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…