Brussels – Ten years have passed since the United Kingdom shocked the European Union with the Brexit referendum. Since then, EU-UK relations have never fully recovered, although over the past year and a half Labour has signalled an opening by promoting the so-called ‘reset’. However, an external threat could reshuffle the cards in favour of a rapprochement between the two sides of the Channel: US President Donald Trump.
“The language in the US national security strategy about Europe facing civilisation erosion does not just apply to the EU, but also to the UK,” says Ian Bond, Deputy Director of the Centre for European Reform (CER). Speaking to The New Union Post, he argues that both Brussels and London must now come to terms with the fact that “the US is no longer a reliable ally.”
As Trump’s repeated threats to annex Greenland demonstrate, he places no value on transatlantic relations and is impossible to predict from one day to the next. “It may not be good for national security,” the former British diplomat adds, particularly given that Trump’s inner circle – starting with Vice-President J. D. Vance – “is quite hostile to Europe, including the UK.”
Despite many continuing to cling to the idea that the UK enjoys a special relationship with the US – rooted in dependency and close intelligence cooperation – Bond argues that, sooner or later, the British government will have to accept that “it will not enjoy the same relationship with Washington in the future, however difficult it finds it.”
As the CER’s Deputy Director points out, unless the UK wishes to become an isolated power, “it has to rebuild bridges that were demolished in 2016 to the nearest neighbours in the EU.” This would amount to the construction of an European alliance positioned in opposition to Washington. Because, if London were to move closer to the EU – which Trump and J. D. Vance openly oppose – the United States “would likely end intelligence and security cooperation,” Bond warns.
Is the UK ready to get close to the EU?
Five years after the Withdrawal Agreement came fully into force, Brussels and London have yet to find a workable formula for resetting a relationship that, given their shared recent history, is meant to evolve into something entirely new – neither a return to EU membership nor a straightforward agreement between third parties.
After a succession of Conservative governments that “wanted to show that Brexit was a great success,” Labour came into office in July 2024 “without all of that baggage.” Yet the party now finds itself operating in a difficult domestic political environment. As Bond explains, each time the government moves the UK even a millimetre closer to the EU, both the opposition party currently leading in the polls – Reform UK – and the Conservatives denounce it as a betrayal of the British people’s will, as expressed in the 2016 referendum.
For some of these figures – including David Coburn, the leader of UKIP in Scotland, who has faced pressure over allegations that he accepted money from Russia while serving as an MEP – “this is not about hatred of the EU, but a quite opportunistic and unprincipled route to political success.” For people like Nigel Farage, however, sovereignty remains paramount. “A decade after Brexit, this has become an article of faith,” Bond explains, noting that one cannot simply decide they have chosen the wrong religion without being prepared to pay a steep price. “Your social networks will be destroyed – it is much easier to say that they were right all along.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer “clearly does not feel that he is politically strong enough” to challenge that narrative, despite the latest opinion poll showing that 58% of people consider Brexit a mistake. Does this mean that the UK public is ready to rejoin the EU? “A lot of people would want to go back to the relationship the UK had before with the EU,” the former British diplomat notes, but if the EU insisted on its normal accession process, “I think that this percentage would go down.”
Complicating matters is the fact that Farage’s Reform UK is currently leading in the opinion polls. As a result, the UK finds itself in “a paradoxical situation” in which the majority recognise Brexit as a mistake, while the potential largest single party in Parliament after the next general election “could be a party saying that Brexit was the greatest idea ever.”
It should not be forgotten that if the UK were to submit an application for EU membership, unanimity among the EU member states would be required, and several countries – including France – would need to hold a referendum on whether to allow the former member to rejoin. “I wonder how many countries really want to go through that again, after so many years of British psychodrama,” the CER’s Deputy Director points out.
