راه طولانی بازگشت

چکیده فارسی

عنوان: راه طولانی بازگشت

 بریتانیا ده سال پس از برگزیت: فقیرتر از آنچه می توانست باشد، هنوز یکپارچه و آرام آرام در مسیر بازگشت به اروپا

چکیده: ده سال پس از همه پرسی ۲۰۱۶، پرسش ها درباره آینده بریتانیا بیشتر شده است: آیا این کشور دچار افول اقتصادی شده، آیا اسکاتلند یا ایرلند شمالی جدا می شوند و آیا بازگشت به اتحادیه اروپا ممکن است؟ این مقاله مروری با تکیه بر منابع ۲۰۲۵ و ۲۰۲۶ از نهادهای بریتانیایی، اروپایی و آمریکایی به این پرسش ها پاسخ می دهد. پژوهش دفتر ملی پژوهش های اقتصادی آمریکا برآورد می کند برگزیت تا سال ۲۰۲۵ تولید سرانه بریتانیا را ۶ تا ۸ درصد و سرمایه گذاری را ۱۲ تا ۱۸ درصد کاهش داده است، اما اقتصاد همچنان رشدی متوسط دارد و قراردادهای تجاری تازه تنها بخش کوچکی از این زیان را جبران کرده اند. خطر تجزیه در کوتاه مدت پایین است: اسکاتلند تقریبا به دو نیمه برابر تقسیم شده و بدون رضایت وست مینستر راه قانونی برای همه پرسی ندارد، و شواهد در ایرلند شمالی هنوز به آستانه برگزاری همه پرسی نرسیده است. بازگشت به اتحادیه از نظر حقوقی با ماده ۴۹ پیمان اتحادیه اروپا ممکن است، اما به رای همه ۲۷ عضو و چشم پوشی از امتیازهای پیشین مانند تخفیف بودجه و معافیت از یورو نیاز دارد. نخست وزیر تازه، اندی برنهام، اکنون آشکارا از گزینه های بازگشت سخن می گوید، اما رقابت با حزب ریفرم و احتیاط بروکسل این مسیر را طولانی می کند. پیش بینی مقاله این است که بریتانیا گام به گام به اروپا نزدیک تر می شود، اما دست کم تا چند سال بیرون از آن می ماند.

کلیدواژه ها: برگزیت، بریتانیا، اتحادیه اروپا، ماده ۴۹، استقلال اسکاتلند، ایرلند شمالی، اقتصاد سیاسی

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/long-road-back-mehdi-mahdavian-sadr-ckw8e

The Long Road Back

Britain is poorer than it would have been, still united, and edging back towards Europe. Full membership is legally possible, but politically a long way off.

Dr. Mehdi Mahdavian Sadr

Ten years after the referendum of June 2016, the questions about Britain’s future have multiplied rather than settled. Is the country in economic decline? Will Scotland or Northern Ireland leave? Is it drifting back towards the European Union, and could it rejoin even if it wanted to?

Each question has attracted confident answers from both sides of the old debate. This article tries to answer them with evidence published in 2025 and 2026 by British, European and American institutions. The short version is that Britain is neither collapsing nor thriving. It is paying a steady price for leaving, holding together for now, and moving back towards Europe in small, practical steps, while the idea of a full return has moved from taboo to open discussion at the highest level of government.

The economic ledger

The most comprehensive recent estimate comes from the United States. In a National Bureau of Economic Research study published in late 2025, Nicholas Bloom and his co-authors compared Britain with 33 similar economies and drew on a large survey of British firms. They estimate that by 2025 Brexit had reduced UK GDP per capita by 6 to 8 per cent, business investment by 12 to 18 per cent, and both employment and productivity by 3 to 4 per cent. The damage turned out larger than most early forecasts, largely because uncertainty dragged on for nearly five years rather than resolving quickly (Bloom et al., 2025; NBER, 2026).

A Federal Reserve note published in January 2026 reaches a similar conclusion on trade. UK goods exports to the EU were still 18 per cent below their 2019 level in real terms in 2024; many smaller exporters simply stopped selling some products into the EU, and new non-tariff barriers raised trade costs by the equivalent of a 2 to 12 per cent tariff. Services exports, by contrast, recovered beyond their pre-Brexit level (Airaudo et al., 2026).

