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False claims are spreading on social media that the European Council has established a UK Office of Strategic Alignment in Brussels to bring the country back into the EU.
One post says the office has been set up in the “main EU building” and implies that Brexit will soon be over, while another says it shows the EU wants to move on “graciously” and urges Brits not to waste the opportunity.
However, unfortunately for any Remainers or Re-joiners, this isn’t the case.
A spokesperson for the European Council described it as a “typical misinformation case”, as no such office has been set up.
They said that the Working Party on the United Kingdom, the Council body responsible for managing post-Brexit relations with the UK, had also said the claims were inaccurate.
However, it is true that the UK is trying to deepen its ties with the EU, almost 10 years after a referendum that eventually led to the country’s departure from the bloc and successive Conservative government measures to put even more distance between them.
Euronews’ fact-checking team, The Cube, also reached out to the UK’s Mission to the EU, which pointed us to a speech that Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave on 1 April this year, where he outlined his government’s desire to move closer to the continent.
“It is increasingly clear that, as the world continues down this volatile path, our long-term national interest requires closer partnership with our allies in Europe and with the European Union,” the UK prime minister said while outlining his country’s response to the war in Iran.
“Now, we have made progress on this front on agriculture, electricity, emissions, trading and more. But as the chancellor [Rachel Reeves] has rightly pointed out, Brexit did deep damage to our economy and the opportunities to strengthen our security and cut the cost of living are simply too big to ignore.”
“So in the coming weeks, we will announce a new summit with our EU partners,” Starmer continued. “And I can tell you that at that summit, the UK will not just ratify existing commitments made at last year’s summit. We want to be more ambitious: closer economic cooperation, closer security cooperation, a partnership that recognises our shared values, our shared interest and our shared future.”
The most recent analysis from the UK’s fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), states that the long-term impact of Brexit remains a significant drag on the UK economy. It estimates that it will reduce the UK’s potential GDP by 4% in the long run (by the early 2030s) compared to what it would have been had London remained with Brussels.
The 4% is driven primarily by a decline in productivity, with trade barriers stifling competition and preventing the UK from specialising in its most efficient industries, according to the OBR.
Other figures from British think tank the Centre for European Reform put the economic loss of Brexit at around £130 billion (€149 billion), and US research organisation the National Bureau of Economic Research says that, by 2025, the UK’s departure from the EU had cut GDP by 6% to 8% since 2016.
How has the UK moved closer to Brussels so far?
The Labour government, which came into power in 2024, promised to “reset” the UK’s relationship with Europe, and it’s already taken some concrete steps to do so, including agreeing to rejoin the Erasmus+ exchange scheme.
The two sides have also launched a Security and Defence Partnership and are working on deals on sanitary and phytosanitary standards and the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, among other steps.
Most recently, British newspaper The Guardian reported that UK government ministers are preparing legislation that could see the country adopt EU single market rules without a vote by parliament, if the government decides it’s in the national interest.
Research from last year by Brussels-based consultancy Frontier Economics showed that deeper alignment in goods and services could grow the UK’s GDP by between 1.7% and 2.2%.
With the next UK-EU summit scheduled for summer this year, it remains to be seen exactly how the two sides will align further, but there’s no doubt relations between the two are now deepening rather than distancing.
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