Clearly we want to re-join the European Union - but we fully realise that that is our long-term goal. We need to proudly and confidently articulate that objective,  but we also need to encourage the UK government to cooperate much much more with the rest of our continent - our neighbours who are our biggest trading partners and our political and military allies.

 

So what specific areas of cooperation should European Movement UK actually be campaigning for?

 

In order to be even more effective, our great movement needs to launch more truly high-profile campaigns. The aim should be to influence public opinion, recruit vastly more members, generate media coverage, inspire and help re-mobilise our existing membership and influence politicians, the media and potential donors

 

It's sometimes claimed that, with Brexit receding further into the past and no immediate prospect of re-joining the European Union, there is nothing really big to campaign on.

 

But nothing could be further from the truth. Re-establishing much closer ties with the rest of our continent is totally central to dealing with the huge economic, geopolitical, military, climatological and other immediate challenges facing our country.

 

So here are 10 potential campaigns that European Movement UK should consider launching one at a time over the next 12-36 months - but on a much higher profile scale than recent campaigns.

 

 

1.  COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE:  Tackling climate change and being a lot more serious about achieving net zero emissions is now more urgent than ever before. The 2026 UK and continental European heatwaves painfully demonstrate the ultra-urgent serious situation facing our world. Over the past 12 months alone, climate-change-induced disasters (heat waves, wildfires, landslides and massive floods in many different countries) have killed up to 400,000 people around the world and have caused an estimated US$500 billion worth of damage and economic losses. Urgent action to slow down global warming is now a national and international emergency which requires the fullest possible UK/EU cooperation. We owe it to the present and the future to take rapid action. We should be more rigorously and publicly campaigning to persuade the UK government to fully align UK environmental and climate-change-related policy with the EU Green Deal and the carbon border adjustment mechanism - so as to strengthen UK/EU cooperation against Global Warming and to guarantee much easier UK/EU trading. At present all that the UK government has done is to link UK and EU carbon markets. As outlined in European Movement's 2025 important environmental cooperation proposals ( A New Agenda for UK–EU Energy, Climate, and Environment Cooperation), we should be campaigning to re-join the European Environment Agency, the EU Internal Electricity Market (IEM), the European Environment Information and Observation Network (EIONET), the LIFE environmental programme and The North Seas Energy Cooperation (NSEC) programme. 

 

 

2.   REGULATE ARTIFICIAL INTELIGENCE:  We should campaign to encourage the UK government to establish full UK/EU cooperation in regulating Artificial Intelligence. The Prime Minister should be encouraged to ensure that British AI legislation is totally aligned and compatible with the EU's very robust AI Act. At present the UK government wants to let AI giants have much greater freedom than permitted in the EU - so as to outcompete our EU neighbours. But, instead, we should join forces with the EU to fully ensure that UK AI firms are as well-regulated as ones in the EU. We should consider absorbing the EU AI Act into British law. AI poses a significant threat to jobs, the environment and indeed the nature of humanity. We should be fully cooperating and aligning with our neighbours and vice versa - not trying to use lighter-touch UK domestic regulation to compete against them. What's more non-alignment is likely to severely damage UK trade. 

 

3.  FIGHT CRIME:  We should not allow Brexit to sabotage the UK's security and our fight against organised crime. We should therefore push for direct live access to the Schengen Information System (SIS ii) in order to get live access to the criminal databases and intelligence data held by all EU countries. It is totally wrong that successive UK governments have made the police's job more difficult by not arranging for them to have full access to those criminal databases. We need to accept the European Court of Justice's right to have oversight in data privacy disputes. After all the UK was partly instrumental in actually setting up the court. Our wish to safeguard our security and fight crime should outweigh progressive politicians fear of Reform UK and other right-wing politicians who have been vehemently against the UK having access to SIS ii.  In early July, 2026, UK immigration officers told the BBC that since the UK left the European Union, it has become more difficult to check criminal records from some other countries.   

