Rejoining the EU would be folly. Sadiq Khan needs to be told to get back in his box over Brexit

Sir Sadiq Khan, London’s incompetent mayor, has demanded Britain rejoin the European Union – immediately!

Who the hell is this execrable little man – who in his ten-year tenure has wrecked our capital city – to demand this Government do anything?

This will be the same Sadiq Khan who for years has had to crawl cap in hand to the Government for multi-billion bailouts to stop his city’s transport system from collapsing. He is also the man who has presided over a 31.5 per cent increase in overall recorded crime and a 40 per cent hike in violent crimes, which he seems utterly incapable of doing anything about.

So, where does he get off demanding this Government rejoins an economically failing bloc which currently could not organise a you-know-what in a brewery?

He made this demand in an interview with the i newspaper just before the start of the Labour Party conference in a deliberate attempt to undermine Andy Burnham, telling the Prime Minister it was not enough to just "float" the idea of rejoining the EU until after the election. He had to start preparing now.

It was also in direct contravention of what Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said, which was rejoining would come at a cost and the “political paralysis" of reopening the debate would be damaging for Britain.

But Sir Sadiq thought “sod all that” and decided to put in his four penneth anyway.

How dare this pumped-up, peacock of a man presume to tell our Prime Minister what he should be doing, especially when he has been such an abject failure in his own job for the past decade?

I suspect it has got a lot to do with what Sir Sadiq wants his next job to be once he gets kicked out of this one. And what is the betting he sees himself languishing on a humongous salary working in Brussels, living off sky-high expenses and unaccountable to anyone. Much like he is here.

Whatever his reasons – and trust me, they will all be about self-interest, not the interests of the British people – he needs to be told to get back in his box over Brexit. Especially as he has called for this, and embarrassed the PM in the process, at the start of the Labour conference to get maximum publicity.

The fact is re-joining the EU would be folly. It is a dysfunctional, disunited bloc in terminal decline. And it is not me saying that. It is the hugely influential economist, Mario Draghi, who was Italy’s PM for 13 years and is widely credited as the man who saved the Euro.

M4 Draghi wrote a devastating report in 2024 which said the EU was in economic decline and was in no way up to the job of competing with either the United States or China. He said the only way the bloc could compete was with an additional investment of £650billion (roughly 5 per cent of its GDP), which has never happened.

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He said the chronically slow growth of the EU would make it harder for member states to provide citizens with the goods and services they needed. And externally he said it would diminish the bloc’s influence and relegate it to a second-rank player in geopolitics.

And that is exactly what has happened. The EU has been humiliatingly sidelined in recent negotiations over conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran.

So why the hell would we want to rejoin a bloc whose star is not just plummeting but is in the toilet?

The fact is the UK economy has grown faster than most of the European economies since we voted to Leave. Since 2016, Germany’s has grown by just a piddling 5 per cent, Italy by just 7.6 per cent, while Britain’s has shot up by 8 per cent. OK, it is not fantastic, but its more than most of the others.

And just look at what is happening in the EU right now – the 27 member states are scrapping about their seven-year budget. The EU Parliament wants a £174billion increase (of course it does) but many of the member states are saying “sod that” including Germany, which is struggling and whose public debt to GDP is 64 per cent. Holland is also saying it does not want to cough up any extra cash, and others are set to follow.

So, this is a bloc at war with itself, yet the Pipsqueak Khan wants us to crawl back?

As for the OBR predictions that Britain would lose 4 per cent of its GDP after leaving the EU – well, that doomsday scenario has never materialised, nor will it.

And there is the huge plus side to no longer being in the EU. We have our sovereignty back; we have control of our own borders (although this Government is making a cock-up of that). We have signed a myriad of bespoke, independent trade deals without waiting for consensus from 27 other EU member states. And we have done it with gusto.

The UK has signed or rolled over more than 70 trade deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We signed a deal with India in 2025. Australia and New Zealand signed ambitious brand-new free trade agreements in 2023. Japan signed a bespoke deal with us in 2020 going way further than the previous EU-Japan deal in digital and data provisions. And we reached a trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes countries like Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, announced in May 2026.

And just think – had we still been in the EU, we would have been hit with Donald Trump’s punitive tariffs and we would not have been so far ahead in the AI race – unlike the EU, which has been hampered by its own EU rules.

Mario Draghi says the EU needs to get over itself and is no longer in a position to suffer delusions of grandeur – and he is right.

Yet weak Labour politicians here want to run back into its arms because they believe rejoining will solve all our problems when the reality is it will make them 100 times worse.

Even Sir Tony Blair – the Uber Remainer – says we should not think about rejoining unless we are in a position of economic strength. And although we are stronger than many other EU countries, we are nowhere near strong enough.

And do not forget, back in 2018, we were paying £15.5billion a year into the EU coffers. And if we went back now, you can guarantee it would be double that with none of the perks we had back then and would not have to sacrifice sterling for the Euro.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having a decent working relationship with other countries, but we must never again put ourselves in a subservient, “whipping boy” position where the British people are told what they can and cannot do by a bunch of overpaid, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

Mr Burnham’s problems – and when I say that I mean Britain’s problems – have got nothing to do with us not being in the EU. What is wrecking our once great country is a runaway debt that gets bigger by the day, out-of-control immigration, a skyrocketing benefits budget and millions of people who just do not want to work.

The last thing we need now is to crawl back on bended knee (which Sir Keir Starmer was doing) to a bloc that has got bigger problems than ours. So, Mr Burnham needs to tell Sir Sadiq to butt out and stop interfering in matters he does not understand. He has got enough going on without being told what to do by a jumped-up, useless mayor who had ten years to get the city of London in order – and failed miserably.

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