Britain’s own fiscal watchdog broadly agrees. The Office for Budget Responsibility continues to assume that Brexit will leave long-run productivity about 4 per cent lower and trade intensity about 15 per cent lower than if the UK had stayed, and judges these assumptions to have been broadly borne out (Office for Budget Responsibility [OBR], 2026). On the financial side, Bruegel estimates that around 10 per cent of UK banking assets and some 40,000 jobs have moved to continental financial centres since Brexit (Berg et al., 2025).

These are large numbers, but they describe a country that is poorer than it would otherwise have been, not one that is shrinking. That distinction matters for everything that follows.

The counter-case

Brexit’s defenders point to a different set of facts, and some of them hold up. The UK economy has kept growing. In January 2026 the International Monetary Fund put growth in 2025 at about 1.4 per cent and projected that Britain would be the third fastest-growing G7 economy in 2026, behind only the United States and Canada (Yahoo Finance, 2026). By May the IMF had trimmed its 2026 forecast to 1.0 per cent, mainly because of the energy shock from war in the Middle East rather than anything to do with Europe (International Monetary Fund [IMF], 2026). The economy grew 0.4 per cent in the second quarter of 2026, faster than Germany and France (House of Commons Library, 2026a).

An independent trade policy has also produced results. The UK–India free trade agreement entered into force in July 2026, and the government expects it to raise UK GDP by about 0.13 per cent in the long run (House of Commons Library, 2026b). In May 2025 Britain became the first country to strike a tariff deal with the Trump administration, with a 10 per cent baseline rate and lower duties on cars and aerospace. Yet Parliament’s Business and Trade Committee noted that some British goods still face higher cumulative duties than equivalent EU exports under the EU’s later 15 per cent ceiling, and that traders operate on worse terms than before 2025 (Business and Trade Committee, 2025).

The honest reading is that these gains are real but small next to the losses. A deal worth 0.13 per cent of GDP cannot offset a hit measured in whole percentage points.

The reset with Europe

Since Labour took office in July 2024, London and Brussels have been rebuilding the relationship piece by piece. The first UK–EU summit, in May 2025, produced a “Common Understanding” covering some twenty areas of cooperation, from defence to energy (Bond, 2026). Some items have been delivered: Britain will rejoin the Erasmus+ student exchange programme in 2027 at a cost of about £570 million, and the EU extended its recognition of UK data protection rules to 2031 (Rutter, 2026).

The most significant piece is a planned agreement on food and agricultural standards. Under it, the UK would follow EU rules on food safety and animal and plant health as they evolve, a principle known as dynamic alignment, in exchange for removing most border checks and health certificates on agri-food trade. Britain would become, in the words of one report, a decision-shaper rather than a decision-maker (Farmers Weekly, 2026). The Court of Justice of the EU would keep the final word on interpreting EU law. For a country that left partly to take back control of its laws, accepting rules it cannot vote on is a telling measure of how far the debate has travelled.

The limits are just as clear. Talks on British participation in the EU’s SAFE defence procurement programme collapsed after the EU asked for a payment the UK considered excessive; the Centre for European Reform’s Ian Bond reports a demand equal to roughly 10 per cent of Britain’s annual defence budget (Bond, 2026). Negotiations on a youth mobility scheme have stalled over numbers, with Brussels seeking up to 150,000 visas a year against a British offer of 50,000 (Euronews, 2026a). And the second summit, planned for July 2026, was postponed after Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister in June (British Agriculture Bureau, 2026).

Will the United Kingdom break up?

Brexit reopened both of the United Kingdom’s constitutional fault lines, but neither is close to breaking.

In Scotland, which voted 62 per cent to remain in 2016, the SNP won a fifth consecutive Scottish Parliament election in May 2026, and pro-independence parties together hold 73 of the 129 seats. On 26 May the Scottish Parliament voted 72 to 55 to ask Westminster for a so-called Section 30 order that would allow a new referendum (Institute for Government, 2026). But the UK Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that Holyrood cannot hold such a vote on its own authority, so without Westminster’s consent there is no legal route. Opinion polls show Scotland almost evenly divided.

In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 obliges the Secretary of State to call a referendum on Irish unity if it “appears likely” that a majority would vote for it. Nationalist parties now hold half of Northern Ireland’s Westminster seats and the debate has grown louder. Yet as The Irish Times noted in September 2026, current evidence does not meet that threshold, and the agreement offers no precise test of how it should be measured (The Irish Times, 2026b).

