Sir Tony Blair’s institute has called on Andy Burnham to put Britain on a ten-year path towards rejoining a reformed European Union, in an intervention that lands three days before Labour gathers in Liverpool for its annual conference.
A report published on Thursday by the Tony Blair Institute, the think tank the former prime minister chairs, says Britain should set “a clear, public objective to rejoin the EU within a decade, subject to internal EU reform”. That objective, it adds, should be “a cornerstone” of the government’s forthcoming ten-year plan. The wording is deliberate: this is an ambition tied to reform of the bloc, not a deadline for accession.
The paper, Beyond Leave and Remain: A Path to Rejoining a Reformed Europe, argues that Britain should play “a leading role in shaping a more powerful Europe”, which it says could match the United States and China if the bloc reforms. It leans on Mario Draghi’s diagnosis of Europe’s competitiveness problem and makes a simple argument: Europe’s difficulty is not a shortage of institutions but a shortage of delivery.
Writing in the foreword, Sir Tony is blunt about the pace he wants. “There is no point in inching towards Europe as we feel what British public opinion might accommodate,” he writes. “We should be clear that we want back into a formal relationship with the EU. But it must be a Europe on a credible path to reform, a Europe of nation states, a Europe capable of being a genuine global power.”
Sir Tony adds that if the EU will not reform, Britain should show it “is prepared to remain independent”. He also writes that “the red lines which we drew in 2016 are not the same as 2026”, and that the question is not whether Britain “reverses” Brexit but whether it can secure a modern relationship in the national interest.
Claire Bullivant, CEO of Great British PAC, said:
“Tony Blair simply cannot accept that millions of British people voted to leave the European Union.
“A referendum is one of the clearest instructions the electorate can give its political class. If politicians spend the years afterwards looking for ways to reverse a result they dislike, why should the British people ever trust another vote?”
The approach is markedly different from that of the previous government. Sir Keir Starmer sought closer ties with Brussels while holding to the commitments in Labour’s 2024 manifesto, which ruled out a return to the single market, the customs union or freedom of movement. The TBI paper proposes a staged route back rather than a straight one.
It says the UK should stop treating those post-2016 red lines as fixed, and that the Cabinet Office should apply a “power maximising test” to decide whether closer cooperation serves British interests. Britain should be prepared to negotiate on freedom of movement, it argues, and should join the debate on how free movement “could better address public concerns” while preserving the opportunities it gives to citizens on both sides.
Steve Wright, a spokesman for Great British PAC, said:
“The paper released by the TBI this morning, and the foreword from Tony Blair, suggests that the EU as it is today is not something that the UK should or would want to join, and so suggests that we should effectively bribe the EU to reform significantly and change direction, with the carrot of rejoining if they do. This is a work of utter fantasy. The EU refused to reform when we were members, and to believe that the EU will reinvent itself now is to rely on delusion”
At the same time, Sir Tony says a straight return to the single market and the customs union would be wrong. Tone Langengen, the TBI’s director and the report’s author, was careful to set the limits of the argument. “We are not saying Britain should rejoin without a referendum, and we do not argue that in our paper,” she said. “Our position is clear: Britain shouldn’t rejoin the EU as it is.”
What is proposed instead is a staged return. Britain should examine rejoining the EU’s €150bn SAFE defence fund, building a European Energy Security Partnership with the North Sea as a shared energy hub, and reconnecting to EU electricity markets, a step the report says would save billpayers up to £370m a year. It also points to joint work on AI safety and frontier technologies such as quantum computing.
Bullivant challenged the report’s argument on technology. She said:
“But there is an even bigger reason why this argument is so extraordinary in 2026. Tony Blair is looking backwards at precisely the moment the world is undergoing a technological revolution that will make national sovereignty more important than at any point in decades.
“Artificial intelligence is going to transform medicine, education, defence, science, business, government and ultimately the balance of economic and strategic power between nations. The countries that can move quickly, experiment, attract investment, build infrastructure and write intelligent rules for new technologies will have an enormous advantage.
“The European Union has chosen a heavily harmonised regulatory model for AI. Britain does not have to copy it. We have the freedom to regulate genuine risks while retaining the ability to innovate, adapt and change course as this technology develops.”
