Tony Blair urges UK to rejoin a reformed EU with 10-year plan

Tony Blair has renewed his call for the UK to rejoin the European Union, saying Britain should take part in a reformed bloc. The former prime minister's intervention comes days before the Labour Party conference and has reopened a fresh argument inside Labour about Brexit.

The Tony Blair Institute has proposed a 10-year plan for the UK to rejoin the EU. Blair's argument is that the UK should think about being in the councils of the European Union, but only if the EU is reformed. If it is not reformed, he says, the UK would not want to be part of that body. The programme noted that this is the same message Blair delivered during the UK's EU presidency in 2005, when he called for reform after French and Dutch voters rejected the European Constitution.

Labour figures are divided. Stella Creasy, the Labour MP who heads the Labour Movement for Europe, said the current red lines with Europe make no sense. She said Brexit had not been a silver bullet for the British economy, security or global status, and argued the UK needs a closer relationship with its neighbours as it faces threats from Vladimir Putin and US economic measures under Donald Trump. She stopped short of saying rejoin is the only option, saying the question is how to achieve closer ties.

Maurice Glasman, the Labour peer who founded Blue Labour and backed leave, rejected Blair's intervention. He said the EU is stagnant and disintegrating, pointing to the rise of the AfD in Germany and the prospect of Marine Le Pen winning in France. He argued the UK should strengthen its sovereignty, adopt an industrial strategy and take the opportunities opened up by Brexit. He said the political class has not taken those opportunities.

The debate comes as Labour looks ahead to its conference and as attention turns to Andy Burnham. In an interview before the 2016 referendum, Burnham, then MP for Leigh and now in Makerfield, said leaving the EU was a bad idea, while recognising the strength of leave sentiment in his constituency. The UK formally left the EU in January 2020. Since then, rejoining has not been a prominent part of the public debate until now.

Jacob Rees-Mogg also criticised Blair's position. He used an old clip of Nigel Farage questioning Blair during his EU presidency, in which Farage said there had been 3,350 new legislative acts and called it a total failure. Rees-Mogg said Blair had gone into the EU presidency promising reform, including reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, and got nowhere. He said Blair now wants the same thing again: to reform the EU and have the UK rejoin to help restructure it. But Rees-Mogg said Blair wants to have his cake and eat it, because Blair also says the UK should stay independent if the EU will not agree to reform. He called this a classic Blair triangulation.