It has become a response pattern that seems to work for Andy Burnham. For every disruptive idea that is proposed to him, or that he himself raises, the Labor Prime Minister of the United Kingdom proposes “opening an honest discussion about it.” This time it has been with the thorniest issue of the hard years of Brexit: the freedom of movement of people, one of the four fundamental freedoms of the European Union, along with that of goods, services and capital.
In an interview with The Sunday Times newspaper, Burnham launched the reflection, aware that it is a stone destined to generate multiple waves on the political surface: “Freedom of movement involves a series of challenges to which I already referred during my previous stage as a parliamentarian,” the prime minister explained. "But at the same time, I don't think it is a type of immigration that generates as many difficulties [as the one that exists now]. It was a revolving door migration, where people came and went, and that is different. Now the balance of migration has changed, and we must have an honest discussion about these things," he said.
Like everything she has put on the table regarding a Brexit review, including the very idea of returning to the EU, all of Burnham's suggestions come with a backpack of caution. Firstly, he admits that the 2024 electoral program with which the Labor Party of his predecessor, Keir Starmer, came to power, established clear red lines that also bind him: no return to the community internal market; no to reincorporation into the common customs space; and not the return of the freedom of movement of people.
Any change to that approach should be subject to citizen opinion, Burnham admits. But by recovering a debate that all political forces, Labor included, had wanted to bury as uncomfortable and eroding, the prime minister takes the initiative, sides with the majority of citizens, according to the polls, and probably prepares a landing strip for future general elections - they are not scheduled until 2029 - in which his party could use the promise of return to the EU as a banner.
The year before the United Kingdom definitively left the EU, the net immigration balance in the country was just over 300,000 people. With the new law promoted by Boris Johnson's Government, shortly after, the number of people who arrived in the country reached almost one million in 2023. All of them were non-EU citizens. The number of arrivals from the European Union was negative.
Burnham's father, Roy Burnham, traveled to Germany in the 1990s to work in the telecommunications industry, as the prime minister recalled in the interview. "It was usually young people, although not always, who spent a few years away and then returned. And it was something that also benefited the British," he recalled.
A new bilateral summit between the United Kingdom and the EU will take place in Brussels on November 20. It was scheduled for last July, but Starmer's resignation and Burnham's arrival at Downing Street delayed the meeting until the new Government team had time to prepare. It was during the Labor conference in Liverpool at the beginning of October that Burnham shook things up, saying that she intended to open an “honest debate” with citizens about EU options, after frankly admitting that Brexit had caused more harm than good to the country, a decade after its approval.
But Burnham knows she's still walking on thin ice in this matter. The extreme right of Nigel Farage and his party, Reform UK, are rubbing their hands at the possibility of reopening a debate that will unleash the most visceral instincts of their parishioners. And the Conservative Party would have no choice but to toughen its approach again, so as not to be left behind.
In fact, before the debate even opens, the prime minister has already put bandages on future wounds, suggesting in the interview that it does not cross his mind that the United Kingdom would return to the Schengen area or adopt the euro as its currency, to the detriment of the sacrosanct pound sterling.
