Angela Rayner has suggested that any decision on restoring EU free movement would be put to the public at the next general election, after the Prime Minister called for an “honest discussion” about readopting rules the British people voted to end a decade ago.
Asked on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg whether she wanted Britain to return to freedom of movement, the Housing Secretary said she wanted “the best deal” for Britain and would “have an honest conversation about what the trade-offs could be, and then put that to the people at a general election”. Nothing, she said, should be “off the table” in talks with Brussels.
The manifesto on which Labour MPs were elected in 2024, and to which Andy Burnham has repeatedly committed since, contains a single unambiguous sentence: “There will be no return to the single market, the customs union, or freedom of movement.”
Mr Burnham told The Sunday Times he wanted “a very factual, quite evidence-based debate” on the question. Four months earlier, he won the Makerfield by-election after promising voters he would not “re-run” the Brexit arguments and stating that he was “not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU”.
A conversation, a summit and a 10-year plan
Ms Rayner was sent to Sunday morning broadcasts to frame the Prime Minister’s intervention as pragmatism. “The Prime Minister is clear that you can’t take anything off the table when you’re having a conversation,” she told the BBC. “But the Prime Minister is not saying we’re going back to where we were in 2016.”
Speaking to Sky News, she said: “We’ve been clear on our manifesto. We’re not changing.” The manifesto she was defending is the one that rules free movement out. She cited “red tape and the friction” with Britain’s biggest trading partner and said exports had fallen “by 20 per cent”, although House of Commons Library figures show services exports to the EU have grown strongly since 2020 even where goods trade has suffered.
Mr Burnham stopped short of endorsing a return. He told The Sunday Times he would not yet “jump to a firm position”, but said staying out of any restored free movement arrangement would “not be a red line” in negotiations. Options he has floated include single market membership, which has in every existing model, from the EEA to the Swiss arrangements, entailed accepting free movement of people. In September he went further, saying Britain could go “all the way” and rejoin the EU. The Telegraph reported that he has suggested Labour’s next manifesto could include a commitment to a second referendum. He did rule out two things: “I can’t see myself ever recommending anything that would involve joining the euro or Schengen.”
The immediate occasion is the second UK-EU summit since Brexit, to be held in Brussels on 20 November, where Mr Burnham will meet the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. What is formally on the negotiating table for the summit is narrower than free movement: a capped, visa-based youth mobility scheme of the kind Britain already runs with 13 countries, with quotas and fees still unresolved. Such a scheme requires applicants to hold a visa and is legally distinct from free movement, which admits EU citizens without one. But the Prime Minister has himself widened the conversation, and Ms Rayner pointed to “a 10-year plan that the Prime Minister is currently in the middle of drafting”.
The promise made in Makerfield
Mr Burnham won the Makerfield by-election on 18 June with 24,927 votes, a majority of 9,231 over Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon. During that campaign he promised not to “re-run” the Brexit arguments and said he was not proposing the UK considers rejoining the EU.
Since entering Downing Street in the summer, the Prime Minister has told the Labour conference that Britain must consider its “long-term relationship with our European partners” and said Brexit had done “more harm than good”.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said: “This is a total betrayal of Brexit Britain and Burnham’s Makerfield pitch. He is also deluded to say immigration was different when we were members of the EU. We will fight this dishonesty.”
What the evidence actually shows
The Prime Minister’s case is that migration under free movement was different: “revolving-door” arrivals, often young, who came for a few years and went home. Today’s migration, he argues, is permanent settlement, a legacy of the “Boris Wave” of long-term visas issued as Britain emerged from Covid. On Monday’s Good Morning Britain he said: “I don’t think things have worked out as people said they would at the time, particularly when it comes to immigration.”
The official record complicates that argument. Free movement ended on 31 December 2020and was replaced by a points-based system. Net migration stood at 335,000 in the year to June 2016, the month of the referendum. It peaked at a record 944,000 in the year to March 2023, driven almost entirely by non-EU arrivals under routes opened by Boris Johnson’s government. Last year it fell to 171,000, roughly half its 2016 level, under the system built to replace free movement.
Where the Prime Minister wants to reopen the debate, the labour market gives pause. Some 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 were not in education, employment or training between April and June, 13 per cent of the age group, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Sir Jeremy Hunt, the former chancellor who voted Remain, told the BBC: “To suddenly say you are prepared to negotiate allowing people from all over Europe to come and take those jobs would be a hammer blow to those plans to get people off welfare and into work.” He added: “When you have to have these big, constitutional debates you have to have an unwritten agreement that you are only going to come back to them once in a generation. Otherwise it is so divisive.”
Even Labour’s own benches are uneasy. Lord Walker of Broxton, the executive chairman of Iceland who was made a peer by Sir Keir Starmer, told Times Radio: “At Iceland we get 50 applications for every job. It’s tough at the moment finding jobs and I don’t think opening up our borders will do anything to help the one million young people that are out of work.” Repeating the European debate, he warned, would set “a very dangerous precedent”: “If you don’t like the answer of a referendum to go back and keep asking the same question. What does that mean for Scottish independence, for example?”
