Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer holds a press conference at the end of his cabinet's first meeting in Downing Street in London on July 6, 2024. (Photo by Claudia Greco / Pool/ AFP)
Strasbourg, France: Britain's trade minister Chris Bryant said Tuesday he hopes to one day see his country rejoin the European Union, in a further sign the UK is headed for a new domestic fight over Brexit.
"Brexit has delivered enormous problems for the UK economy," Bryant told AFP in an interview at the European Parliament, against a backdrop of turmoil at home, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer is fighting off calls to quit.
Among Starmer's challengers for the Labour leadership, his outgoing health minister Wes Streeting called at the weekend for Britain to rejoin the EU -- an explosive stance a decade after a narrow majority voted to leave in 2016.
Starmer has been pushing to move closer to the EU, while stopping short of saying Britain should reapply for membership or rejoin the European single market.
But his trade minister, who told AFP his "heart broke on the night of the Brexit vote", went further.
"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," said Bryant, who was in Strasbourg for talks with lawmakers on fostering closer ties post-Brexit.
The 64-year-old cautioned any prospect of rejoining remained a long way off, saying: "We're not going to be doing that this summer."
But he cited the figure of 16,000 fewer UK businesses exporting into Europe, saying that leaving the bloc had been "an own goal for us".
Bryant underlined that while Britain is pushing to diversify its trade partners -- from South Korea to Turkey to Switzerland -- the lion's share of its trade is still conducted with the EU.
Other 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", he said.
Since 2020, when Britain finally left the bloc after four years of fraught negotiations, few prominent figures have dared to revive the question, recalling the political paralysis and bitter division of the time.
Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage, who leads the hard-right anti-immigration Reform UK party, has already pounced on Streeting's comments, accusing him of seeking to "drag" the country towards the EU.UK
EU-UK 'reset' -
Pressure for stronger UK-EU ties has grown as US President Donald Trump rocks Washington's long-time allies by throwing transatlantic relations into doubt.
The issue has reared its head again in the chaos following Labour's poor performance in local elections this month.
Dozens of Labour MPs have urged Starmer to quit, raising the prospect of a change in prime minister just two years into the party's tenure.
Pressed on whether the turmoil risked derailing Britain's push to "reset" EU ties, Bryant said he was confident in the "long-term trajectory", with Labour's parliamentary mandate running until 2029.
"I am absolutely certain that a Labour government under Keir Starmer, or whoever it may be by the end of that time, will want to have a much stronger relationship with the European Union," he said.
Britain and the EU are due to hold a second bilateral summit this summer, following talks in May 2025 that produced a deal on closer cooperation in defence and security, and an easing of restrictions on food trade.
