The UK and the EU have reached agreement on a post-Brexit “reset” to their relationship. Mitya Pearson and David Jeffery write that while there is support in the UK for establishing closer relations with the EU, there are major political obstacles to taking more ambitious steps like rejoining the single market.
Following the UK-EU summit on Monday, Britain is moving closer to the EU again in several specific areas. Inevitably, such moves are not far enough for some, who wish to see a much more radical alignment between Britain and the EU. So why does the idea of Britain rejoining the customs union, single market or even the EU itself currently seem so unlikely to happen?
Support for rejoining
British politics is in something of a paradoxical situation when it comes to public and elite opinion about the UK’s ongoing relationship with Europe. After Britain voted for Brexit in 2016, voters came to have an overwhelmingly negative assessment of how the UK government had handled the negotiations and, once the deal had been signed, they were also pretty sceptical about what had been achieved.
In the years since Britain left the EU, polling has shown that the public tend to think the impact of Brexit has been negative across a range of areas and there has been a largely consistent polling lead for the idea of rejoining the EU (versus staying out) since 2022. Since 2021, surveys have also repeatedly shown Britons, on balance, feel that it was wrong to leave the EU.
All the leading figures in the current Labour government supported remain in the 2016 EU referendum. We conducted polling of Westminster MPs elected at the 2024 general election, as part of a recently published report, and found that a clear majority of them would vote to rejoin the EU if there was another referendum on the issue. MPs were significantly more supportive of this position than the public (who also favoured the idea of rejoining when asked the same question, at a similar time).
Reopening divisions
There are, however, several powerful reasons why a partial or full reversal of the Brexit process looks unlikely in the near term, even though politicians and the public favour the idea. While public opinion surveys show overall support for rejoining the EU, there is no evidence that this is a salient issue. The EU does not feature among the top ten issues facing the country, as selected by the public, in Ipsos’ March 2025 Issue Index. Just as the issue did not feature in the same index when David Cameron originally announced the plan to have an EU referendum.
During the Brexit negotiation process, there was a widespread sense of public frustration and by late 2019, 70% of voters suggested they had “Brexit fatigue”. Politicians may therefore be wary of a potential backlash among voters if they are seen to be re-opening a divisive episode in British politics.
The polling results mentioned here essentially asked politicians and voters about the idea of rejoining the EU in principle. If the policy implications of concrete options for a major softening of Britain’s EU relations, such as accepting freedom of movement, were more widely discussed, they might start to seem less attractive. The period since Britain left the EU has also coincided with challenging economic conditions, so the public’s views on Brexit are no doubt partly bound up with these, and if they were to change, attitudes to EU membership could too.
Political calculations
When Keir Starmer took over as leader of the Labour Party, part of the approach he took to recovering from the 2019 general election defeat was to accept that Brexit was happening and seek to move on from a debate that had alienated a significant section of Labour’s voters. This basic calculation has continued to shape the party’s approach, even as public opinion evidence on what British voters think of Brexit has started to suggest that politicians may not need to be so wary about being critical of Brexit.
Additionally, in recent years, British political elites have become very focused on quite a narrow set of voters: older, non-graduates living outside big cities who had a tendency to support Brexit in 2016. This is because voters with such traits are distributed quite efficiently across constituencies (whereas graduates who supported remain are more concentrated in seats in big cities), and because significant numbers of such voters have switched between the Conservative and Labour parties in ways that have been very influential in recent general elections.
A majority of the group of voters who voted Conservative in 2019 and Labour in 2024 supported leave in the 2016 referendum. The group of voters who voted Labour in 2024 but are now expressing (via surveys) openness to voting Reform in a future election are more socially conservative than other Labour voters (a trait associated with supporting leave).
Labour’s desire to hold onto such voters at the next general election is likely to continue to mean they are nervous about managing Britain’s relationship with the EU. For these reasons, currently, the political conditions do not seem conducive for a more ambitious reset of UK-EU relations.
For more information, see the authors’ accompanying study, What do British Politicians Think?
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: European Union
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