Sadiq Khan says Andy Burnham must prepare to rejoin EU now

Andy Burnham must start work immediately on rejoining the EU, Sadiq Khan has said, urging the prime minister to do the “heavy lifting” on returning to the bloc as soon as possible.

Speaking from the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Sunday, the London Mayor told the i Paper: “We’ve got to start the work now.

“You can’t, a week before a general election, pull out of a hat this rabbit of a manifesto and say we’re going to rejoin in six weeks’ time.

“The heavy lifting, the pitch-rolling must be done now, explaining to the country the disbenefits of being outside the European Union and the benefits of being part of this family.”

While Mr Burnham has previously said he would like to see Britain rejoin, he later committed to Sir Keir Starmer’s red lines on the EU, which rule out a return to the single market or customs union.

It comes days after Sir Tony Blair said Britain should commit to rejoining the European Union within the next 10 years, as he called for a “new approach” to post-Brexit ties.

The former prime minister urged Mr Burnham to demand a “structured relationship” with the bloc and abandon Sir Keir Starmer’s piecemeal approach to Britain’s ties with the EU, which he described as “inching towards” Europe as a result of public opinion.

However, the former Labour leader said it would be wrong to return to a straight membership of the single market and customs union, and said Mr Burnham should instead seek to rejoin a “significantly reformed” EU, along with reforms inside the bloc, which could see Europe as a superpower that could challenge the US and China.

The latest intervention from the London Mayor adds to growing pressure on Mr Burnham to prioritise a new relationship with Europe and give serious consideration to the possibility of rejoining the EU, amid ongoing economic turbulence and an increasingly difficult relationship with the United States.

On his recent trip to New York, the prime minister failed to rule out including a commitment to rejoin the EU in the next Labour manifesto when questioned by The Independent.

It also came as a report by the Institute for Public Policy showed that £6.5bn a year was being lost in exports to the EU because of a failure to have mutual recognition of standards while YouGov polling for Best for Britain highlighted that Labour’s best chance to win the next election is to include a commitment to rejoin.

Meanwhile, Sir John Curtice, Britain’s leading pollster, told The Independent earlier this month that support for rejoining the EU is at its highest point since the 2016 referendum, while a separate analysis published last week found that all but four of the 632 constituencies in Great Britain would support returning to the bloc.