British trade minister Chris Bryant said Tuesday he hopes Britain will one day rejoin the European Union, a striking message from a government still trying to manage the fallout from Brexit while stopping short of openly backing membership talks. Speaking in Strasbourg during talks with lawmakers on closer post-Brexit ties, the 64-year-old minister said Brexit has delivered enormous problems for the UK economy.
“I hope in my lifetime that we would be welcomed back in the heart of Europe fully and solidly as members of the European Union,” Bryant said, adding: “We’re not going to be doing that this summer.”
His comments land at a moment when the Labour government is trying to reset relations with Brussels without crossing the line into calling for Britain to reapply. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is pushing for closer ties while avoiding any explicit call to rejoin the EU or the single market, even as Brexit continues to cast a long political shadow a decade after the 2016 referendum and six years after Britain finally left the bloc in 2020, after four years of fraught negotiations.
Bryant, who is part of the team led by Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle, said leaving the bloc had been “an own goal for us” because 16,000 fewer UK businesses are exporting into Europe. He said other trade partners “don’t add up to the 47 percent of trade that we do with the European Union, and that’s what we need to get right.”
The minister also pointed to the wider strategic backdrop now shaping the debate. He cited the war in Ukraine, Donald Trump’s “quite serious challenges to NATO” and economic uncertainty tied to China’s rise, saying the EU and the UK were “thrown together more than ever.”
That language underscores how much the argument has shifted since Britain voted narrowly to leave the bloc in 2016. Pressure for a warmer relationship has intensified as the security and economic environment has worsened, but the political constraints remain real. Labour has been under domestic strain after poor local election results and calls for Starmer to quit, while the party’s parliamentary mandate runs until 2029.
The remarks also sharpen an already sensitive domestic split. Health Secretary Wes Streeting called at the weekend for Britain to rejoin the EU, prompting Nigel Farage to accuse him of trying to “drag” the country back toward Europe. Bryant did not go that far, but he made clear he sees the direction of travel as lasting. He said he was confident in the “long-term trajectory” of Britain’s push to reset EU ties.
For now, that leaves the government in a familiar place: trying to promise closer cooperation with Europe while avoiding the word that still divides British politics most sharply. Bryant’s comments suggest the argument is not whether the EU should come back into focus, but how openly ministers are willing to say so.
