Europe dominates British politics. Most UK citizens think leaving the EU was a mistake. Yet Nigel Farage, the staunchest of Brexiteers, is a country mile ahead in the polls. What does it tell the Union?
Philip Rycroft spent his career at the heart of Whitehall. As permanent secretary of the Department for Exiting the EU, he helped manage Britain’s departure from the bloc. Now he wants it reversed. “The argument is there to be won,” he wrote in the Times. “It is time to talk about rejoining. It might be time to knock on the EU’s door.”
Mr Rycroft’s conversion, emblematic of a broader shift, kicked off a renewed Brexit debate, as vigorous as ever. Chancellor Rachel Reeves declared at her Mais lecture that “Brexit did deep damage”. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said Britain needed to “keep moving towards a close relationship with the EU”. Health Secretary Wes Streeting—widely seen as a contender to succeed Sir Keir—has called Brexit “a catastrophic mistake” and argued Britain should ultimately rejoin.
The mind-boggling figures
Even Andy Burnham, the Manchester mayor and another leadership hopeful, has previously said he would like the UK back in the EU within his lifetime. The polls, for once, appear to back them up. YouGov puts Rejoin at 55 per cent and Stay Out at 33. BMG has Rejoin at 48 and Stay Out at 34. Support for rejoining has been consistently ahead since 2021.
Yet the political arithmetic is far less obliging than the polling. Labour is averaging just 19 per cent in the polls. It trails Reform UK—whose support comes overwhelmingly from Brexit-backers—by eight points.
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One in ten of those who voted Labour in 2024 have since moved to Nigel Farage’s party. The Makerfield by-election on 18 June, which Mr Burnham must win simply to enter Parliament, sits in a constituency that voted heavily for Leave in 2016.
His response has been revealing: he is “not advocating” rejoining in the near term and says the 2016 vote must hold. The gap between what Labour’s supporters believe and what Labour’s candidates dare to say has rarely been wider.
The electoral trap
The paradox cuts deep. Data from the British Election Study and the National Centre for Social Research suggest that 80 per cent of Labour’s support in 2024 came from people who said they would vote to rejoin the EU. In the same YouGov poll, 82 per cent of Labour voters said they supported rejoining outright, with just 12 per cent opposed.
Yet Labour’s advance among working-class Leave voters in 2024 was no stronger than among middle-class voters. If anything, it may have been somewhat weaker. The ‘Red Wall’, the geographic cluster of Labour strongholds that collapsed in 2019, has not seen any rebuilding.
Labour wants to go back and re-fight wars which were settled a long time ago. — Kemi Badenoch, leader of the UK’s Conservative party
This creates a trap. For every voter who has switched from Labour to Reform since 2024, almost twice as many—19 per cent—have swung to the Greens. Another eight per cent have moved to the Liberal Democrats.
Poor execution
Both parties, unlike Labour so far, favour eventually reversing Brexit. Labour’s vote is down nine points since 2024 among Leave voters, but down 19 points among Remainers.
The New Statesman has put the dilemma plainly: “Support for Rejoin appears less like an active political movement than an expression of dissatisfaction with Brexit’s outcomes.” The party also needs to win back pro-EU minded voters, who, in switching to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, have defected to parties that, in contrast to Labour, are in favour of eventually reversing Brexit.
The Economist has noted that any Labour leadership race will renew the European debate, with Mr Streeting “more explicit about wanting to reverse Brexit”, while even Sir Keir says “Britain should be at the heart of Europe again”. Yet the party’s red lines—no return to the single market, the customs union, or freedom of movement—remain formally intact.
The economic case hardens
The economic evidence has not been kind to Brexit’s defenders. Mr Rycroft was blunt: “Most economic analysis suggests that we have taken a significant hit to GDP as a result of leaving the single market. The precise number, and the impact on our export performance to the EU and beyond, might be subject to debate, but no one can credibly claim that we have marched to the sunny uplands of sustained economic growth as a consequence of Brexit.”
The economy grew by just 1.3 per cent in 2025, below official forecasts of 1.5 per cent. Estimates put the total cost of Brexit at a loss of 6–8 per cent of GDP, with the numbers likely to deteriorate further amid trade disruption and stagflation risks.
Support for Rejoin appears less like an active political movement than an expression of dissatisfaction with Brexit’s outcomes. — The New Statesman
The financial markets tell a similar story. New research comparing daily stock-market movements across nine European countries before and after Brexit found that the UK’s net volatility spillover score—a measure of how much financial turbulence a market sends versus receives—fell from +11.8 before the referendum to -5.5 afterwards. The UK, once the dominant transmitter of financial signals across Europe, now absorbs more shocks than it generates.
