘migrant crisis’, so crudely propagated by Farage’s infamous ‘breaking point’ poster, then it would be a travesty if a similar sentiment was used as a basis for a case to join the EU. Moreover, it doesn’t even make sense in Burnham’s own terms since, in the speech, as elsewhere, he made much play of how the government is successfully reducing the number of crossings, Brexit notwithstanding.

The problem of Brexitism

This might also be put in a more general way. Using the ‘small boats crisis’ as an argument against Brexit leaves untouched, and indeed reinforces, Brexitism. For all that Burnham spoke of engaging in a “new politics” which is “honest” with the electorate, he persisted in boasting about the massive reduction in net migration. Yet honesty would require telling the truth about the realities of an ageing population, and the fact that this means that there is a need for immigration which is going to increase, not decrease, in the future.

Only this week it was reported (£) that falling net migration has reduced the ‘fiscal buffer’ available for next month’s budget by billions of pounds. How, then, does clamping down on immigration help the government deliver any of its projects, including funding a National Care Service? How, indeed, will such a service cope without high levels of immigration? But there is more at stake, even, than the pragmatic reasons for immigration. The bigger challenge, at least as regards the UK’s relation with the EU, is to entirely decouple ‘freedom of movement of people’ from immigration. (The biggest challenge of all is to entirely redefine the way that we think about immigration and British history, something discussed in a fascinating review article by Ferdinand Mount in the London Review of Books last week)

From this perspective, revisiting Brexit is only half the task. As I have consistently argued, and as is reflected in the title of this blog since renaming it in September 2025, Brexit has become inseparable from Brexitism. The hold which Brexitism still has over the British polity has been amply evidenced in the last few days by the near-insanity of the commentary about the RAF Fairford ‘events’, especially the immediate (and, it turned out, false) claims that these had involved ‘small boat’ migrants. But on Brexitism, if not Brexit, Burnham remains relatively muted if not, as regards immigration and asylum, somewhat complicit.

A historic moment?

With all that said, it remains the case that Burnham’s speech this week marked an important moment which may even, in time, come to be seen as an historic one. For Labour, it represents the effective end of the policy to ‘make Brexit work’ and it certainly represents the end of any pretence that the reset, as envisaged under Starmer, is a viable policy. It also certainly marks the moment when Burnham, at least, has decided that Brexit is not too toxic to be ‘reopened’.

I think it may also offer a ladder down which committed Brexiters may, if only implicitly, be able to climb. There must be many who advocated Brexit, and more who voted for it, who know in their hearts that it was a mistake or, at the very least, recognize that it can no longer be convincingly defended.

It is far too early to be sure yet, but the thing which has struck me almost as forcibly as the speech itself was how muted the reaction from leading Brexiters has been. Even as recently as the first UK-EU summit, and certainly the 2024 election, Starmer’s modest ‘reset’ was immediately depicted in the familiar, lurid terms of ‘betrayal’ and ‘treachery’. There seems to have been much less of that in response to Burnham’s speech.

To give a notable example, so far Farage has focussed almost entirely on the announcement to end the triple lock on pensions. That may not last, and it is reported that Farage will attack Burnham on Brexit in a speech tomorrow. But it wasn’t his first response and it’s certainly the case that in recent times he and other Brexiters seem to have lost enthusiasm for defending Brexit. If so, that is at least in part a consequence of having insisted, since almost the day after the 2016 referendum, that Brexit had been ‘betrayed’: it’s perverse, after all, to defend that which you have condemned.

Most importantly, Burnham has articulated something which has been obvious for some time and yet largely unsayable, at least by political leaders. In some collective sense, deeper although less tangible than opinion polls on the subject, Brexit has settled in the public consciousness as having been an historic mistake, rather in the way that Munich and Suez, both of which at the time were passionately contested, settled as bywords for failures not just of policy but of world-view.

In personal life, we rarely regard terrible decisions we have made as being unalterable, or at least not for long. We may, moralistically, tell ourselves that we have ‘made our bed and must lie in it’. We may, stoically, insist that we ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘have to make the best of it’. But few of us are so moralistic, or so stoic, as to deny ourselves the chance to revisit our bad decisions, if it is possible. With Brexit, that has not, in the sense of realistic politics, been possible until now. Burnham’s speech this week has made it so.

Whether that possibility will be realised, and what the outcome will be if it is, remains to be seen.