As discussed in Part 6, there is increasing consensus that Brexit was a terrible mistake, probably the worst in 240 years, when Lord North lost the American Colonies due to ineptitude. Brexit is widely perceived to have been more of a failure than a success, with those thinking the former outnumbering the latter fivefold (61% vs 12%). The slogan “Make Brexit Work” is an oxymoron. Brexit cannot work. Joining the EU is the only way forward. This final piece sets out how best to achieve this.
For legitimacy and stability, another referendum is needed: not a simple majority, but at least 60% (ideally 2/3) and a simple majority in all four constituent parts of the UK. This is not only necessary to settle the matter in the UK, but also to reassure the EU that a future HMG won’t Brexit again.
One could hardly blame the EU for not wanting us, particularly after the disgraceful behaviour during the Johnson and Truss governments (Part 5). Still, surprisingly and encouragingly, two-thirds of EU citizens would welcome us back.
Rejoining will not be on the terms Britain had in 2016, with all the opt-outs. There is no rejoining in that sense, and Britain will have to commit fully to the EU and passionately embrace its European identity. Applying to join the EU is straightforward and will be done via Article 49 and the Copenhagen Criteria, which include:
- Stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities;
- The ability to take on the obligations of membership, including the capacity to effectively implement the rules, standards and policies that make up the body of EU law (the ‘acquis’), and adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union.
The EU is becoming less happy with bespoke membership deals, and while there may be some minor derogations, it will mean no rebate and committing to joining the Euro and full Schengen membership.
A referendum could be called tomorrow, but the 2016 Referendum was deeply flawed, as documented in the first three parts of this series. Unless these issues are acknowledged and resolved, a new referendum is unlikely to secure even a simple majority for “Join,” let alone a supermajority. The current majority to join the EU is based on rejoining with the opt-outs, rebates and terms that existed in 2016 and is likely to evaporate once the Copenhagen Criteria are fully understood.
The 2016 Referendum and subsequent fallout were so traumatic that the entire country is suffering from PTSD. Britain needs time to heal, but the work needs to start now. It is essential that this new referendum is run according to best practice, and Britain is honest about its place in the world and its failings.
Before calling a third EU referendum, it is important to understand what went wrong in the 2016 referendum and the subsequent fallout. A recap of the first six parts of the series follows.
The most pressing issues, identified in Part 6, that need addressing are policing of the new referendum, the media environment, the unchecked rise of racism/rabid xenophobia, dark money in politics and electoral reform.
Once these issues are honestly addressed, the road will be clear to holding a successful third referendum on EU membership.
Recap of the first six parts of this series
Part 1 looked at why the entirely unnecessary Referendum was called. Not for any pressing reason or desire to do what was best for Britain, but to settle an internal dispute in the Tory Party.
Part 2 looks at the referendum structure and design, which were so far from best practice and so slanted towards Leave that the result became almost inevitable.
Part 3 on the referendum campaign showed how any slim chance of a Remain result was lost through the ineptitude of the Remain campaign and the industrial-scale cheating and dishonesty of Leave.
In Part 4, lack of preparation for a Leave result and the fact that Leave was completely undefined resulted in mayhem and eventual humiliation for the UK, with an asymmetric Brexit deal very much in the EU’s favour. However, one that crucially protected Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement.
Part 5 discussed the Tory years, the abysmal Johnson/Frost deal, the plunge into the abyss under zealot Truss, and the slow crawl back to some semblance of sensibility under Sunak.
Part 6 discussed the Starmer years, which showed some incremental gains but lacked ambition. I hope Burnham is far more ambitious regarding the EU, but early signs are not encouraging.
The media environment and policing the new referendum
The problem
One of the major flaws of the 2016 process was the lack of policing. Leave used unchecked industrial-scale dishonesty and cheating. The BBC was utterly ineffective and used both-sideism rather than attempting to present the truth. Leave used microtargeting on social media, disgustingly in the period after Jo Cox’s murder, when both sides agreed to stop campaigning. While the Electoral Commission proved effective at ensuring the result matched voter intentions, it was utterly ineffective at ensuring honesty and balance, and at preventing dishonesty and cheating by Leave.
As Tim Lezard wrote, “The BBC is so left-wing that since 2010 its biased reporting has resulted in the election of four successive Conservative governments and, … the most right-wing Labour administration this century.”
