Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
A sentence in Liverpool did something no British prime minister had done in a decade.
The UK is more than ten years past the Brexit vote, and the two main parties have spent most of that time treating the 2016 result as a closed question.
On the third day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, September 29, Andy Burnham reopened it.
In his first conference speech as prime minister, Burnham said “Brexit has done more harm than good,” and told delegates the country needed to decide what its long-term relationship with the European Union should look like.
Ireland’s national daily, The Irish Times, carried the speech in full, including his line that “Brexit hasn’t given us control” and that Britain had “lost some of the control we had over our economy.”
He then set out four options he said he would put on the table at a UK-EU summit later this year. “We could stay as we are,” Burnham said. “We could look at what [former Chancellor] George Osborne has said about a customs union. We could look at what the Liberal Democrats said about the single market, or we could go all the way.”
He added: “I will see if we can find consensus around one.”
What the spokesman would not rule out
Burnham himself did not promise a rejoin campaign. But his spokesman declined to rule out a pledge to seek re-entry to the EU in Labour’s manifesto for the next general election, which is due by August 2029, Bloomberg reported.
That careful phrasing is the news: a sitting prime minister formally keeping a rejoin option on the table, without committing to it.
The London Economic reported that ministers around Burnham are already framing the question as settled in principle: “from the discussions taking place, it is not ‘if’ but ‘how’ we do it,” one minister told the outlet.
A senior colleague described “a lot of momentum around rejoining again,” adding that “the economic data is there and we are feeling more relaxed about talking about Brexit.”
Two months into the job
The rest of the hour-long address in Liverpool was dominated by domestic policy: a National Care Service, a £2 bus fare cap, changes to leasehold, and a return to public ownership for parts of the utilities sector. Foreign policy took less than a minute.
Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, quoted by The London Economic, said Britain’s “future lies in a stronger, deeper partnership” with the bloc. Chancellor John Healey, in the same coverage, tied Britain’s current fiscal squeeze to “Boris Johnson’s Brexit.”
The manifesto Burnham is bound to for the rest of this parliament still rules out membership of the single market and the customs union. He has said he intends to make his case at the next election instead.
Burnham has been prime minister for about two months. He took over from Keir Starmer in July, after a Labour Party leadership crisis.
