𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

And right now, there’s not much of a discussion either. Just hints, leaks and suggestions, and a surprisingly quiet response from Brexiteers. The result? We’re being slowly nudged back towards Brussels, like it or not. Burnham keeps testing the waters. He’s floated everything from restoring freedom of movement to going “all the way” and rejoining the European Union. He’s gaslighting us, playing party politics to unite the anti-Brexit left and trying to reverse the referendum by stealth. And the arguments are getting more ridiculous by the day.

Labour won the general election promising not to bring back free movement during this Parliament. Burnham’s own election victory came in Leave-voting Makerfield, where he promised voters he wouldn’t reopen the Brexit debate. His exact words were: “The last thing we should do right now is re-run those arguments.” Yet he seems to restart the debate almost every single day.

Burnham also blames almost every ill afflicting Britain on the 2016 vote, even many of our EU neighbours are in a far worse state. Last week, Labour MP Stella Creasy, chair of the Labour Movement for Europe, once again claimed that leaving the EU has cost the UK between 6% and 8% of GDP. It’s a familiar Remainer claim, based on research by the pro-EU Centre for Economic Policy Research. But it relies on questionable assumptions and reaches an extraordinary conclusion.

Since Brexit, the UK economy has grown 13.2%. That’s disappointing but it’s better than France, up 12.8%, Italy, up 10.7%, and Germany, up a mere 7.2%. If Creasy’s figures were correct, the UK might have grown by as much as 21.2%. Does anyone seriously believe we would have grown at three times Germany’s rate if we’d stayed in the EU?

Burnham also refuses to confront the potential cost of rejoining. We’re unlikely to get the £5billion rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher. And may have to rejoin Schengen, accept freedom of movement and eventually adopt the euro. EU negotiators will treat us as supplicants, and laugh in our faces.

But why would we want to rejoin a trading bloc whose economic and political power is dwindling, while its bureaucrats accelerate the process by regulating it to death?

Burnham completely ignores the fact that Europe is in turmoil right now. France has been rocked by weeks of protests and rioting, with the unrest spreading to Italy, Germany, Albania and Belgium. German taxpayers fear they’ll be left on the hook for debts run up by the French, whose profligacy risks crashing the euro. Is this the dysfunctional club Burnham wants to beg his way back into? We’d soon be begging to leave again. But Labour’s latest argument for closer EU ties is peak madness.

In a statement marking Remembrance Sunday, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said her department wanted to “repair” damage to “the strong links with Europe that veterans’ service helped to secure and endure after the Second World War”.

So apparently the Spitfire pilots defending our skies in the Battle of Britain, the Desert Rats defeating Rommel in North Africa and British troops storming the beaches on D-Day did so because they wanted us to rejoin the EU’s Erasmus+ programme, as Nandy suggested. It’s beyond madness.

Labour is coming up with all sorts of ridiculous arguments to justify reversing Brexit. There’s nothing honest about this process at all. We simply can’t believe a word they say.