If the UK were, at some point in the future, to rejoin the EU, how would it happen?

I’m not saying it’s likely. I’m not saying it should be the aim of the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats in the short-term. It certainly isn’t going to be the basis of any manifesto going into the next general election.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to consider how it might happen, if it were to happen.

First, re-entry would only happen after a referendum approving such a move. The 2016 referendum will be the reference point, rather than the 1975 referendum, which confirmed the UK’s membership after it had already joined the EC.

Referendums, like elections, are highly context-specific. I don’t subscribe to the view that the result in 2016 was pre-ordained by structural factors. It could have gone differently — the closeness of the result speaks to that. For this reason, I’m not even going to try to speculate the winning formula for such a referendum. (Though I would point to the trend in polling data towards more socially liberal values and the increasingly favourable state of public opinion towards immigration… What that might mean is best left to a different blogpost). Instead, I’m focusing on the only slightly less futile task of identifying potential routes to such a referendum.

Also, even if Rejoin successfully won such a referendum, the UK would still need to negotiate accession. I’m not even going to bother speculating how that might go. At least with identifying pathways to a referendum, there is some solid ground on which to lay out possible scenarios.

So here they are. I will probably come back and add to this. I’ll make changes clear.

Scenario 1: Multi-Track Europe

Say the Labour Party wins power in 2024 or 2028. The Government adopts a more favourable posture towards the EU than the present Government. For the foreseeable future, I expect ‘closeness to the EU’ to be a dividing line between Labour and the Conservative — not one of the dividing lines that plays a role in the outcome of elections, but a dividing line evident in their respective approaches to trade and strategies for growth.

The dream of a free trading ‘Global Britain’ is much cherished in this Conservative Party. It is not a dream shared by the Labour Party. Lexiteers tend to be…