About rejoin.info

The Brexit debate dominated British politics for three years, from 2016 to 2019. By the time Brexit was finally implemented on 31 December 2020, a consistent majority in polling (56%) already believed it had been ‘wrong to leave’ the European Union. Just ten months later, in November 2021, we saw the first majority for Rejoin.

Since then, that majority has stabilised and grown. Polls rose and fell with the political weather until the Liz Truss government of September–October 2022, the shortest-lived in British history. The crisis she caused, driven by Brexit Tory ‘fantasy economics’, saw Rejoin pull ahead to 60% support in some polls, a level it has continued to consolidate since.

The next generation believes in rejoining even more strongly, by a massive 82% among 18–25 year olds. Every single day, more young people turn 18 and get the right to vote, and 4 out of every 5 of them would vote to rejoin the EU tomorrow.

This shift happened because Brexit went from a theoretical debate – a set of contested predictions about the future – to a reality we are living through every day. People may not have believed the dire warnings about Brexit, but they do believe the evidence of their own eyes. Brexit is now widely identified as a contributor to the UK’s cost-of-living crisis. London School of Economics researchers found that Brexit added £5.8 billion to UK food bills alone over two years. This economic picture was a significant contributor to the Tories’ defeat in the 2024 general election – which in turn has opened new possibilities for pro-EU campaigning.

Questions of possibility

Yet while the public’s lived experience is making the case for rejoining for us, we face a new stumbling block. Many who deeply wish to rejoin the EU ask: can it really be done? Some tell us that, for one reason or another, it may not even be possible. Others argue that the road ahead is fraught with difficulty: an EU that has ‘moved on’, whose criteria we no longer meet, whose rules we no longer comply with, with vengeful EU member states that would force us to sign up to the euro, accept punitive terms of membership, and then veto our application anyway.

Here, we are unfortunately thrown back into the realm of the abstract and debatable, of prediction and counter-prediction. After years of ignoring or even mocking the idea of rejoining, its opponents are beginning to take it seriously enough to push back. Every step forward for the Rejoin movement is now met with arguments for the supposed impossibility of rejoining – whether political, legal or practical.

Our firmest foothold, apart from sustained public support for Rejoin, is the extensively documented membership processes of the EU – which let us counter the widespread myths. Countries regularly join the EU, and the process and requirements are laid out publicly for all to see. Yet despite all the years of Brexit controversy, knowledge of the EU’s workings remains relatively low among the British population – and perhaps especially among our politicians.

For many in the public debate, the idea that rejoining the EU is impossible (or near-impossible) acts as a comfort blanket: it gives an excuse to avoid confronting Brexit, a reason to avoid plunging ourselves back into such arguments, and limit ourselves to tweaking the Brexit deal at the edges.

We reject this – and not just as a matter of opinion. The idea that the UK cannot rejoin the EU, that there is some immovable obstacle that blocks the path, is simply untrue.

The purpose of this website

That brings us to the reason for the existence of rejoin.info. We wanted to create the definitive, evidence-based explanation that rejoining the EU is absolutely possible – and how it would work. Even where the fundamental possibility of rejoining is admitted, much sand has been thrown in the gears about whether the road will be too long and the ‘price’, whether financially or in policy terms, too high. We are often told that the consistent 60% majority for rejoining, built by the realities of Brexit, will melt away once the public is confronted with the realities of negotiating our re-entry.

Every time the UK-EU relationship is in the news, social media sites light up with exactly the kinds of debates about the practicalities of rejoining that rejoin.info is designed to address. Our hope is that this website will give Rejoiners all the information needed to provide credible answers to these points.

We do not claim ‘neutrality’, since we are clearly Rejoin supporters – but in our answers we have endeavoured to stick to the facts, and not let mere opinion intrude. We have aimed here not for rhetoric but for rigour, with only well-sourced facts included and the text fact-checked by experts. You will find citations of our sources in the links included on each page.

We hope that this website can be a tool to inform and enrich the growing discussion about rejoining the EU.