Andy Burnham rows back on Rejoin

As Wes Streeting embraces EU membership, why is Burnham getting cold feet?

Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham

Labour’s 2024 election manifesto is unlikely to go down as a triumph of draftsmanship. Over 136 pages of assorted policy proposals, pull quotes and pictures of non-threatening shadow ministers, the party succeeded largely in tying itself up in fiscal knots, hell-bent as it was on the oft-quoted but little-examined ‘Ming vase’ strategy.

But in one arena it was pretty blunt. “Britain will stay outside of the EU.” Sure, there might be some nibbling around the edges: for instance, when the prime minister hums along ‘Ode to Joy’, he would do it with feeling. But no one, from the Red Wall to Walthamstow, should get any ideas: “There will be no return to the single market, the customs union, or freedom of movement.”

Not long ago, I googled ‘how to merge six photos’ and hit send on the below piece:

In it, after circling around the founding traumatic event for literally tens of middle-aged millennial political advisors, the 2015 Labour leadership election, I eventually stumbled onto my point: the next leadership contest, whenever that may be, would serve as the rejoin camp’s best chance of dragging the party to a more pro-European position.

On Saturday, Wes Streeting kindly seconded the thesis. The former health secretary used his keynote address at the Progress annual conference, a safe space for the party’s Blairite faction, to denounce Brexit as a “catastrophic mistake” and call for Britain to rejoin the EU as part of a “new special relationship.”

Your move, Burnham.

Only a Northern Song

The Mayor of Greater Manchester, long the darling of the party’s amorphous soft-left tendency, has previously shared his support for rejoin. However, speaking to ITV over the weekend, Burnham watered down that view, acknowledging only that there was a “case” for rejoining the EU but that he’s “not advocating that in this by-election”. Perish the thought.

Now, there are all manner of political axioms that are total bunk: he who wields the knife never wears the crown (erm, Gordon Brown? Boris Johnson? Margaret Thatcher herself!) Then there’s the coverup is never worse than the crime (again, not true — Richard Nixon only covered the Watergate break in because it was really, really bad!) But I maintain at least one adage still holds: all politics is local.