Polling on anniversary of vote also finds 71% of leave voters now want a closer relationship with the European Union
The Tony Blair Institute report – Moving Forward: The Path to a Better Post-Brexit Relationship Between the UK and the EU – includes a series of recommendations for how Britain and the EU could develop a closer trading relationship. It does not explicitly propose rejoining the single market. Instead it highlights 10, mostly technical, recommendations, that would align the UK more closely with EU regulations.
But does the EU want a closer relationship with the UK. As Anton Spisak, one of the authors of the report, highlighted on Twitter last week, the answer seems to be no. Spisak highlighted a Financial Times report quoting Stefan Fuehring, the European Commission official in charge of overseeing the trade and cooperation agreement (the post-Brexit trade deal with the UK). Fuehring told a conference recently:
There’s almost on a bi-weekly basis a report [on how to improve the existing Brexit deal] coming from the Tony Blair Institute, the UK in a Changing Europe, the House of Lords and so on. My job is to follow all these, of course, but I’m not aware that in the last two years any such report has come out of the EU system. We have really moved on now with this debate [over Brexit] and I think the next decade is one where we’ll deal with future member states, rather than a past member state.
Full membership of the EU single market could happen only in return for the UK accepting all four freedoms that are inherent to the EU – including free movement of persons – and ceding regulatory autonomy over parts of its economy, without having much decision-making power over those EU rules. If it was faced with this decision, the UK would have to consider the merits of going back into the single market versus rejoining the EU, the latter offering a similar balance of rights and obligations but with the UK given a direct seat at the table, where the rules are made and decided.