The media environment has deteriorated considerably since 2016. It is now much more fragmented. The print media is even more tabloidy, as circulation figures have plummeted and online presence driven by rage-bait clicks has become more important.
Broadcast media has also deteriorated, with the BBC becoming shallower and bothsideism becoming entrenched. As James O’Brien puts it, “Media impartiality is a problem when ignorance is given the same weight as expertise”. This is not just a problem in the UK; it is even more pronounced in the US. Yale history professor Timothy Snyder has described bothsideism as “suicide for democracy”.
GB News, a glaringly far-right propaganda channel, is blatantly violating rules as the daming dossier compiled by The New World shows. Yet OFCOM is so toothless it is unable or unwilling to police it.
As discussed in Part 6, social media has become enshitified. X is a prime example. It has become a sewer of hatred amplified by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Other major platforms are not much better.
Towards a solution
A few things can be done immediately. HMG could and absolutely should stop using X and move on to other platforms such as BlueSky. The BBC needs to stop using “what the papers say” to set the news agenda, given the right-wing and increasingly far-right bias of the print media.
The BBC needs to move back to first principles and stop being bullied by coordinated and concerted right-wing pressure. The UK is not as far gone as Hungary, but there need to be serious changes in direction, the quality of news coverage, and management.
Leveson 2 needs to be fully implemented, and the scope and powers of OFCOM need to be enhanced so that blatant bias and deliberate lying can be addressed effectively. The Electoral Commission’s powers need to be enhanced to enable it to prevent deliberate lying. A classic case was the Brexit Bus: “We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead” was a blatant lie on so many levels. The Electoral Commission needs to be given powers similar to those of the Advertising Standards Authority to curb mis-selling.
Social Media needs much stronger control. One can get lost in technical complexity, but they need to be treated like other publishers and rapidly retract any lies, bias, and untruths. For those interested in complexity, Chaminda Jayanetti’s Policy Matters Substack is a good place to start.
Normalisation of racism and hatred of immigrants
The problem
One of my greatest fears when “Leave” won was that it would turbo-boost the far Right. Their methodology is never to compromise, bag any gains and use them as a ratchet to move the Overton Window even further to the Right. Leaving the EU was not enough for the far-right; their new target is leaving the ECHR. The same is true of hatred of immigrants, particularly non-whites and Muslims. The JCWI page is a good place to start to understand the extent of the cruelty immigrants endure.
Not content with curbing immigration, over half of Reform members think non-white Brits born abroad should be forcibly removed, and the ever more far-right group Restore Britain are openly using the phrase “Ethnic Cleansing”. Hope Not Hate provides excellent resources for monitoring the far Right.
Freedom of Movement (FoM) and immigration are very different, yet they are often conflated in the minds of many Britons.
One of the most vocal far-right pressure groups on reducing immigration is Migration Watch UK – who persuaded Cameron to choose net migration as a target, as their obvious racism, bordering on Great Replacement Theory, could not be spoken aloud. (Migration Watch should not be confused with the excellent Oxford-based Migration Observatory).
As Jonathan Portes wrote: “The Cameron target [net migration] did not create the far Right, but it did help entrench the idea that lower net migration was the obvious test of political seriousness. Once that was accepted, every failure became evidence of betrayal.” Portes further argues that this particular statistic was used to legitimise racism.
Tabloids such as the Express and Mail have long stirred up hatred of immigrants. Racists have always existed in Britain; societal norms prevented them from expressing their disgusting views openly. Within the past few years, as Kenan Malik wrote in the Observer: “Modern racism has become loud and proud”.
Social media platforms such as X are also whipping up racial tensions, and one of the worst offenders is Musk himself. A view into his chilling thinking is given in the New Republic analysing why Musk repeatedly claims his DOGE cuts killed zero children.
Enoch Powell has become a hero figure for the far-right. He was famously hounded out of the Tory party and ended up as an NI Unionist in South Down. Powell was the mentor for the disgraced Jeffrey Donaldson, recently convicted on all charges of child sex abuse and stripped of his knighthood. It seems Powell was not just a political mentor. The Village magazine, an Irish political magazine, did an investigation of Powell: The late Enoch Powell was a racist and a violent paedophile with deranged views about the intelligence of women.
One wonders what the Epstein files will reveal when they are published in unredacted form.
Of course the far-right is international and not just confined to the UK. A good resource tracking these groups internationally is the Counter Extremism Project.
