In Britain, Brexit is debated again as Starmer’s grip on power slips

London, England – For record stall owner Johnny Skates, leaving the European Union has made travelling to DJ in Europe harder as the tax implications of bringing his materials with him have tightened.

“If I want to DJ and if I take records, I have to declare that. In the past, you could just go, and there [Europe], it was nothing,” the 66-year-old said.

He spoke to Al Jazeera in the London borough of Lambeth, where about 80 percent of people like him voted in vain to remain in the EU in 2016.

“Now I have to declare the value of the records I take because if I don’t, I get taxed because they say, ‘Oh, you’re taking in records to sell. There’s tax on them.’ If I send a record and I put the value, or vice versa, if I buy something and it’s the value, I’ve got to pay the tax when it comes into the country,” said Skates, who goes by his DJ name.

Since the ruling Labour Party suffered heavy losses in local elections at the beginning of May, the debate over the decision to leave the EU, also known as Brexit, has been renewed.

In the aftermath of the vote, Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised to rebuild Britain’s relationship with Europe “by putting Britain at the heart of Europe, so that we are stronger on the economy, stronger on trade, stronger on defence” – almost 10 years after 52 percent of Britons voted to leave the bloc.

Wes Streeting, the former health secretary and now would-be contender in a possible leadership contest to succeed Starmer, has called Brexit a “catastrophic mistake”, suggesting the UK rejoin the bloc to help “rebuild our economy and trade”.

But some among the Labour leadership have shunned the Brexit debate. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy called it a “bit odd” while Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has refused to say whether he thinks the UK should rejoin the EU.

The Labour Party’s membership is overwhelmingly pro-EU. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Reform UK, the hard-right party predicted to win a general election if one were to be held soon.

“The EU is not going to be willing to engage in a serious discussion with the UK about rejoining when anti-EU parties are ahead in the opinion polls,” said Jonathan Portes, an economics and public policy professor at King’s College London. “Why would they waste time talking to Keir Starmer or whoever succeeds Keir Starmer about rejoining when there’s an election in 2029 and at the moment it looks likely that, or at least highly possible that, it will be won by parties who are fervently opposed to re-joining.”

Streeting is not the only contender to Starmer to bring up Brexit. Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, who is currently preparing for a crucial by-election that he hopes will allow him to become an official candidate in a leadership contest, has said that while he would not try to reverse Brexit, it “has been damaging”.

Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, campaigns door to door on May 20, 2026, in Ashton-in-Makerfield, England [Ryan Jenkinson/Getty Images]

A survey by the More in Common research agency recently found that if Burnham were to take over from Starmer, he could beat Reform UK in a general election.

Piers Ludlow, professor of international history at the London School of Economics, said the conversations around Brexit could be seen as “a lot of noise and smoke and mirrors about Labour leadership”.

“We have lived through a period of unprecedentedly unstable politics and extremely sort of underwhelming economic performance, so it’s not surprising that the debate has begun to shift and the public opinion … begins to show that a majority of people, including many former leave voters, are now beginning to have second thoughts,” Ludlow told Al Jazeera.

Skates said if another referendum was held, he would choose to return to the EU.

A Conservative Party voter, he wants to see stronger controls on immigration and better employment opportunities for young people.

Portes said, “I think it is paradoxical that some of the impacts of Brexit – the rise in immigration, the broader negative economic impacts on living standards and so on – have indeed fuelled the rise of Reform UK, but historians will, no doubt, look at that as a rather ironic consequence.”

Logistics costs

Three doors down from Skates’s stall, 29-year-old Noufal works in a home goods shop. He moved to the United Kingdom from India four years ago and believes the UK should never have left the EU.

Before Brexit, there were more opportunities for workers, he said.

For businesses, added border bureaucracy has meant higher delivery costs.

“The price has increased after Brexit, and the transportation costs have increased. When we are bringing the goods, logistics costs [have] increased,” said Noufal, who requested Al Jazeera withhold his surname.

Portes explained that economists had warned of challenges linked to trade before the 2016 vote.

“Businesses can indeed continue to trade with the EU and indeed with the rest of the world, and the UK economy didn’t fall off a cliff. But the economic damage has been significant, and the damage to some businesses has been significant, and again, that’s not remotely a surprise. It’s exactly what we said would happen,” Portes said.

Looking ahead, Brexit debates look set to keep casting a shadow over British politics.

“If we do change our mind on this issue, if we do decide that we want to go back to EU membership, it’s going to be slow, it’s going to be painful, it’s going to be extremely politically costly in British domestic terms because of the state of British politics at the moment, because of the fairly fresh wounds that those Brexit identities [created],” Ludlow said. “We really did divide into a remain tribe and leave tribe during the Brexit period. It’s only 10 years ago. People haven’t forgotten that. The identities, in a sense, were so strong that they endured,” he added.