On Thursday morning, the day after delivering his first Budget, John Healey was asked a direct question on LBC: would Britain be better off inside the European Union? “I’m older than Andy Burnham,” the Chancellor said. “I don’t expect to see that.” He went on: “We had a referendum. We’re out of the European Union.”
Three days earlier, the Prime Minister had said something different in substance, if not in form. Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Mr Burnham was asked whether he wanted Britain to rejoin, and replied: “I’m going to be honest and say, in my lifetime I would like to see that happen, but I am not going to move ahead of the public.”
The exchange matters because of what it reveals about the Government three weeks before Mr Burnham travels to Brussels for a UK-EU summit on 20 November, where he intends to set out options for the relationship, including membership and the single market. It matters because the two ministers who run the country have now described different futures for it. And it matters because neither description is Government policy.
Two visions, one unresolved question
A personal ambition and a personal expectation are not the same claim. They are not even strictly incompatible. A minister can want an outcome he does not expect to witness, and Mr Healey said as much when he conceded that Brexit had “certainly hit our level of growth” and “certainly hit our level of trade”. He called the settlement “not a good one”. He simply does not believe he will live to see it reversed, and he does not “actually accept” that Britain would have grown faster had it stayed in.
What remains unclear is the Government’s longer-term destination beyond its existing manifesto commitments. Downing Street spent Monday clarifying the Prime Minister’s position and clarified very little. A spokesperson said Mr Burnham was “crucially not leaning either way” and “not setting out a concrete position either way”.
The formal position is narrower than either minister’s preference. Labour’s 2024 manifesto was explicit: “With Labour, Britain will stay outside the EU”, with “no return to the single market, the customs union or freedom of movement”. Mr Burnham says those commitments will stand for this parliament. His stated policy is that any fundamental change would be a matter for the public and for the next Parliament, and that the Government will set out the merits of the various options once the summit process concludes.
That is a holding position, and it is being held deliberately. Mr Burnham has ruled out rejoining during this parliament while declining to rule out fighting the next election on a promise to do so. He told GMB that “there is no election coming anytime soon” and that people should put the thought from their minds, then left open a manifesto commitment to take Britain back in. Asked by the BBC whether such a commitment was possible, he replied: “Yes, things are possible.” He also answered “no” when asked whether he would allow Britain into the EU’s freedom of movement scheme without a referendum. After an interview with the Sunday Times was interpreted as removing free movement from his red lines, Number 10 insisted he was proposing no particular option.
So four positions are in circulation at once: a manifesto that pledged Britain would remain outside the EU, the single market and the customs union, with no return to freedom of movement; a Prime Minister who wants EU membership in his lifetime; a Chancellor who does not expect to see it; and an undefined set of options for the future. Each is defensible on its own terms. Together they leave the voter to guess which one would survive contact with a parliamentary majority.
His party is not pretending otherwise. Jo Stevens, a former cabinet minister under Sir Keir Starmer, used an interview with The Telegraph to say: “I want the UK to be an EU member again.” A minister warned the Prime Minister against “reopening old wounds”, and a frontbencher said the public was not ready for another referendum.
The scale of internal unease is contested but no longer private. The i Paper reported this weekthat, according to people familiar with their views, around 15 of the 28 ministers attending Cabinet are understood to support a return to the bloc, against 13 who are undecided or opposed. The same paper reported that most ministers now regard a referendum as unavoidable. GB News reported that Mr Burnham had told ministers collective responsibility applies to the summit mandate and that anyone wishing to speak against it must resign, quoting him saying it “will not be appropriate for ministers individually to advocate for specific options or opine on the likely outcome of the process”. Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, is among those reported to have reservations, though she has not put them on the record in this round. These are accounts from anonymous sources, not confirmed ministerial statements on the record, and they should be read as such.
What the Budget exposed
The argument would be less pointed if the Government’s economic case were settled. It is not.
Mr Healey’s Budget, delivered on 28 October, forecast growth of 1.2 per cent this year and 1 per cent next, with the Office for Budget Responsibility trimming its expectation for 2027. The OBR said households would be little better off than before the pandemic even a decade after Covid struck, a judgment its head David Miles called “pretty grim”. Debt interest is running £14 billion above forecast this year, driven by energy prices and the conflict in the Middle East. The Chancellor’s headline measures, a £100 payment for 20 million households in England in council tax bands A to D, at a cost of £2.6 billion, and an increase in the tax on bank profits from 3 per cent to 6 per cent, buy time rather than change the growth path. The Institute for Fiscal Studies described “a raft of fiddly measures but very little that will move the dial on growth”.
