EU migration will be Burnham’s biggest challenge

What is Andy Burnham up to? In the week of a difficult Budget, the prime minister has chosen to shove the sensitive and divisive issue of Brexit back to the top of the political agenda. For a man whose self-proclaimed mission was to unite the country and pursue a “relentless domestic focus”, he has angered some and enraptured others with his call for an “honest discussion” about the possibility of a return to free movement of workers between the UK and the European Union, according to The Independent.

A reset summit is due in November to finalise some modest moves on food and drink border checks, the EU energy trading system and a youth mobility scheme, unobjectionable to all but the most hardened Eurosceptics. Yet this innocuous agenda is surely going to be overshadowed by this “honest discussion” — the kind of thing a hapless marriage counsellor might advise, accidentally provoking an explosion of recrimination. Burnham might recall what befell David Cameron, who tried to insist during his EU renegotiations with German chancellor Angela Merkel that some aspects of free movement had to be revisited: he got short shrift.

So is Burnham being foolish in stoking the embers of this most emotive of arguments, or being smart by taking on the objections many still hold about moving to a closer relationship with the EU?

It is unlikely Burnham chose his words merely to send Nigel Farage into a frenzy; he wants to make his government a success and improve the lives of the British people, and put some options for a future relationship to them. It has to be done because Brexit isn’t working and the 2016 vote has self-evidently not settled the issue.

If the country is to move on from the “red lines” set out by Sir Keir Starmer in Labour’s manifesto and forge a more constructive and mutually rewarding relationship with its closest neighbours and largest export market, then a frank debate is – on balance – welcome. We have certainly had enough of the dishonest versions that prevailed ahead of the 2016 referendum.

As Angela Rayner points out, the hypothetical scenarios about the economy during the Brexit traumas of 2016-2020 are now a real-world, lived experience; most people have concluded that Brexit has failed to live up to expectations, and that Brexit has made Britain poorer than it would have been — by an estimated six to eight per cent, which is more than enough to fund social care, adequate defence, even some tax cuts. Demographic changes, to put it delicately, have also shifted the balance of public opinion.

Yet whatever the data says, “freedom of movement” — code for immigration from Europe — remains the most politically charged obstacle to more radical European reintegration, so needs to be “unpacked”. Burnham suggested during his speech to the Labour conference that Britain has options, including the status quo; closer defence cooperation and joining the EU customs union would not require unfettered freedom of movement.

But full membership, or joining the single market — which would yield the greatest economic boost — would require a fundamental change in immigration policy for workers. In 2016, arguments in favour of freedom of movement were lost; they’ll have to be won during this new “honest discussion”. For example, the “lump of labour” fallacy — the notion that EU workers will take jobs that should be going to young British Neets — must be tackled. In truth, boosting the economy through higher investment and exports creates jobs, as was the long-term experience after the original accession in 1973.

Moreover, the number of Neets has increased since Brexit, to one million, and thus seems to be driven by post-Covid economic malaise rather than immigration trends. We have also seen how EU migration was simply replaced post-Brexit by workers on visas from the rest of the world, the so-called “Boris wave”.