London MPs slam Brexit as Khan pushes Britain back into EU

London MPs lined up on their first day back in Parliament to attack Brexit, as Lord Sadiq Khan stepped up calls for Britain to rejoin the European Union and new Prime Minister Andy Burnham opened the door to that prospect in a debate on returning to the bloc. Deirdre Costigan, Labour MP for Ealing Southall, led the charge from the capital. She said many of her constituents voted Leave in 2016 because they were bombarded with lies, from the £350 million a week for the NHS that never appeared to the claim that immigration would fall when it actually trebled.

The framing treats the referendum result as a fraud rather than a sovereign choice the country made and must make work. Tulip Siddiq, Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate, said 87 per cent of her constituents backed Remain and listed local firms she said were damaged by leaving. She named kitchen designer Neil Lerner, whose family business of more than 30 years closed after a sales downturn she blamed on Brexit, a bakery whose paperwork nearly doubled before it shut, and John Atkins, who ran a flower stall by the Royal Free hospital for nearly 40 years and said tulips had risen 50 per cent in cost since 2020 because of post-Brexit bureaucracy.

Ben Coleman, Labour MP for Chelsea and Fulham, pointed to a Spanish-Italian delicatessen with gaps on its shelves and a small supplier tired of reams of red tape since departure. Wimbledon Liberal Democrat Paul Kohler accused the Conservatives of denial over economic harm. European experts, the Evening Standard reported, claim London and other parts of the UK would get an immediate boost from the Single Market or full rejoining.

That chorus treats exit itself as the wound and re-entry as the cure. It skips the harder truth that politicians who never accepted the vote have every incentive to talk down delivery, pile on friction, and then present the wreckage as proof the public was wrong. Sovereignty, border control and the right to make our own laws were the point of Brexit.

Original source: Evening Standard