It is difficult to see how the Europe question will not resurface once Labour has decided to politely thank Sir Keir Starmer for his work in making Labour re-electable after the lost Corbyn years, but look for a new leader and prime minister who is a professional politician not a government legal manager who decided to go into politics as a retirement hobby.
In his latest batch of opinion polls Lord Ashcroft reports that 53 per cent supported rejoining the EU and 30 per cent remained opposed.
While nearly eight in ten Labour, LibDem and Green voters said they would vote to rejoin a surprising 25 per cent of Tory voters and even 11 per cent of Reform voters now back Rejoin.
In Norma Percy’s new BBC documentary on the Brexit 2016 campaign “A Very British Civil War” viewers see a jowly David Cameron and a paunchy Boris Johnson repeating their incantations from 2016. They look like two ageing men living in the past.
Today the economic facts speak for themselves. In 2025 goods exports from the UK were $485 bn, from Germany $1.77 trillion, from France $668 bn, from Italy $726 bn.
Britain’s declining number of mainly long retired economists who still defend the trade and people rupture with Europe point to the glorious profits made by the City selling its financial engineering products. Last year these brought in just £166 bn for the UK.
The City’s genius lies in on-line financial engineering, including the lucrative new crypto and bitcoin currency manipulations undertaken by clever Brits in remote corners of the world where there is little financial supervision. Many scams emanating from these places are based on fraudsters conning individuals, usually over the phone, to invest in money growth products which to begin with show quick big profits, leading to serious money transfers and then the disappearance of the fraudster. Nearly all are based on crypto.
This non-regulated crypto world appears as a profit in the post-Brexit UK accounts, but does nothing to help growth outside the City as the rest of Britain, cut off from its largest markets, becomes poorer and poorer.
In nearly every chapter in his new book, “Can We Get Rich Again” the former Chancellor and eternal minister ,Jeremy Hunt urges British policymakers to copy better practice in Europe.
He is right but can Kemi Badenoch leave behind the early unconditional support for Donald Trump and resist the calls from many her party to cuddle up closely with Nigel Farage?
Tory leaders who have changed the political weather have done so by finding a political vacuum and filling it. Robert Peel was accused by Benjamin Disraeli of “catching the Whigs bathing and walking off with their clothes” because Peel adopted liberal policies like voting reform, protection of young workers, trade reform to promote free trade all which challenged the cherished beliefs of established Toryism.
The same was true of Baldwin and the early Neville Chamberlain who promoted council housing, health care and other social legislation which enraged Tory diehards and press lords like Northcliffe. But they won power for Tories.
As did Macmillan’s endorsement of the 1945 social reforms brought in by Labour and Margaret Thatcher powering ahead with the Single European Act against the opposition of the anti-European Labour Party which fought the 1983 election on a manifesto offering a referendum on leaving the EEC with a pledge that Labour would campaign for a Leave vote.
To be sure the question of a British prime minister sitting in council with other European leaders every month to lay down 101 big and small decisions has been settled. Britain is now an observer not a decider , a rule-taker not a Thatcher-like rule-maker in Europe.
Until now Kemi Badenoch has shown little desire to challenge the conventional Tory thinking of Brexit era prime ministers. This has not paid off in the ballot box.
Since Ms Badenoch took over after the 2024 General Election she is now the party leader who has lost the most seats. In the April municipal elections 563 Tory seats were lost to Reform and Greens. In London Reform and Greens won four councils and in Westminster a well-off middle class Tory bastion for over a century that fell to Labour in 2022 the Conservatives narrowly won but with Labour holding most of their seats from 2022 despite Sir Keir Starmer’s unpopularity.
Ms Badenoch lost 19 seats in the Scottish Parliament and halved the Tory representation in the Welsh Senedd. In short she is not doing what any Tory leader has to do to keep her job – put more Tories into positions of political power.
So far she has cleaved to a Daily Telegraph-Daily Mail set of attack lines against Starmer. Might it be possible to re-think this unthinking rightism and catch Labour and other parties off guard.
As a woman in a political party leadership field dominated by boring, snoring men other than the flaky rent-a-quote Green leader Zak Polanksi are there no policies she could spear-head to help women?
Maybe lift the Tory-Starmer Brexit ban on au pairs from Europe? The fatuous work “woke” is wheeled out to denounce any pro-women policies but is it time for the party that had produced three women prime ministers in contrast to the pensioner age men like Corbyn and Starmer who run Labour seek ways of making them the champion of women?
Despite the super-profits made from financial engineering males who control the City, the rest of British business is suffering badly from Brexit trade isolation.
She can avoid the word ‘rejoin’ but can she argue, citing Mrs Thatcher’s willingness to share power with European leaders to boost the UK economy in the 1980s, to say a Badenoch government would seek to reconnect to Europe in place of the Starmer red-lines which are a complete block on any serious lifting of the barriers that would allow the UK to start growing again and recruit workers from nations sharing our culture in place of the Boris Johnson policy of mainly importing workers and often their dependents from Asia and Africa.
All this will be heresy to the Johnson-Farage fan base on the right. But looking at the opinion polls with ever growing majorities saying Brexit is bad for Britain Kemi Badenoch can make a real splash by thinking out-of-the-box on the UK’s relationship with Europe.
* Denis MacShane was Labour’s Minister of Europe and author of “Brexiternity, The Uncertain Fate of Britain”
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