Diminishing returns
Over the same period, Germany’s transmitting influence grew by nearly 50 per cent, and Italy transformed from a shock absorber into the second most influential market in the system. More than 440 financial firms moved at least some operations from the UK to the EU after Brexit, taking with them more than £900bn in bank assets—around 10 per cent of the UK’s banking system.
Currency and equity data reinforce the picture. The pound fell from an annual average of £1 to €1.38 in 2015 to €1.22 in the referendum year and has since stabilised in the €1.10–1.20 range—a permanent depreciation of 15–20 per cent that has never reversed despite aggressive Bank of England rate rises in 2022–23. The FTSE 100 posted a total return of 118 per cent over 2011–26 compared with 124 per cent for the STOXX Europe 600, but the FTSE’s gains were heavy on energy, mining, banking and pharmaceuticals megacaps. Domestic sectors—retail and real estate—lagged throughout, weighed down by Brexit-related uncertainty and higher borrowing costs.
Against this backdrop, the arguments of Brexit’s remaining champions have grown thinner. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch insists Labour wants to “go back and re-fight wars which were settled a long time ago.” Mr Farage, on a local-radio tour in May, argued his party is “united by a belief in our nation”, while warning that “the North East needs industry and without it (…) you will see economic decline”. This makes it appear as if EU membership, rather than Brexit, was responsible for deindustrialisation; some creative reasoning, indeed.
Central promise broken
The sovereignty argument is the most durable one, but also the most circular. The Centre for European Reform notes that Brussels is already considering a so-called Farage clause in any future UK alignment deal, i.e., a mechanism to prevent a future government from tearing it up. The very existence of such a clause is a measure of how seriously European partners take the Brexiteer threat, and how much it complicates Britain’s negotiating position.
Brexit was a colossal mistake. — Alexander Stubb, president of Finland
On immigration, the numbers have long since undermined the Leave campaign’s central promise. Brexit changed the composition of migration, not its level. EU inflows collapsed after 2016, but were more than offset by non-EU arrivals under the points-based system, pushing total net migration to a record 944,000 in the year to March 2023. The promise of control was kept; the promise of reduction was not.
Brexiteers also claim that the EU would never readmit Britain. That argument, too, is hard to sustain. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, has spoken of “dreaming of a return”. Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, travelled to London to declare that Brexit had been “a colossal mistake”. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said he would “definitely like to have the UK back on board”. Mr Stubb’s own country’s accession to the EU was completed in under three years, from application to full membership, with legislation already closely aligned to the single market.
The door is ajar, maybe
Britain’s position—a former member whose regulatory divergence is mapped and understood—is not so different. As the International Policy Digest has argued, the obstacles to British re-entry “are political, not structural; contingent, not inevitable”.
Concerns about Schengen and the euro are real but likely overstated. Ireland, an EU member, remains outside the passport-free zone. Five current member states remain outside the eurozone with no imminent plans to join. The EU is preparing to admit Ukraine, which will not be in a position to adopt the euro for decades. Rejoining the EU would require unanimous agreement from member states and extensive negotiations across multiple policy areas — a process that would take years.
It is time to talk about rejoining. It might be time to knock on the EU’s door. — Philip Rycroft, ex-Department for Exiting the EU
But terms need not be as punishing as Brexiteers suggest. The geopolitical context has shifted decisively. Mr Rycroft put it starkly: “Chill winds don’t just blow through the international trading order. The postwar certainties that underpinned our security as a nation are visibly crumbling. With a hot war on the European mainland perpetrated by a revanchist Russia and an increasingly disengaged America, it is beyond peradventure that we must look to solidarity with our friends and neighbours in Europe to secure our defences.”
A question of pace
What remains is a question of political will and timing. The EU, for its part, has little immediate incentive to reopen the Trade and Co-operation Agreement; from Brussels’ perspective, it is functioning as intended. UBS economists maintain that Brexit rhetoric does little to change the outlook for UK assets in the near term, with volatility more likely to be driven by the domestic fiscal trajectory.
As a juicy aside, Reform UK’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election was himself reported to have praised European freedom of movement on social media. It is a reminder that even within the Brexit coalition, the ideological lines are not always where they appear.
Britain finds itself in an uncomfortable position. Here goes a country whose public has quietly concluded that Brexit went badly, whose economic data confirm as much, whose European neighbours would, more or less, welcome it back. But it is also a country whose political system remains too fractured, and too scarred by the battles of 2016 and 2019, to act on any of it.
The argument, as Mr Rycroft says, is there to be won. Whether any politician is yet willing to make it openly, and in the right constituency, is another matter entirely. But the crucial takeaway—that Europe may become a politically toxic topic even when people broadly agree with Brussels’ policies—should be heard across the bloc from Lisbon to Tallinn.
