It's on the EU to get serious about a better deal with UK

No 10 may have slapped down deputy PM David Lammy after he cautiously suggested that the UK rejoin the EU's customs union, but the genie is out of the bottle.

- JAMES MOORE

Seeking to stir the pot, the Liberal Democrats brought forward a 10-minute-rule bill advocating just that, urging Labour backbenchers to support the motion - a bill that duly passed in the Commons by a slim margin yesterday.

Those MPs know full well that if Labour is to recover from the doldrums it finds itself in, it needs to pull the economy out of a slough of despondency. This was proving challenging even before chancellor Rachel Reeves clobbered UK plc with a wrecking ball labelled “£26bn of tax rises”. That, too, can be traced back to Brexit.

The UK's exit from the union - as Lammy correctly noted - badly damaged its economy. It was an act of self-harm, puncturing the economy's wheels and wrecking the nation's fiscal position in the process. It was as much to blame as Reeves for that appalling Budget.

What good timing, then, for the respected pollster Peter Kellner, who sat as YouGov president until 2016 - the year of the Brexit referendum - to say that the pro-Brexit majority which voted to leave the EU nine years ago has “literally died out” in The New European, noting that there's most likely a majority of eight million now in favour of rejoining the bloc.