January 9, 2025
Labour's EU “reset” will fail as Brexit hits economy in 2025: a New Year's message from Rejoin EU Party leader Brendan Donnelly
The New Year is a good time for predictions and resolutions. I have a prediction and a resolution for 2025.
The prediction is that this year will be the year in which finally the conspiracy of silence among our political leaders about Brexit will be breached. I say this for three reasons.
The first is that Keir Starmer's attempted “reset” of EU/UK relations will be a humiliating failure. He has already excluded those options, such as trying to re-join the single market, which would have made a genuine overhaul of relations plausible. By the end of the year, it will be clear the UK either needs to put up with its present disadvantageous position on Europe's margins or to re-join the EU. There is no third way.
Second, most British voters now realise Brexit was a mistake. Yet none of the biggest political parties at Westminster are committed to making British re-entry into the EU happen. At best, they pay lip service to an impossibly distant goal of re-joining when circumstances have changed radically. There is, therefore, a gap in British politics for fresh-thinking politicians and parties to occupy the electoral ground left vacant by the timidity on European issues of the British political elite. In the not-too-distant future, there will be a race to fill this gap. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Third and perhaps most importantly for Starmer, it will become ever more apparent throughout 2025 that Labour needs a new narrative and policies. Dour managerialism and attempts to outflank the Reform Party on migration won't be enough to reverse voters' political disillusionment six months after the General Election. Nor do Labour's present economic policies bring any plausible hope of significantly remedying the UK's economic stagnation. It would be masochistic in the extreme if Labour continued to refuse even to contemplate the policy which would give it both political and economic momentum, namely re-joining the EU. There are many in Labour who already recognise this reality. This silence of the party's lambs is unlikely to continue indefinitely.
My proposed resolution follows directly from the above prediction. The many millions of British electors who want to re-join the EU should no longer allow faint-hearted politicians claiming that re-joining the EU is a question only for future generations to cow them. They should loudly and clearly tell them that evading the European issue is no longer an option. Re-joining the EU is a question for the here and now.
As a country and political culture, the UK should be mature enough to acknowledge a mistake and seek to correct it as soon as possible. The path to re-joining the EU is unlikely to be easy and may be long, but delay probably won't make it easier. The sooner we set out, the sooner we will arrive. Any New Year's resolution needs a prompt start. January 2025 is the best possible time for a renewed commitment to making, publicly and unambiguously, the case for the UK to re-join the EU.
Notes for editors:
For interviews and more details, call party leader Brendan Donnelly on 07956 379129 or email the party at admin@therejoineuparty.com.
Brendan is a former Conservative MEP; a brief biography can be viewed at https://therejoineuparty.com/golders-green-by-election/
Visit our website at www.therejoineuparty.com, follow the party on Twitter at @rejoinp and read our 2024 General Election manifesto at therejoineuparty.com/manifesto-2024
The Rejoin EU Party is campaigning to re-join the EU because we believe re-joining is the only way to solve the multiple problems Brexit has created. Brexit is broken and it’s breaking our country too. All the promises on which Brexit was sold to the electorate in 2016 were nonsense. Far from reducing red tape and providing £350m a week for the NHS, Brexit makes trading with the crucial European market more complex, difficult and expensive and threatens to reduce funding for public services. If you agree Brexit is making our country poorer, less tolerant and less united, join us and send a message to Westminster that you want your EU membership back, with all its freedoms and benefits.