Towards a solution
The solution is not the right word here. Immigration is a good thing, as was FoM, and the UK has benefited massively from immigration over the past 30 (if not 300) years. Net migration is falling rapidly and, on current trends, will be near zero at YE 2026 and negative at YE 2027.
The BBC has to stop pandering to the far-right and present the facts fully and impartially, ditching bothsideism. The general public is horrifically ill-informed. Only 16% of people in the UK know net immigration has fallen (radically, at that). 49% think it has gone up. 67% of people with negative views about immigration think it has gone up. Small boat crossings are being weaponised by the far-right to shift public opinion against immigrants. Most are unaware that small-boat crossings have declined significantly and have been a tiny fraction of net migration.
Certain sectors such as hospitality and health/social care would collapse without immigrants. Immigration is also very important for the Exchequer, contributing tens of billions of pounds per year.
Britain also has an ageing population. According to the ONS, the median age has risen from 35 to 40 since 1991. Who is going to look after our old people? As detailed in Part 6, the UK has hit a turning point where deaths exceed births, and without immigration the population would fall. This fall will be slow at first (10s of thousands); ONS data has it accelerating to -273k by 2050. This needs to be hammered home.
It is only the aggregated figures that the general public object to. When asked about specific groups: doctors, nurses, care workers, hospitality workers, and students, the general public is almost universally in favour. There is also a belief that immigrants are gaming the social welfare and housing system. There is little evidence of this. It is true many immigrants are claiming Universal Credit. This includes sectors such as hospitality, care, retail, and agriculture, where wages are generally low. Many British workers are in the same position.
International students, who are a massive boon to our University Sector and the economy in general, should be removed from the immigration column, as they generally leave within a few years. According to the ONS, students are now close to 50% of all immigrants. The latest figures (YE June 2025) are 288,000 students and 13,000 dependents. (It is getting far more difficult to bring in dependents. These are likely to be dependents of PhD students rather than undergraduates).
The Labour Government needs to passionately set the agenda and make the case for immigration rather than cowardly following the lead of the right-wing media. Once the immigration case has been won, the case for Freedom of Movement will be easy to make. Sadly, Burnham seems unlikely to make this necessary change.
Dark and foreign money in politics
The problem
This was discussed in detail in Part 6. It is not just direct donations to political parties, but the influence of right-wing think tanks such as those operating from 55 Tufton St. As this Open Democracy report from four years ago, “US climate deniers pump millions into Tory-linked Think Tanks” shows this has being going on for years. It seems to be bearing fruit with Badenock’s ditching of support for Net Zero.
Reform UK is also very much in the news regarding dark money, a good tracker at Reform Intelligence, and Peter Geoghegan’s Democracy for Sale Substack. The headline news is the £5m gift from Thai-based crypto investor Christopher Harborne, and £500,000 from the mother of convicted fraudster George Cottrell.
The current White House has openly declared its support for far-right groups in Europe. Silicon Valley tech firms’ business interests converge with those of the White House, and the US is instrumentalising far-right politicians in Europe to achieve its foreign policy objectives. Video from Richard Murphy here.
Towards a solution
Considerable work has already been done to curb foreign funding with the implementation of the Rycroft Review, with headline recommendations that British citizens living abroad will face an annual cap of £100,000 and a ban on cryptocurrency until sufficient regulation is in place to prevent untraceable funds from being funnelled into UK politics.
Stella Creasy is pushing for the £100,000 cap to apply to all political donations, not just international ones; amendment NC71– no decision has yet been made to include it. This naturally should be done. The £100,000 cap seems far too high. £10k is probably a more sensible figure.
Regarding think tanks, two changes can be made immediately.
Force transparency of think tanks and legislate for full disclosure of funding. Who Funds You? ranks current UK think tanks from A to E rated. It is no surprise genuine think tanks such as the Resolution Foundation and the Tax Justice Network are A rated. Whereas Legatum, Policy Exchange, the Tax Payers Alliance, Migration Watch and the Adam Smith Institute are all E rated.
Remove charitable status from those effectively laundering money, by taking money from sources that are, by law, prohibited from funding party political activities in the United Kingdom, and using it to promote politically biased research.
