Burnham must not seek to reverse Brexit – that won't fix Britain's problems
Andy Burnham delivers speech at Labour conference, September 2026 (Will Colebourne/Alamy Live News)
4 min read
Brexit didn't cause Britain's economic malaise. Its roots lie much earlier with the increasing dominance of finance, culminating in the 2008 banking crash.
Reversing Brexit won’t correct these problems. Instead, we need a fundamental reorganisation of our bloated financial sector and our distorted capitalist structures.
Andy Burnham has reportedly asked the Treasury to model the impact of rejoining the EU. But state official orthodoxy simply won’t do. Before the 2016 referendum, the same narrow group predicted a Brexit apocalypse: recession, collapsing house prices, plummeting GDP, and 500,000 extra unemployed. None of it materialised in the manner they warned.
Indeed, Whitehall has a long history of catastrophic forecasting failures, from joining the ERM and Black Wednesday to the promotion of austerity, turning blind eye to deindustrialisation and the miscalculations of the Truss budget. Burnham previously criticised our central institutions, arguing that top down neoliberal economics doesn't work – why, then, expect the country to accept lectures about Brexit from the Treasury?
The Labour Party's 2024 manifesto was clear: we would not rejoin the EU, nor return to the single market, customs union or freedom of movement. Reopening the constitutional settlement now would betray those promises and plunge the nation into the paralysing polarisation of the referendum debates.
The EU isn't a progressive haven. It habitually prioritises corporate “competitiveness” over social protection. Neoliberal orthodoxy has colonised its decision-making structures, buttressed by centrist and right-wing majorities. It has enforced austerity, created inequality and low pay, and allowed the European Court of Justice to rank cross-border corporate freedoms above the rights of workers.
Across Europe, a sharp right-wing surge boosted fiscal tightening. In countries like France and Spain, working-class communities and unions are staging mass uprisings against spending cuts and pension overhauls. Meanwhile the forces of ultra-right populist nationalism, and even fascism, casts a shadow over Europe. These developments expose deep social and economic fractures between optimistic EU rhetoric and the lived realities of citizens.
The strongest arguments for rejoining the EU rely on the claim that its economic growth makes it attractive for British companies. But there is stagnation in countries like Germany; in France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, economic difficulties are manifest. So, the argument about the UK rejoining misses the bigger picture. Our own GDP outside the EU has not been significantly worse than that of the member states. In any event, headline GDP figures can mask underlying issues, often bolstered by population growth rather than productivity. The real bottleneck in the UK is structural.
The core constraint on the British economy is not Brexit but a systemic investment strike by institutions. It began with the 2008 financial crash, not the 2016 referendum. Since 2008, the finance sector has taken fright, retreating from productive capital deployment across the UK and concentrating wealth overwhelmingly in central London’s property and financial bubbles.
UK regions suffered stagnant, collapsing productivity and consequently low pay. If we were to suddenly re-enter an open-borders, frictionless single market our uncompetitive regional economies would face a devastating shock. Regional GDP per hour in the UK has suffered from the investment strike and is low compared with our neighbours.
Britain’s needs are clear. Forget market-led solutions. Without a Marshall Aid-style state-led industrial strategy, modern infrastructure and a productivity drive, regional businesses will be outcompeted by high-capital continental rivals, locking British workers deeper into low-wage decline. There might well be a tsunami of bankruptcies and redundancies as under-invested British companies fail to compete.
The social contract between our workers and the wider society is broken – and it is this that Andy Burnham needs to focus on. And Brexit did not cause this structural hollowing out; the 2008 crash did. Rejoining the EU would do nothing to fix it. It is a distraction from the real task: rebuilding a productive economy from the bottom up, taming Whitehall and requiring Britain’s bloated finance sector to reengage with the real economy.
Jon Trickett is the Labour MP for Normanton and Hemsworth
