Britain should rejoin the European Union to ‘fix’ Brexit, the president of the European Commission said late on Tuesday.
‘We goofed it up,’ Ursula von der Leyen admitted during an interview in Brussels, asked whether the UK could ever reverse its Brexit arrangement.
‘First of all, thank God. With the Windsor agreement, we had a new beginning for old friends. Very important,’ she said at an event hosted by the Politico website.
‘And then I must say, I keep telling my children, you have to fix it. We goofed it up. You have to fix it. So I think here, too, the direction of travel, my personal opinion is clear,’ she said without elaborating.
While there are no plans for the UK to rejoin the European Union, Labour leader Keir Starmer has promised an overhaul of the post-Brexit trading agreement should his party win a general election, expected to take place next year.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen opens the first International Conference on a Global Alliance to Counter Migrant Smuggling, in Brussels on 28 November
Ursula von der Leyen (L) meets with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, Britain, November 2 2023
During her interview with Politico, Ms von der Leyen said undoing Brexit was an issue for the next generation.
She also gestured to joint challenges for the bloc in reducing dependence on China and its extractive industries.
‘Since 20 years, China has bought mine after mine globally, takes the raw material, processes it in China and has the monopoly on some of the critical raw materials like, for example, lithium for clean technologies,’ she said.
‘This is the reason why I said we have to de-risk, not decouple from China … because it would not be in our interest and I think it is not viable.’
She also remarked that Ukraine has now completed ‘well over 90 per cent’ of the prerequisites to join the EU.
Ms von der Leyen is coming to the end of her first term as Commission president and has not yet announced whether or not she will run again in the June EU elections.
Under her leadership, steps have been taken to collaborating more on trade deals and research agreements with Britain, backed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
The signing of a new ‘Windsor Framework’ Brexit deal for Northern Ireland in February was widely heralded as a diplomatic success.
It sought to overcome trade problems with the Northern Ireland protocol not ironed out in the original Brexit deal while ‘safeguarding Northern Ireland’s place in the Union’ and addressing the ‘democratic deficit’ felt in the original protocol.
British MPs overwhelmingly supported the revised arrangement, with 515 votes shooting down the opposing 29 – though former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss pushed back on the new deal.
Speaking in February, Ms von der Leyen said: ‘This new Framework will allow us to begin a new chapter. It provides for long-lasting solutions that both of us are confident will work for all people and businesses in Northern Ireland. Solutions that respond directly to the concerns they have raised.’
Since then, Brussels has approved the UK’s participation in Horizon, its key €95.5 billion (c. £82.62bn) research and innovation project, and its Copernicus Space Programme – a boon for Britain as it plans to restore its place as a science and technology superpower by 2030 with investment of £370 million.
Ms von der Leyen has urged clear support for working more closely with Britain over the years.
Last October she tweeted: ‘In these testing times for our continent, we count on a strong relationship with the UK to defend our common values, in full respect of our agreements.’
While acknowledging in 2020 that ‘our partnership cannot and will not be the same as before… because with every choice comes a consequence, with every decision comes a trade off’, she urged Britons to ‘choose collaboration over isolation’ and ‘hold your governments accountable’.
Other European politicians have voiced support for Britain rejoining the bloc as the continent bears the weight of Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Guy Verhofstadt, former Prime Minister of Belgium and a sitting MEP, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, this week: ‘David Cameron says the obvious. The UK & EU should work together to defend democracy & freedom against Putin’s imperialism.
‘Why not rejoin ?! The best reply to the autocrats & their pundits in the west who want to divide us & destroy liberal democracy.’
In September, France and Germany proposed a restructuring of the EU’s membership system to allow the UK to rejoin as an associate member, rather than a full member.
Rejoining the EU would likely be a long and complicated process taking several years.
Polling this month showed 57 per cent of people in Great Britain now think it was a mistake to leave the EU, compared with 33 per cent who still believe it was the right decision.
The share of people who do not know whether it was the right decision or not has stayed relatively consistent, between 11 and 14 per cent, since 2020.
Research by Changing Europe (UKICE), a British think tank, has also found just nine per cent of British voters believe Brexit has gone well.
But 61 per cent of Leave voters believe it will eventually turn out for the best.
Approval ratings of the bloc in Britain reached a high during the pandemic, when more Britons had a favourable view of the EU than their own government.
At 60 per cent, it was highest rating since Pew began polling on the subject in 2004.
Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer meets the Prime Minister of Greece Kyriakos Mitsotakis (not pictured) on November 27, 2023 in London, Britain
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak greets EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen at the Fairmont Hotel on February 27, 2023 in Windsor, England
This September, the Office for National Statistics revised its assessment of how well the British economy was doing between 2020 and 2021, during the pandemic.
In the fourth quarter of 2021, GDP was up 0.6 per cent compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, instead of down 1.2 per cent as originally reported.
Le Monde noted that if the new calculation is right, and the statistics for 2022 and 2023 not fully corrected, Britain’s economy was 1.5 per cent stronger than its pre-pandemic level – comparable to France and better than Germany (0 per cent) but worse than Italy (2.1 per cent), Japan (3.5 per cent), Canada (3.5 per cent) and the United States (6.1 per cent).
However, research by the London School of Economics earlier this year estimated Brexit was responsible for about a third of UK food price inflation since 2019, adding nearly £7bn to Britain’s grocery bill.