The EU’s AI Act, in force since 2024, applies harmonised, risk-based rules across member states, while the UK government has set out a pro-innovation, principles-based approach delivered through existing regulators.
Bullivant continued:
“That freedom will turn out to be one of the greatest long-term prizes of Brexit.
“This is not about refighting 2016. It is about 2036. The twentieth century was the age of mass standardisation. AI is ushering in an age of extraordinary personalisation and technological change. This is exactly the wrong moment to voluntarily surrender our freedom of manoeuvre to a 27-country regulatory system.
“Britain should cooperate with Europe, America and our allies, of course. Cooperation is not the same thing as surrendering sovereignty and rejoining the EU.
“In the age of AI, sovereignty means having the power to decide how our data is governed, how our technology is regulated, where our critical infrastructure is built and, crucially, being able to change our own rules when circumstances change. Brexit gave Britain that freedom. AI gives us an extraordinary opportunity to use it.”
The timing puts the paper directly into Labour’s conference debate. Labour’s conference opens in Liverpool on Sunday, and December brings a deadline in the wider reset talks with Brussels. A UK-EU summit due earlier this year was delayed amid tensions over the bloc’s Made In Europe scheme. Asked by The Independent this week whether he would put a commitment to rejoin in Labour’s next manifesto, the prime minister declined to rule it out. He said his focus was the summit and rebuilding bridges, and told reporters in New York, where he met European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, that Britain was “not your enemies here… we are not the problem”.
He is not short of pressure from his own side. Wes Streeting, who was defence secretary in Sir Keir’s cabinet, has said Labour should consider rejoining the customs union to lift growth. Trade union leaders used the TUC’s annual meeting last week to urge Mr Burnham to drop what they called “arbitrary red lines” on the single market and customs union.
The economics arrived the same morning. The Institute for Public Policy Research estimated that UK goods exports to the EU could have been between £3.7bn and £6.5bn higher each year from 2021 to 2024 if Britain had secured a mutual recognition agreement covering product testing. That is roughly 0.18 per cent of national income, and about three times the expected gains from the CPTPP trade deal. Motor vehicles and parts account for the largest share, between £2.48bn and £3.42bn a year, followed by electronics and pharmaceuticals.
Joseph Sassoon, an IPPR economist and co-author of the research, said the modelling isolated the effect of regulatory barriers from Covid disruption, global supply chain shifts, sanctions on Russia and energy market shocks. “Since Britain left the EU, thousands of products that are made and certified in the UK have to be tested and certified by EU bodies before they can be exported,” he said. “At a time when growth is hard to come by, a mutual recognition agreement with the EU would be a practical way to boost trade and support key sectors of the UK economy.”
Polling and electoral modelling commissioned by Best for Britain has also tested how an explicit rejoin pledge might affect Labour’s position. Its YouGov survey of 13,400 adults modelled a scenario in which Labour would win 321 seats if it made such a commitment, five below the 326-seat threshold used in Best for Britain’s analysis but, on the campaigners’ reading, enough to deny Reform UK a path to government. The survey was conducted in June, before Burnham became prime minister. It is a scenario, not a forecast, and the interpretation is Best for Britain’s.
The wider debate has also shifted. Sir John Curtice has said support for rejoining is at its highest level since the 2016 referendum. The European Movement UK says more than 20,000 people have backed its letter-writing campaign ahead of a Commons debate on 12 October. The Liberal Democrats’ Ed Davey has promised talks on the single market and customs union if his party takes power.
For Mr Burnham, the personal history adds a layer. He entered Parliament as MP for Leigh in 2001 and served as a junior minister under Sir Tony, before the two fell out. He accused his former boss of “not understanding what’s going on” after Sir Tony warned against a shift to the left on tax and welfare. The proposal now confronting Labour comes from the institute chaired by the man Mr Burnham once worked for.
Returning to the democratic argument, Bullivant said:
“Tony Blair wants Britain to spend the next decade travelling back towards Brussels. We should spend that decade racing towards the future.
“And there remains a fundamental democratic question for Andy Burnham and Labour. More than 17 million people voted to leave the European Union. If that instruction can simply be reversed by a political establishment that never reconciled itself to the result, why should the British people ever trust a referendum again? It will bring chaos.”
Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016. Ten years later, Tony Blair’s institute has put a date on reopening the question.