What the polls say
The public mood cuts across the argument. YouGov’s tracker has put support for rejoining the EU at around 51 per cent since January 2024, and Ipsos found 53 per cent would accept immigration from the EU in return for improved access to the single market, up from 42 per cent, though its researchers concluded that the trade-offs temper any rush to return. Support for going back in principle is not the same thing as support for a particular deal on particular terms, and it is the terms that would decide the politics.
The parties respond
Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, said: “This is yet another example of Burnham’s foot-in-mouth syndrome. He hasn’t thought this through or the implications. Most people who voted for Brexit did so because they didn’t want free movement. Too many politicians have failed to understand the significance and impact of immigration on communities.”
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “Andy Burnham knows full well that a return to EU free movement would mean handing back control of our borders and allowing uncontrolled migration from across Europe. The British people voted to end free movement, and there can be no return to it.”
Andrew Griffith, the shadow chancellor, told Times Radio: “I don’t want to go back to open borders that the British people conclusively rejected. I don’t want to go back to the toxicity and wasted time and energy in Westminster of the Brexit debate. And I really feel for those young people in the UK that can’t get a job now.”
Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick, who backed Remain in 2016, told the BBC: “I think it’s completely mad, the idea that this country needs more immigration.” Working people, he said, did not want “their wages being undercut by a load of low wage, low-skilled migrants from overseas”.
The Liberal Democrats want to go further, not back. Daisy Cooper, the party’s deputy leader, said restoring free movement “would be a really good thing for growth” and pushed for rejoining the single market and customs union.
What happens next
While the Prime Minister floats free movement, his Home Secretary is tightening settlement elsewhere. Shabana Mahmood plans to extend the wait for indefinite leave to remain from five years to up to 15, a proposal Mr Burnham backed on Monday, saying “settlement is a right to be earned, not just granted automatically”.
By Monday morning, though, the Prime Minister was adding caution of his own. He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain he was “not proposing any changes in this Parliament” and would not “move away from the red lines that were in the Labour manifesto”, and said he would not return the UK to free movement without a referendum: “I will never move ahead of the British public when it comes to Brexit.” Asked when a manifesto proposing a return to the EU might appear, he replied: “No time soon, if at all.”
The 2024 red lines are political promises, not statutes. No act of Parliament requires a referendum first: the referendum lock created by the European Union Act 2011 was repealed by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. Nor does every route back demand the same procedure. A youth mobility scheme like the one on the summit agenda needs no treaty at all: Britain’s schemes with 13 countries run through visa rules under the Immigration Act 1971. Restoring general free movement would mean a new agreement with Brussels, laid before Parliament for ratification under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, and primary legislation to reverse the framework that ended it. Single market membership would mean a treaty of its own. Rejoining the EU itself would mean accession under Article 49 of the treaty on European Union, requiring the unanimous consent of all 27 member states and ratification by every national parliament. The real constraint is democratic. His party promised the country one thing in writing, and his own by-election campaign repeated it. Breaking that kind of promise carries no statutory penalty, which is why the political reckoning matters.
An Ipsos poll published on Sunday put Labour on 32 per cent, eight points clear of the Conservatives on 24 with Reform UK on 20, from 1,109 adults interviewed between 15 and 22 October, days before a Budget Ipsos described as challenging for the Government.
Great British PAC reaction
Steve Wright, Great British PAC, said:
“Sadly the British public finds itself being tasked again, at some unknown point in the future, in taking part in a referendum – when those wishing us to do so did not honour the result of the first one, and did everything they could to avoid having to implement the result. The Prime Minister has shown, through his deception to the people of Makerfield and the whole UK, that he has no desire at all to have an ‘honest’ conversation. Every single poll conducted in the UK, on the necessary terms of rejoining the EU, have shown that a majority of Brits would prefer to stay out”
Richard Thomson, National Director, Great British PAC, said:
“Andy Burnham must be mispronouncing “dishonest discussion”, because Britain has already had this debate. We discussed it, we voted, and the British people decided to leave the European Union and end free movement.
For decades, the political class has asked for our votes, listened to the answer and then done precisely the opposite. Now, just four months after promising Makerfield he would not reopen Brexit, Burnham is putting free movement back on the table.
This is not consultation. It is a calculated attempt to overturn a democratic decision through the back door.
The Great British PAC will not accept it. We will fight tooth and nail to defend Brexit, protect our sovereignty and ensure the votes of 17.4 million people are respected.”
The test now comes in Brussels on 20 November. The formal agenda before Mr Burnham and Ursula von der Leyen runs to a security pact, food and drink trade, emissions trading and a capped youth visa scheme; free movement appears on no authoritative list of summit business. What the summit puts in writing is one thing. What the Prime Minister has put back into national politics is another: a debate about readmitting free movement that his own manifesto says the country has settled, and that he promised the voters of Makerfield he would not reopen. Mr Burnham says he wants an honest national conversation about free movement. The country had one. His manifesto, in a single sentence, records how it ended, and democratic accountability does not require a statute to enforce it: a government that intends to abandon a promise it made to the country should say so plainly, before the voters, not after.