Against that, the Prime Minister’s argument rests on evidence his opponents should not wave away. The Centre for European Reform’s June 2026 modelling estimated that Brexit has cut total UK exports to the EU by about 12 per cent and imports by about 16 per cent, with the overwhelming majority of the damage attributable to leaving the single market rather than the customs union. The same paper notes that comparable studies place the reduction in UK GDP at between 4 and 8 per cent. These are modelled counterfactuals rather than directly observed outcomes: they describe what trade and output might have been had Britain remained, and they carry the uncertainty any such model carries. Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, said that without the courage to fix the trading relationship any Budget would be “tinkering around the edges”.
Two things can be true at once. Brexit can have imposed an economic cost, as estimated by independent researchers, without rejoining necessarily being the right response. The CER is explicit that recovering those losses would mean accepting free movement, budget contributions and rules made without a British vote, and it warns that a customs union alone would recover little. A cost estimate tells you what was given up. It does not tell you which alternative is best, and it certainly does not settle whether the public would accept the terms. The Government has published no assessment of what those terms would require of the country.
The Chancellor is entitled to argue for resilience. He is not entitled to do so selectively. He cited the official forecasters when they supported his economic case, describing the economy as “remarkably resilient” and saying it had “confounded the forecasters”. But independent research into Brexit’s long-term impact on trade and growth also deserves serious consideration, even where the policy response remains contested.
The seats that will decide it
There is a plainer explanation for the ambiguity, and it is electoral.
Mr Burnham won Makerfield at a by-election on 18 June with 24,937 votes, and the seat voted an estimated 65 per cent to Leave in 2016. Mr Healey’s Rawmarsh and Conisbrough constituency, which he has represented since 2024, succeeded Wentworth and Dearne, where the Leave vote is estimated at around 70 per cent, among the highest in the country. He held the new seat with a majority of 6,908, with Reform UK second on 28.6 per cent. Both men represent precisely the voters most likely to punish a party that appears to be drifting back towards Brussels while insisting nothing has changed.
Those referendum figures are modelled estimates rather than counts, because the 2016 ballot was tallied by local authority area rather than by constituency. They are widely used and broadly reliable as a guide to local opinion. They are not precise measurements, and the argument does not depend on a decimal place.
An electoral calculation is a legitimate thing for a party to make. It cannot stand in for a governing philosophy. Kemi Badenoch called the Budget “not bold enough”, saying the Government was “overspent, overborrowed, overtaxed”, and told the Commons the Chancellor “should have set out a plan for 3 per cent today”, a reference to the defence spending dispute that led him to resign as Sir Keir Starmer’s defence secretary on 11 June. Nigel Farage dismissed the Budget as “little giveaways” that “doesn’t overall do very much”. Neither has yet been asked to answer the question the Chancellor answered on Thursday morning.
Great British PAC reaction
Great British PAC’s concern is not that ministers are discussing Europe. It is that they are doing so without telling the country where the discussion is meant to end. Consent given in a referendum is not undone by a summit communiqué, a regulatory annex or a series of broadcast clarifications. If the Government intends to seek a mandate for membership or for substantial change, it should say so plainly and let the voters rule on it. If it does not, it should say that too, and stop convening meetings that imply otherwise.
Steve Wright, Campaign Leader of Great British PAC, said:
“The Prime Minister clearly does not have the consent of his Cabinet for the statements he is making, which is why we are seeing so many retractions only hours after he makes statements. The Chancellor knows that the British people would not support the conditions required for rejoining, and the implications for the UK economy.”
The question he must answer
The test for 20 November is straightforward. Publish the legal text of every arrangement reached. State whether each one crosses the manifesto red lines. Say whether any of it would require a fresh mandate from the electorate.
Whether the Government is prepared to meet that test remains to be seen. Doing so would require a clarity of purpose that has so far been missing from its public statements. Ahead of the 20 November summit in Brussels, Mr Burnham owes the country one straight answer.
Does he intend to seek a mandate to take Britain back into the European Union, or does he not?
If the answer is yes, he should say so, put it in a manifesto and let the voters decide. If the answer is no, he should say that too, and ensure that his Government speaks with one clear voice. What he cannot do is run a government in which the answer depends on which minister is asked, and in which the only person never asked is the voter.
