Alison Glasspool

🚨 AMERICA HAS REJECTED TRUMP Donald Trump told voters to treat him as though he were on the ballot. They did. 🔵 Democrats have seized the Senate, flipping seats in Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, North Carolina and Ohio and are closing in on the House. 🤩 Texas even elected a Democratic governor. This was a rebellion against Trump’s tariffs, corruption, Iran war and the soaring fuel, food and living costs his policies helped create. 🔴 Trumpism is not irresistible. Authoritarian power can be confronted and defeated through the ballot box. 🇬🇧 Britain should learn the lesson immediately. 🛑 Stop grovelling to a collapsing strongman. Stop tying our security, technology and economy to Trump’s America. Our democratic future lies with Europe.

What an extraordinarily pessimistic view of Britain. Believing Britain’s future lies in Europe doesn’t mean believing Britain “can’t hack it”. It means recognising that sovereignty isn’t measured by how many things you insist on doing alone. France isn’t defeated. Germany isn’t defeated. The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Spain and Poland haven’t been “subsumed”. They are sovereign European democracies which have chosen to exercise some powers together because acting together can give nations more power over the world around them than acting alone. And some of this argument is simply wrong. EU countries set their own income and corporation tax rates and decide how their revenues are spent. Not every EU country uses the euro. Yes, members share trade policy, tariffs and many regulations. But that’s the point of coordination to get better deals. In return, businesses gain access to a huge Single Market without customs barriers between 27 countries. Brexit Britain chose instead to erect a trade border between itself and that market and even created barriers to moving food within its own United Kingdom. Now we’re negotiating to remove some of those barriers by aligning food standards with Europe again. Britain is finally rediscovering geography. And after Ukraine, Putin and the enormous geopolitical upheavals of recent years, I find the idea that European nations working together represents weakness particularly strange. Europe was built because generations who had experienced what happened when European nations turned against one another understood the value of cooperation. Britain doesn’t become smaller by sitting at the European table. It gets a chair. My optimistic view of Britain is that we should be helping to shape Europe not standing outside it insisting that isolation is sovereignty. 🇬🇧🇪🇺

Rejoining the EU won’t have to mean joining the euro or Schengen. Two EU officials have told POLITICO that Brussels could be flexible, taking Britain’s circumstances into account. This isn’t a formal offer: the EU has no official position as the UK has not applied. But it challenges the claim that Britain would have to accept every aspect of deeper integration to come back. The choice should be put honestly to the public. And with 55% wanting to reverse Brexit, the case for discussing our future in Europe is getting harder to ignore.