A break-up of the UK in the next few years therefore looks unlikely. Over a longer horizon both questions are more open than they were before 2016, and a British government seen as hostile to Europe would probably strengthen both movements.

Can Britain rejoin? The legal route

Legally, yes. No clause bars a former member from returning. The UK would apply under Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union, like any other European state. The Council of the EU would have to agree unanimously, after consulting the Commission and obtaining the consent of the European Parliament, and the resulting accession treaty would need ratification by every member state (House of Commons Library, 2025). Britain would also have to meet the Copenhagen criteria on democracy, a functioning market economy and the capacity to apply EU law. It largely does, although several years of regulatory divergence would need to be unwound.

The political price would be steep. Britain would lose the special arrangements it enjoyed as a member: the budget rebate, the opt-out from the euro and its position outside the Schengen border-free area. New members formally commit to adopting the euro once they meet the conditions (House of Commons Library, 2025), although Sweden has shown for three decades that this commitment can be deferred indefinitely in practice. Any single member state could veto the application, as France did twice in the 1960s, and some capitals may want assurance that a British decision to return would survive a future change of government in London (TIME, 2026).

Timing is the other constraint. Finland took about three years to join in the 1990s (House of Commons Library, 2025). A Britain already aligned with much of EU law might move faster, but only once the political groundwork had been laid at home.

The politics of return

The politics are moving faster than the law. In a YouGov poll published for the tenth anniversary of the referendum in June 2026, 57 per cent of Britons said leaving had been the wrong decision and 55 per cent supported rejoining in principle. Support fell to 35 per cent, however, when respondents were told that Britain would have to return without its old opt-outs on the euro and Schengen, and 59 per cent preferred a closer relationship that stopped short of rejoining the EU, the single market or the customs union (YouGov, 2026).

At the top of government the taboo has broken. Andy Burnham, who became prime minister in the summer of 2026, said on 29 September that Brexit had done more harm than good and that he would set out the options for Britain’s long-term relationship with the EU around a summit later this year. His spokesman would not rule out full membership; the options discussed include the single market, a customs union or both, with any decisive move expected only after the next general election (The Irish Times, 2026a). A week earlier he had declined to rule out a rejoin pledge in Labour’s next manifesto (Euronews, 2026b).

The opposition is formidable. Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, has led or tied Labour in the polls for much of 2026, and a January 2026 projection gave it an outright parliamentary majority (Menon, 2026). Its deputy leader accused Burnham of trying to take Britain back into Brussels by the back door (The Irish Times, 2026a). Brussels, for its part, remains cautious. EU officials insist there can be no cherry-picking of single market benefits and are reluctant to negotiate in depth while British policy remains unsettled (Euronews, 2026a).

The next decade: three paths

Three broad paths are visible.

The most likely in the near term is deeper association without membership. The food standards agreement, cooperation on electricity markets and some form of youth scheme are concluded, and Britain gradually aligns with EU rules in more sectors. The economic gains would be modest, since sector-by-sector deals recover only a small part of Brexit’s costs (Bond, 2026), but the direction of travel would be unmistakable.

The second is a formal path back. If Labour won the next general election, due by 2029, on a manifesto that included the single market, a customs union or membership, structured negotiations could begin around 2030. Full accession would take several more years and would almost certainly require a referendum or an equivalent democratic mandate, both to settle the question at home and to reassure sceptical EU capitals.

The third is reversal. A Reform-led government would halt or unpick alignment with EU rules and push the relationship back towards distance, with likely knock-on effects on support for independence in Scotland and for Irish unity in Northern Ireland.

The signposts to watch are the planned autumn 2026 summit, the options Burnham publishes, the trajectory of Reform UK and, above all, the next general election.

Closer, but still outside

So what is Britain’s fate after Brexit? Not break-up, at least not soon. Not economic collapse, but a lasting loss of output, investment and trade that the new trade deals have barely dented. Not the triumphant Global Britain that was promised, nor the basket case its critics predicted: a mid-sized European economy growing modestly while carrying a self-inflicted weight.