Electoral reform
I set out my argument for electoral reform and my preferred form of PR in my piece Towards a better voting system – why we need STV. The First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system is failing Britain – catastrophically. The July 2024 general election exposed just how broken it has become. Labour snatched 411 out of 650 seats – an overwhelming 63% – with barely a third of the vote. The right-wing vote was shattered: Reform scooped up 14.3% of the vote but claimed only five seats. The Conservatives bled votes to Reform and haemorrhaged seats to Labour. The Lib Dems surged, from 8 to 72 seats, thanks to tactical voting, as Labour supporters backed them where it mattered and vice versa. The result? A parliament that looks nothing like the country it claims to represent.
The single transferable vote, STV, is far the best PR system by a country mile. It maintains the constituency link and discourages extremes as set out in my piece. There is a debate to be had as to the size of the constituencies. Every constituency has several MPs, and the voter simply lists their preferred MP in order.
There is a trade-off between being too small (excellent local representation and constituency links, but less proportionate) and being too large (excellent proportionality but poorer local representation and constituency links). In Ireland, constituencies have between 3 and 5 seats and, as far as possible, natural boundaries are preserved. In this scenario, Northumberland, for example, would become a three-seater. Others argue constituencies should be larger, with up to 6 seats.
Referendum resilience and experience
I would deeply love it if a referendum were unnecessary, and that, e.g. Labour putting something like “We will start negotiating to rejoin the EU” in their manifesto and winning the next GE would be sufficient. Sadly, that won’t cut it. Given the 2016 Referendum happened, another one will be needed. As I wrote in the very first line of Part 1 in this series, “Referendums should either be a regular part of political life or avoided entirely”. I argued that the protest vote alone would likely cause the Referendum to be defeated, given the democratic deficit and that it was the first time since 1975 that many could cast a vote that mattered.
Committing to join the Euro is highly emotive. The collective memory of Pound Sterling as the world’s reserve currency lingers, even though the US dollar has held that role since Bretton Woods (1944). Emotional ties persist – UKIP even used the £ symbol for its resonance. Before the Brexit Referendum, the pound was worth about €1.30; it fell 10% after the vote and never recovered.
Westminster must make referendums a regular part of British politics. The first could address House of Lords reform, followed by referendums on proportional representation, a written constitution, and further devolution.
It may be wise to follow Iceland’s example: hold one referendum to secure a mandate to negotiate with the EU, and a second once the terms of rejoining are agreed.
Of course, apart from the Scottish Independence referendum, which Westminster won, the AV referendum, as documented in Part 6, was a catastrophic defeat: 68% ‘No’ and 32% ‘Yes’. The 2004 North East Devolution Referendum was a similar catastrophic disaster, resulting in 78% ‘No’ and 22% ‘Yes’. (I was one of the 22%).
Both the NE Devolution Referendum and AV referendum were characterised by industrial-scale dishonesty on the anti-government side. I would argue that if there was industrial-scale dishonesty in the Scottish referendum, it was on the Government side. One takeaway could be that industrial-scale dishonesty in referendums is a winning formula. That would be entirely wrong. Britain needs to implement proper policing of referendums to ensure truth and fairness, as argued in the Media Environment section.
Westminster badly needs to understand that the UK needs more democracy, not less.
Conclusion
At the start of the Burnham premiership, it is easy to be overwhelmed and discouraged by intolerance. Blair, who was a closet Catholic for years, only formally converted when he left the premiership. Burnham is the first Catholic ever to serve as PM, though some say May was a Catholic as well, but in the Anglican rather than Roman tradition. There have been historic restrictions on Catholics and Jews. The fact that this is getting so little attention is highly encouraging.
Northern Ireland has a special deal, the Windsor Framework, and has been the fastest-growing part of the UK since Brexit. It is in the Single Market for goods and is a concrete example that being close to the EU boosts economic growth.
Even if all the criteria above are met, we still face a vital referendum battle. As discussed in Part 3, the previous “Remain” campaign fell disastrously short. Yet, EU membership is a cause that deserves our passion and determination—especially as the “special relationship” with the US devolves into something deeply unhealthy. The hope remains that the US will ultimately reject the far-right regime currently in power, but nothing is certain. Even if disaster is averted, it is clear that many in the US now embrace values completely at odds with what most Britons hold dear. Our future cannot hinge on a relationship that no longer serves us.
Our place is in Europe. There is no greater patriotism than standing up for our future together, with courage, hope, and relentless resolve. We owe it to ourselves and to the generations that follow to seize this moment and fight for what truly matters.
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