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Britain should seek to rejoin EU, says civil servant who led Brexit department
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Leopards Ate My Face
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EU citizen living in the UK for many, many years.
The EU would restore all the exceptions that Britain had. They might call it something else, but the advantages of having the UK back in would be too great to ignore.
And I say this as someone that regularly rolls my eyes at the inflated sense of self-worth the UK constantly displays. The UK has become the south-Italy of the north; poor infrastructure, poor governance, poor outlying areas, yet we act as if we still are owed an empire.
EU citizen who lived in the UK and chose to leave the UK with Brexit, here.
I totally disagree.
In the EU Britain mainly blackmailed the rest with its veto - hence all the exceptions - mainly pushed for American levels of Capitalism and often even for American interests, and by the time of the Leave Vote it was basically a posh version of Orban's Hungary. Worse, in meanwhile it has only managed to become more right-wing that back then: the Brexit Tories weren't Far-Right enough for a significant proportion of Britons, so the extreme far-right ultra-nationalist Reform appeared and got more than 14% of the vote.
As for the rest, the main export of Britain was Financial Services, an almost purely rentierist business domain and were one of the most notable offers from Britain is International Tax Evasion services.
I can see why YOU as an EU citizen who chose to live there after Brexit would want to have Britain back in the EU: it would give you back in Britain a level of rights very close to those that native Britons have, making you way better than before.
What I don't see is what most people living in the EU right now would gain from Britain being an EU member, especially an EU member with privileges other countries do not have (i.e. the exceptions).
Personally, I think the only acceptable thing is more integration of the UK in the Single Market, NEVER Britain having a vote on the affairs of the 470 million people in the EU, much less a veto (which is what you get with EU membership), and even the Single Market integration has to be limited since even back when it was an EU member Britain was known for willingly (in that it's authorities couldn't care less as long as those products did not end up in the British market) being a massive backdoor for illegally bringing non-compliant products into the Single Market.
Fortunately, when Britain swerved towards Fascism, it actually left the EU so the harm it could do to the other 470 million EU citizens was limited, but as Hungary showed, if such a country slipping towards Fascism does not chose to leave the EU, it's almost impossible to deal with, so it would be an incredibly bad idea to make an EU member of a country which is now even more far-right than at the time of Brexit, even if with the most basic, zero exceptions, membership.
FWIW, I have a U.K. citizenship at this point too, so my rights in the EU and the UK are the same.
Good for you.
My point still stands though: from the point of view of somebody living in the EU, having the UK back isn't all that much of a gain, especially anybody who looks at how the UK voted back when they were members and even more so if the UK and its people upon returning had more rights than other EU countries and citizens (i.e. if they go their exceptions back).
IMHO, it would be literally impossible to get governments in all 27 member countries to accept that Britons should get into the EU with more rights than the citizens of those countries and you need all 27 to approve a new member since it requires an unanimous vote.
(Frankly, you as an EU citizen not knowing this shit is surprising: for me as an EU citizen living in Britain during the Leave Referendum and subsequent shit show of the Leave negotiations was highly educational about the details of how the EU operates. Were you one of those people who "would be alright either way" because of having both citizenships and voted Leave?!).
But even more simple than that: bringing Britain into the EU without it changing enough Politically and as a Society that the chances of another Brexit were very low, would be the EU setting itself for yet another such event when, say, Reform UK got enough power that a section of the Tory Party felt that anti-Europeanism would get them into power.
The Political reality of present day Britain is the rise of the complete total nutter Far-Right in the form of Reform UK and Far-right ideas so normalized that even the Labour Party is spewing anti-immigrant and transphobic rhetoric.
Even with the EU sliding rightwards, very few countries in it have an Overtoon Window so far to the right.
Off topic: So lets say the conservatives correlate with the nazis in germany...then what with the EU? Should we preemtively invade germany? (Me as a germany, please do that in that case!!)
Aside from the joke element of your post, Fascist is not the same as ethno-Fascist, so somebody who is a Fascist isn't necessarily a Nazi-style one: they can simply be a traditional Fascist like the kind that for a while ruled Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece.
You can easily tell the difference between the two because ethno-Fascists are all about how they represent an ethnicity which is somehow a superior ethnicity and use claims that they're protecting themselves from another ethnicity who are describe as "violent" and even "vermin" to justify extreme violence against that other ethnicity. Traditional Fascist are all about The Nation and the superiority of it and it's people, which probably explains why for example unlike the ethno-Fascists they seldom engage casually in the most horrendous of violent acts, such as murdering children just for being of the wrong ethnicity.
The only present day ethno-Fascists I know are Zionists (who claim to represent the Jewish People, who are "God's chosen people" and have been stealing from, raping and murdering Palestinians and any other Muslims they can read whilst claiming they're only "defending themselves".
Mind you, conflating accusations of Fascism with accusations of Nazism and other similar purposeful absurdist misportrayals of the critique of others is in my experience (of living in Britain) a pretty common technique from the British Far-Right.
Yeah but the AfD has all 3 branches, monarchists, fascists and nazis :) The unholy untrinity
Just like former general and president of france de gaul predicted..