🎉 We could be heading towards another huge election argument over Brexit. So we need to start explaining what a genuinely closer relationship with Europe could actually restore for Britain. @andyburnham 🥂 Freedom to live and work across Europe again, opening up opportunities for British people across the EU and wider EEA. 🥂 Freedom from work visas and their costs, including for European workers coming to help British farms, hospitality and other sectors struggling to recruit. 🥂 A level playing field for British farmers and businesses, competing inside a common European regulatory framework rather than from outside it. 🥂 Far fewer trade barriers with our largest neighbouring market, particularly if Single Market participation is combined with the customs and food/SPS arrangements needed to remove agricultural friction. 🥂 A route back to the Common Agricultural Policy if Britain ultimately rejoins the EU, restoring British farmers to the same support framework as their European competitors. 🥂 Stronger food security, reconnecting British farming and food production with the European supply chains on which we depend. 🥂 Closer energy integration, improving resilience against geopolitical and supply shocks. 🥂 The freedom to retire across Europe again. 🥂 Easier pet 🐶 travel again moving back towards the simple European pet-passport system. 🥂 Full European opportunities for young people: Erasmus, study, training, ski seasons, hospitality work and careers across the continent. 🥂 Less friction for Gibraltar 🇬🇮 🥂 Deeper police 👮 and security cooperation. 🥂 Potentially easier travel through European borders, depending on the mobility and border arrangements negotiated. This debate should not be reduced to another argument about whether people were right or wrong in 2016. The question now is much more practical: Which freedoms, protections, opportunities and security arrangements does Britain want back?

The rewriting of 2016 needs challenging. ❌ The referendum ballot did NOT ask: “Should Britain end freedom of movement?” It asked whether Britain should remain in or leave the EU. Nothing about leaving the Single Market. Nothing about the customs union. Nothing about ending free movement. And during the referendum prominent Brexit campaigners openly cited Norway and Switzerland as models for Britain outside the EU. 🇳🇴 Norway is in the Single Market and accepts free movement. The Leave coalition contained several completely different versions of Brexit. The public was never asked to choose between them. So it is simply not accurate to retrospectively turn 17.4 million Leave votes into 17.4 million votes specifically against free movement. That interpretation came afterwards. And if Britain is now deciding what relationship it wants with Europe, voters are perfectly entitled to decide again with the actual choices made explicit.

Andy, @andyburnham I am pleading with you to end this nightmare for farming families. Farmers have now lived under the shadow of the farm IHT changes for nearly two years. Behind all the Treasury calculations and political arguments are real families, real farms and an enormous amount of fear. A close friend of my son died by suicide just a week before his wedding. He had been deeply worried about what divorce could mean for the future of the family farm. This year, the brother of one of my closest friends died intestate. His death has left the farm and his family facing terrible uncertainty and complexity at the worst possible moment. These are not wealthy people sitting on disposable assets. A farm is a home, a business, a livelihood and often the work of several generations bound together. For nearly two years families have been trying to work out whether they must sell land, restructure businesses, change wills, divide farms or somehow find money that simply does not exist in cash. The human strain of that uncertainty is immense. Please, Andy, use the Budget to bring it to an end. Restore proper APR and BPR for genuine working farms and family businesses and release farming families from this burden. They need certainty. They need to be able to plan for succession rather than fear it. And, above all, they need to know that passing a viable farm from one generation to the next is not something government intends to punish.

This is the great irony of British privatisation. We were told the state should not own strategic infrastructure. So we sold it. Then foreign states, sovereign wealth funds and state-linked companies bought stakes in the very assets we had decided our own state should not own. Chinese investors have held stakes in Heathrow and Thames Water. Chinese-linked companies bought major utility assets and became involved in UK nuclear power. So perhaps the question was never: “State ownership or private ownership?” It was: whose state owns it, who gets the returns, and whose national interest is ultimately being served? Britain did not abolish state ownership, it simply outsourced it.