Burnham’s Brexit betrayal makes him an enemy of democracy

‘I am not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU.’ So said Andy Burnham to the voters of Makerfield on 18 May 2026, a month before the by-election that catapulted him into Downing Street. ‘I respect the decision that was made at the referendum and it’s going to undermine everything I’ve said about strengthening democracy if we don’t respect that vote.’

Now, having promised to respect Brexit when campaigning in a heavily Leave-voting constituency, Burnham struck a very different chord this week when addressing the EU-obsessed Labour Party faithful in Liverpool. The UK prime minister namechecked ‘Brexit’ as one of the five great ills of our age, alongside ‘Deindustrialisation. Deregulation. Privatisation. Austerity.’ And he promised that, come the next UK-EU summit, he would lay out all the possible options for Britain’s long-term future with Europe – which range from rejoining the Customs Union or the Single Market to rejoining the EU in full.

Any respect he may have had for the people of Makerfield or for their democratically expressed wishes was clearly short-lived. Here was the most powerful man in the country promising to put their votes in the shredder, and to deny them the right – in perpetuity – to have any kind of say on some of the most significant matters affecting the country.

Make no mistake, rejoining the EU – or any of its institutions – means taking crucial political questions out of democratic contestation. Control over immigration, energy, the environment, agriculture and industry, to name but a few, would no longer be held by Britain’s elected governments or MPs. Rules and laws would instead be imposed by the unelected apparatchiks in Brussels, or bound up in unchangeable, unchallengeable treaties.

All of which gives the lie to the notion that Burnham is some sort of radical, breaking with decades of ‘neoliberal’ consensus. On the contrary, he wants to reverse the public’s genuinely radical decision to overthrow the shackles of the globalist order. Brexit voters wanted to restore democratic control over our institutions and policies. Andy wants to restore the rule of the unelected technocrats.

Burnham’s EU-worship also exposes the hollowness of ‘Manchesterism’, the devolution agenda that the PM promises will deliver ‘the biggest transfer of power out of Whitehall in modern times’. In Burnham’s devolved Britain, the public can concern themselves with bins and buses, sure, but the big stuff will be left to Brussels.

And there is no issue bigger in British politics than immigration. It consistently polls highest as the most important issue facing the country. What’s more, Britons are more likely than any other people on Earth to cite immigration as their nation’s leading problem. Yet rejoining the EU or the EU’s Single Market means we will instantly lose control over our national borders. Freedom of movement is a non-negotiable cornerstone of the EU treaties.

Remainers will often point to the so-called Boriswave as ‘proof’ that Brexit is the cause of, rather than a solution to, Britain’s uncontrolled borders – a reference to the roughly 2.15million migrants let in by the Conservatives between January 2021 and June 2024. Indeed, Burnham deployed a version of this argument in Liverpool, claiming that Brexit ‘weakened immigration control’. In reality, non-EU migration also exploded in several EU member states after the UK left, including in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands – partly as countries scrambled to fill Covid-related staffing shortages and partly as millions of Ukrainians fled from the Russian invasion.

The difference is that Brexit Britain now has the sovereign right to chart its own course on immigration, whereas EU members are held hostage by every other member’s border policies. Pedro Sánchez’s 2026 amnesty for a million illegal migrants in Spain, or Germany’s welcoming of 2.7million migrants in 2022, would have had implications for Britain too, were it not for Brexit.

Perhaps the greatest lie about reversing Brexit is that it would reinvigorate Britain’s ailing economy. For Burnham, it is an article of faith that Brexit has weakened our economy and hampered our industries. But even the struggling UK is actually growing faster than its EU rivals, including France, which is on the verge of a sovereign debt crisis, and Germany, which is in terminal industrial decline.

Far from boosting the economy, rejoining the EU would lock us into the disastrous policies that have brought the whole of Europe to ruin. The political consensus on Net Zero might be collapsing in Britain, but all EU countries are bound by the same emissions targets. Ruinously expensive green-energy policies and regulations would be gold-plated and locked in for all time by the European Climate Law. The very deindustrialisation that Burnham claims to hate is inevitable if Britain cosies back up to Brussels.

Should Andy Burnham succeed in dragging Britain back into the EU, this will be the greatest betrayal of democracy of any of our lifetimes. It’s not just that he will have lied to his Makerfield constituents, whose Leave votes he promised to respect. It’s not just that he will have ignored the 2016 referendum, the largest democratic exercise in British history. And it’s not even just that he would be giving powers back to Brussels that Britain has only just repatriated.

No, the EU in 2026 is actually even more hostile to democracy than what we voted to Leave in 2016. In the 2010s, the EU notoriously turfed out the elected prime ministers of Italy and Greece and replaced them with technocratic administrations prepared to do Brussels’ bidding. Now the EU acts before ‘problematic’ – that is, populist, Eurosceptic – parties and election candidates can reach power. Brussels now interferes extensively in national elections, while the EU’s Digital Services Act and the Democracy Shield provide a vast EU-wide censorship apparatus to limit and shape political debate. One would hope that even ardent Remainers would be queasy about the prospect of Brussels picking our prime ministers.

For all Andy Burnham’s talk about giving back to the people, his plot to betray Brexit marks him out as an enemy of democracy. He wants to put the people back in their box. We must refuse to go quietly.