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According to today’s Daily Telegraph, “Labour will reverse Brexit if it wins the general election, UK Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch has warned.”[1]
As a convinced Remainer I would welcome this if it happened, but I am not sure this is more than Kemi Badenoch‘s desparate attempt to warn voters against a Labour government. I think that if Keir Starmer actually believes he can do it he is highly delusional.
Britain joined the EU in 1973,[2] and eventually secured several very favourable concessions, such as a major rebate on the country’s financial contribution to the Union[3]. Yet in the years since then a very vocal faction of Eurosceptics mostly in the Conservative Party has kept agitating against membership, culminating in David Cameron’s ill-advised 2016 Brexit referendum and the UK’s eventual departure from the EU at the beginning of 2020.
During the Brexit negotiations Britain very much took the attitude that the EU needed the country more than the UK needed the Union, and demanded all sorts of continued membership privileges despite wanting to leave. In the years since then the UK keeps demanding changes to the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement — with the result that many in the EU, both politicians and bureaucrats, have become sick and tired of the British and are not very keen on re-admitting them to the club.
Since re-admitting Britain to the European Union would very likely re-start all the same phenomena of the UK’s 47 years of EU membership (i.e. vocal Eurosceptic agitation, etc) and sooner or later result in Brexit 2.0, any suggestion of a Bre-Entry[4] will meet with little enthusiasm in Brussels. I am afraid it is nothing but a pipe dream.
__________- Starmer will reverse Brexit, warns Badenoch[↩]
- UK Membership[↩]
- UK Rebate[↩]
- British Re-Entry to the European Union[↩]
