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Hello and welcome to Monday’s Evening Blend. Andy Burnham has spent the day in a bit of a tizz over the European Union. After he declared yesterday on The Rest is Politics podcast that ‘yes, there was’ Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum, Downing Street has been forced to clarify that the Prime Minister does consider the result ‘legitimate’. This is not the first time No. 10 has found itself explaining remarks made by its occupant. Mr S has more.
The reason for this weekend’s confusion all became clear when Burnham informed MPs this afternoon that he will be pursuing closer ties with the EU. In a statement to parliament, he argued that it is time to ‘face up to the reality that Brexit has done more harm than good’ and that ‘sticking with the status quo is not good enough for Britain’.
These are the strongest terms in which a British prime minister has condemned our departure from the EU. While Keir Starmer was a Remainer, he always felt obliged to pay lip service to Brexit’s opportunities, promising that it could be made to work.
Burnham has taken a different tack. He confirmed that the UK-EU summit will take place on 20 November, with deals on food and drink, emissions trading, immigration and a new ‘youth experience scheme’ all ‘on the table’.
He is also trying to sell closer cooperation with Brussels as a way to ‘get a grip on the small boat crossings’. Burnham wants to link up law enforcement efforts, share more data and criminal records of foreign nationals, and secure faster access to electronic evidence from the phones of people-smuggling gangs.
Whether this will make much difference to the number of arrivals is another question. Those with long memories will recall how few asylum seekers Britain managed to return to Europe under the Dublin Regulation, which stopped being applied to the UK in 2020.
There are still some red lines. Burnham told Ed Davey that he was not prepared to revisit Labour’s commitments on the single market and customs union. Nor is he proposing to rejoin the EU during this parliament.
Kemi Badenoch has accused Burnham of ‘unpicking’ the deal Britain struck with the EU after Brexit, reminding him of his promise last year that ‘the last thing we should do right now is rerun those arguments’.
Here lies Burnham’s difficulty. He has spent the day arguing that Brexit has done Britain great harm while insisting that some of its most consequential features remain untouched. Meanwhile, he has already told MPs exactly what he wants from next month’s summit, before securing a single concession from Brussels.
The EU will no doubt have its own ideas about what Britain must give up in return. Burnham may have decided that Brexit is a failure. But he has yet to explain how much he is prepared to pay to put it right.
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