The Remainer Who Borrowed a Convenient Leave Voice
Andy Burnham told Leigh that free movement served the boss. He told Makerfield he would not reopen Brexit. Now he is in Downing Street, and the conversation he promised not to have is the only one his government wants.
Andy Burnham has never changed his mind about Europe. That is the problem. What changes is what he is prepared to admit, and that depends entirely on who is in the room.
On 7 December 2016, six months after the referendum, Burnham stood up in the Commons as MP for Leigh, a Leave-voting town on the edge of Wigan. He had wanted Britain to stay in. He told the House that his preference had been to reform free movement from within the EU, but that the country had understandably lost patience. Then he said something few Labour politicians have dared to say before or since:
“There is nothing socialist about the system of open borders that allows multinationals to treat people as commodities and move them around Europe, to drive down labour costs and create a race to the bottom.”
He told the House that free movement was not working for towns where traditional industry had given way to low-wage, insecure work. He said those towns got no help to manage the pressure on wages, housing, schools and GP surgeries. He warned his own side that calling Leave voters racist was both wrong and politically suicidal, and that the left’s silence was handing the argument to the right.
Every word of it was true. And he knew it.
Andy Burnham Brexit U-turn: From Leigh to Downing Street
Nearly ten years later, Burnham needed another Leave seat. Makerfield, next door to his old constituency, is reported to have voted 65 per cent Leave. In May, as he sought the Labour selection, he said Brexit had been damaging, but that the last thing the country should do was re-run those arguments. He told voters he was not proposing that the UK consider rejoining the EU. Once elected, he promised to apply a single question to everything his government did: would it work for the people of Makerfield and communities like it across England?
That was the doorstep. Then came the conference hall. In Liverpool in September, Burnham told Labour members that Brexit had done more harm than good, and that rejoining was among the options. This month, in an interview with the Sunday Times, he signalled that staying out of free movement would no longer be a red line. Downing Street had to clarify that he was “not setting out a concrete position either way”.
His ministers have followed the script. On Sunday, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner told the BBC that free movement should not be off the table, and that she wanted an honest conversation about the trade-offs before putting it to the people at a general election.
Labour’s 2024 manifesto contains a single, unambiguous sentence: there will be no return to the single market, the customs union or freedom of movement. That was the settlement. Burnham promised Makerfield he would not reopen it. Within four months, he has.
Rejoining the EU Without a Referendum: A Treacherous Path
Let me say plainly what I think is happening, because this is opinion and it should be read as such.
This is not a conversation. It is a campaign. The next two years will be spent softening the ground: an “evidence-based” review here, a “closer partnership” there, ministers repeating that nothing is off the table until the table is all that is left. Then the next manifesto will carry a pledge to rejoin.
We already know the route, because one of Labour’s senior figures has drawn the map. Dame Emily Thornberry, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, told Sky News this month that Labour should not bother with another referendum, and should instead make rejoining a general election issue. Put it in the manifesto, win a majority, and call that the mandate.
It is a way of overturning the largest democratic vote in British history without ever asking the same question again. Even voters who want to rejoin seem uneasy with it. YouGov found that 54 per cent of them still want a referendum before membership is restored.
The likely result is an election fought as a single question: Labour or Reform, in or out, with the working-class towns that voted Leave forced to choose between a party that ignored them and a party that will exploit them. Before that, we can look forward to another parliament of paralysis, as the whole exhausting argument is dragged out and fought again. Every betrayal, real or perceived, will make another Reform voter. That is not leadership. It is a gamble with the heartlands as the stake.
Why Rejoin Arguments Miss the Reality of Britain’s Economy
The rejoiners have arguments, and they deserve a fair hearing.
They say public opinion has shifted. YouGov’s tracker has put support for rejoining at around 51 per cent since January 2024. But we have heard this before. Remain led in the polls for most of 2016, and the country voted Leave. Every year since, a new survey has declared the argument settled. And every time the question has come anywhere near the ballot box, people have answered differently: the Brexit Party topping the European elections in 2019, Boris Johnson’s three words, “Get Brexit Done”, delivering the largest Conservative majority since 1987, and this May, Reform winning the most council seats in England. In Wigan, the borough that contains Makerfield, Reform took 24 of the 25 seats up for election. A poll measures what people say when nothing is at stake. An election measures what they do when something is.
The rejoiners have other arguments. They say Brexit added red tape and friction to trade with our nearest market, and that is true for many goods exporters. And they say Brexit did not deliver control of immigration, which is also true: net migration rose to record levels after we left.
But look at what those arguments leave out.
Ministers now claim exports have fallen by 20 per cent. Yet House of Commons Library figures show services exports to the EU have grown strongly since 2020, even where goods trade has suffered. The economy did not collapse. The IMF projected that Britain would outgrow Germany, France and Italy in both 2025 and 2026. The doom was a forecast, endlessly repeated until it was mistaken for a fact.
As for migration, the record numbers were a choice made in Westminster, not an accident of leaving. A British government designed that visa system, and a British government can redesign it. Burnham himself told conference that the British right “gave it away in the first place”. He is right. So why is his answer to give it away again?
Sovereignty is not a guarantee of good government. It is the precondition for it. Power used badly is still power you can use well. Hand it to Brussels, accept rules made by others under “dynamic alignment”, and you lose the right to use it at all.
Nye Bevan saw this coming in 1957. Writing in Tribune, he called the Common Market “an escapist conception in which the play of market forces will take the place of political responsibility”. He understood it as the symptom of socialists who had lost faith in using their own parliaments to plan their own economies. Seventy years on, a Labour government with an enormous majority is reaching for the same escape.
Who the Single Market Serves: Cheap Labour and Stagnant Wages
None of the rejoiners’ arguments answers the question Burnham himself posed in 2016. What does free movement do for the towns he described?
The single market rests on four freedoms: goods, services, capital and people. The City wants its services passport back. The business lobbies want their pool of labour back. For finance and for the boss, rejoining means opportunity. For the plasterer whose day rate has not moved in a decade, the shop worker whose hours are cut whenever a cheaper rota can be filled, and the young man in Ashton on a zero-hours contract, it means the same downward pressure Burnham described in the Commons, with nobody left to stop it.
Most economists find the average effect of EU migration on wages was small. But averages are where working-class grievances go to be dismissed. The pressure was never felt in the average. It was felt at the bottom of the labour market, in exactly the towns that voted Leave, and that is why they voted Leave.
There is a revealing line in Burnham’s conference speech. He listed the things that had put Britain on the wrong path for forty years: deindustrialisation, deregulation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. He is right about the first four. But Brexit does not belong on that list. For millions in the heartlands, Brexit was the vote against the other four. It was the one time in forty years they were asked, and they answered.
Industrial Strategy Over Brussels: What Northern Towns Need Now
What would pass Burnham’s own Makerfield test is not a return to Brussels. It is an industrial strategy with teeth. That means public ownership where the market has failed, public procurement that buys British, apprenticeships that lead somewhere, and an economy that makes the things we use here rather than shipping them in from the other side of the world. Every one of those tools is easier to use outside the single market than inside it. A cheaper bus fare is welcome. A warm summit with Ursula von der Leyen may make good television. Neither will lift a single wage in Hindley or Leigh.
If Burnham believes free movement now serves the communities he spoke for in 2016, he should go back to Makerfield and say so on the doorsteps where he made his promise. He won’t, because he knows the answer.
Burnham knew the truth when he needed Leigh’s votes. He knew it again when he needed Makerfield’s. The only thing that has changed is that he no longer needs them.
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