Nowhere is an anniversary more relished than in newspapers. As we approach the 10-year mark since Britain voted for Brexit, countless column inches would no doubt have been reserved for this purpose anyway. Yet the prospect of a Labour leadership contest, at a time when polls are showing four-fifths of the party’s voters at the last election and an even higher proportion of its members want to reverse that June 2016 referendum decision, is transforming what might have merely been melancholic reflection into a more active debate.
Keir Starmer last week made a belated nod to one of his party’s deepest desires by saying that he, too, wants to put the UK back at “the heart of Europe”, even if it was still unclear exactly what he meant. Then Wes Streeting sought to revive faltering ambitions to be the next prime minister with a call for full re-entry into the EU, although he was similarly vague about when that might happen. Meanwhile, Andy Burnham was busy rowing back from a previously expressed hope of rejoining at some undisclosed point in his lifetime, perhaps because he won’t get a shot at Downing Street unless he first wins next month’s byelection in Makerfield, where a majority supported Brexit a decade ago.
Any hesitancy about plunging back into the fires of 2016 is, of course, understandable when the smouldering consequences of Brexit have burnt through five prime ministers – and now a much-anticipated sixth – over the decade since. Yet if Labour’s leaders, both current and wannabe, are serious about addressing the damage done by leaving the EU, they cannot repeat the error made by the Conservatives after the referendum. Too often, they seemed to believe the terms of any deal were primarily a matter for Britain to choose, when in practice the EU turned out to be significantly more effective in getting what it wanted. And it is true that support for rejoining begins to fall in polls when those surveyed are told that would likely mean the UK being forced to replace the pound with the euro or accept unrestricted freedom of movement across borders.
Even so, it may be wrong to assume the intransigent stance taken by EU negotiators, particularly the French, will continue indefinitely or that they will now simply shrug off talk of Britain rejoining. Some suggest that a UK government setting a clear direction for getting back in, possibly by showing a semblance of Ukraine’s enthusiasm for the idea of Europe that has led it to be tentatively offered “associate membership”, would deserve a more sympathetic hearing. Roberta Metsola, the president of the European parliament, told the EU-UK Forum last month that Britain is not just another pleading supplicant but a former member that “needs to be treated as such”. Paul Adamson, who chaired that event, told me: “A negotiation to rejoin would have its difficulties but none of us knows what’s possible because no one has really tried.”
The real obstacle to the EU offering much in the way of concessions is not innate hostility towards Britain so much as the absence of any sign we can find lasting consensus and stability on this issue – or anything else. Not only is Downing Street’s front door revolving between elections, Brussels knows there is a genuine risk that Nigel Farage, one of the architects of Brexit, will walk through it after the next one and then rip up any painstakingly negotiated deal.
This is a story not only about the volatility of public opinion but also a structural flaw in our democracy. What was always a narrow majority for leaving the EU in 2016 disappeared years ago through a combination of older people dying, younger pro-European ones reaching voting age, and still more changing their minds. According to a December 2025 estimate, if the referendum were held again then, leave would have been defeated by a margin of 8m votes. The pollster Luke Tryl, from More in Common, says his modelling suggests (and Burnham should perhaps take note) that even northern working-class seats such as Makerfield would now back remain.
Instead the bigger difficulty is about how Britain determines who has power at Westminster. Although first-past-the-post elections have long since been regarded as a bit unfair, it used to be argued they at least provided for strong government and kept extremists out of parliament. The splintering of the old Labour-Tory duopoly into five or even six different parties bunched quite close in overall support, however, means this same system is now a force for instability that could allow Farage to become prime minister with barely a quarter-share of the national vote.
The spread of votes in Britain now resembles that of European multiparty democracies, but in contrast to the proportional representation used by just about every EU member state, we maintain an eccentric and antediluvian system that is no longer fit for any sort of purpose except bad ones.
This probably explains why changing it is now viewed less favourably by Reform party supporters while remaining popular among the public as a whole, as well as Labour’s voters and the party’s membership. Electoral reform has been consistently backed by Burnham, too, even though he knows this would probably mean Labour would never again secure the kind of victory Starmer’s party won just two years ago.
Maybe the “less point-scoring, more problem-solving” politics that Greater Manchester’s mayor hopes to nurture would help him avoid the kind of mistakes made in the run-up to the referendum nearly a decade ago. That was when David Cameron allowed policy on the EU to be driven by the internal dynamics of the Tory party and his desire to secure a parliamentary majority at any cost. Indeed, electoral reform might yet enable the creation of a viable pro-business party on the centre-right that would not be addicted to national economic self-harm, as the Conservatives have been ever since Brexit. And, in turn, that might persuade the EU that Britain can find a stable consensus to reverse it.
There are a lot of “maybes” or “mights” to this debate. But if Britain wants to get back into Europe before another 10 years have passed, it is not only our leaders who must become more European in their approach; the way we choose them will need to be more European, too.