A return to Europe is legally possible and, for the first time since 2016, openly discussed by a sitting prime minister. But the road back is long. It runs through a general election, probably a referendum, a unanimous vote of 27 member states and the loss of privileges Britain once took for granted. The most realistic forecast is that Britain will keep walking back towards Europe one agreement at a time, ending up much closer than it is today but, for some years at least, still outside the door.

References

British sources

Bond, I. (2026, February 3). EU-UK relations: Will 2026 be the year to reset the reset? Centre for European Reform. https://www.cer.eu/publications/archive/policy-brief/2026/eu-uk-relations-will-2026-be-year-reset-reset

British Agriculture Bureau. (2026, June 16). EU-UK: Summit to be held in 2026. https://www.britishagriculturebureau.co.uk/updates-and-information/eu-uk-summit-postponed/

Business and Trade Committee, House of Commons. (2025, September 14). US Economic Prosperity Deal. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmbeis/1306/report.html

Farmers Weekly. (2026, June 5). SPS deal with the EU due to be agreed next month. https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/eu-referendum/sps-deal-with-the-eu-due-to-be-agreed-next-month

House of Commons Library. (2025, March). Debate on the UK applying to join the European Union (CDP 2025/0067). https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2025-0067/

House of Commons Library. (2026a, September 25). GDP international comparisons: Economic indicators. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02784/

House of Commons Library. (2026b). UK–India free trade agreement. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10258/

Institute for Government. (2026). Scottish independence [Explainer]. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/scottish-independence

Office for Budget Responsibility. (2026). Brexit analysis. https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/the-economy-forecast/brexit-analysis/

Rutter, J. (2026, January 7). Will Keir Starmer’s “EU reset” deliver in 2026? Institute for Government. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/keir-starmers-eu-reset-deliver-2026

YouGov. (2026, June 9). What do Britons think of Brexit, 10 years since the referendum? https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54925-what-do-britons-think-of-brexit-10-years-since-the-referendum

European sources

Berg, J., Christie, R., Geeroms, H., & Papadia, F. (2025, April 29). Make finance part of the EU-UK post-Brexit reset. Bruegel. https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/make-finance-part-eu-uk-post-brexit-reset

Euronews. (2026a, August 20). Will Prime Minister Andy Burnham move the UK closer to Europe? https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/08/20/will-prime-minister-andy-burnham-move-the-uk-closer-to-europe

Euronews. (2026b, September 22). British Prime Minister Burnham declines to rule out rejoining EU. https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/22/british-prime-minister-burnham-declines-to-rule-out-rejoining-eu

The Irish Times. (2026a, September 29). British PM Andy Burnham raises prospect of UK rejoining European Union after next election. https://www.irishtimes.com/world/uk/2026/09/29/uk-prime-minister-raises-prospect-of-uk-rejoining-eu-after-next-election/

The Irish Times. (2026b, September 22). How would a Border poll on Irish unity get called in Northern Ireland? https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2026/09/22/how-would-a-border-poll-on-irish-unity-get-called-in-northern-ireland/

American and international sources

Airaudo, F., Fleck, J., & Vega, K. (2026, January 16). Lessons from Brexit on the effects of trade disintegration (FEDS Notes). Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/lessons-from-brexit-on-the-effects-of-trade-disintegration-20260116.html

Bloom, N., Bunn, P., Mizen, P., Smietanka, P., & Thwaites, G. (2025). The economic impact of Brexit(NBER Working Paper No. 34459). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w34459

International Monetary Fund. (2026, May 18). United Kingdom: Staff concluding statement of the 2026 Article IV mission. https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2026/05/18/pr26154-united-kingdom-staff-concluding-statement-of-the-2026-article-iv-mission

Menon, A. (2026, February 4). Back to the future? British politics in 2026. Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/back-to-the-future-british-politics-in-2026/

NBER. (2026, February). Measuring Brexit’s economic toll on the United Kingdom. The Digest. https://www.nber.org/digest/202602/measuring-brexits-economic-toll-united-kingdom

TIME. (2026, May 18). Could the United Kingdom rejoin the E.U.? Here’s everything you need to know. https://time.com/article/2026/05/18/united-kingdom-rejoins-eu-possibility-starmer-streeting-debate/

Yahoo Finance. (2026, January 19). UK growth outlook trails only US and Canada among G7, IMF says. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/uk-growth-outlook-imf-gdp-2027-110647675.html