Now that Britain is out of the European Union, it will be very hard to go back in. In the 2016 referendum campaign, one of the things that Vote Leave did most effectively was point out that because the EU was constantly evolving, no one could be confident that a vote for Remain was a vote for the status quo. And now Rejoin campaigners will be the ones who want to rip up current arrangements. There is no certainty about the terms on which the country could rejoin. Would the UK, for instance, be expected to commit to ‘ever closer union’ if in the future it were to return to the fold?
Even if, say, a party were to win an election on a Rejoin platform, that would not be sufficient for Britain to actually rejoin. The view in Brussels is that there would be no point in readmitting the UK unless there was a broad, cross-party consensus in favour. There is no desire to have countries coming and going at regular intervals, depending on who wins an election. This means that the Tories will, in effect, have a veto over whether to go back in or not.
Historically, it was Labour that was split over whether or not Britain should join the European project in the first place, but in recent decades the European question became the fault line in the Tory party. Since Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Bruges speech, any Tory’s stance on Europe said more about their position in the party than anything else. Europe is the issue that ended the careers of the last four Tory prime ministers.
But now Boris Johnson has transformed the Tories into a Leave party, kicking out the grandees who could not accept that. The Tory civil war over Europe is over. What, then, will the Tories fight about now?
A few years ago, one might have thought that the answer to that question could be climate change.
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