 

4.  JOIN THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA:  We should also campaign very vigorously and publicly to encourage our government to consider joining the European Economic Area (the EEA). This would give us automatic access to the Single Market. Norway and Switzerland have that arrangement - and it works well. Not being in the Single Market has cost Britain up to £240 billion over the past 5 years. Brexit is suffocating the UK economy - and we should be campaigning for our country to urgently join the European Economic Area. Joining the EEA would be a natural progression from EMUK's current policy of advocating joining the Single Market  ( https://www.europeanmovement.co.uk/single-market-petition   )

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5.  REDUCE YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT:  Britain's youth deserves to be able to work and live in the rest of our continent. Everybody had that right up until 2021 - when Brexit stole it from us all. Now we should encourage the government to negotiate an uncapped (ie., non-time-limited) reciprocal work opportunities programme for under-35s to help end youth unemployment.

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6.  HELP UK TOURISTS: Brexit is causing huge problems for British tourists. We should campaign to encourage the government to negotiate with the EU to create a unique bilateral travel exemption for UK citizens entering and leaving the EU. As everybody knows there have been huge queues at many entry points in Europe and UK tourists have found themselves queuing for hours. The government must take action to solve this problem. British tourists deserve their help. 

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7.  DEFEND BRITAIN AND OUR CONTINENT:  In military and geopolitical terms, the world is becoming a far more dangerous place. Over the past four years, there has been a hundred-fold increase in Russian sabotage, arson, cyber warfare and other attacks against the UK and the countries of the EU. Russian attacks on undersea telephone cables, electricity grids and cyberattacks on British and western European industry, health and other infrastructure is causing huge damage. This year alone has seen a 1500 percent increase in Russian cyber attacks against the UK. Russia wants to see a weak and disunited Europe. Certainly Brexit served their purpose. Now we need to do everything we can to ensure that the UK and the EU properly coordinate our defence capabilities. We should therefore campaign to encourage the UK government to negotiate full UK integration into the EU's new SAFE programme, which is designed to expand Europe's defence manufacturing capacity and strengthen supply chains.  The UK has major strengths in innovation and production, and involvement in SAFE would benefit both the UK and the EU by increasing scale, reducing duplication and improving resilience. It would also help ensure that British industry does not get left out of key large-scale EU defence projects. We should also push for an administrative arrangement with the European Defence Agency, enabling structured UK participation in selected PESCO (the EU's military cooperation system) projects. PESCO strengthens Europe’s operational capacity. Its Military Mobility project - speeding up the movement of troops and equipment - is a clear example. UK involvement would directly improve Europe’s ability to respond to emerging threats.  In parallel, the UK should establish a Framework Participation Agreement with the EU to take part in Common Security and Defence Policy missions. CSDP is the EU’s main operational tool, and the UK previously led major missions. Selective re-engagement would rebuild lost capability and reinforce European stability and security.

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8.  HELP BRITAIN'S PREMIER NATIONAL SPORT: Brexit has cost the UK football industry around 5000 million pounds! It has financially harmed and disadvantaged Britain's premier national sport - and has caused huge amounts of damage to the industry. Our separation from the EU is still costing the UK football scene around £1 billion per year. It has harmed UK clubs ability to hire continental European talent, has degraded the industry's purchasing power, has grossly inflated domestic UK transfer fees, increased expensive bureaucratic hurdles, reduced player value appreciation, drained clubs of their capital and inflated clubs' wage bills. Although major clubs have been badly hit, it is the much less wealthy mid-tier clubs throughout the UK that have been most seriously impacted. We should be campaigning on behalf of our national sport to persuade the government to do at least four key things:  (a) Negotiate a bespoke "Sporting Youth Mobility" Treaty with the EU; (b) drastically reform the points-based so-called 'GBE System' for professional football; (c) Introduce a targeted tax credit or financial relief program for UK clubs that invest capital into domestic training facilities and community infrastructure, while fiscally discouraging expensive Brexit-induced rule-busting capital flight; and (d)  Implement a reciprocal, fast-tracked "Sports Personnel and Supporter Visa" with EU Schengen countries.

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9.  PROTECT OUR CREATIVE INDUSTRIES: Our ongoing absence from the European Union has caused tremendous damage to the UK's theatre, entertainment, arts, music and video-game industries. Brexit has lost the creative industries around £36 billion since 2020. The UK theatre and music industries, the video-game industry, the UK independent film scene and the computer software development industry have all been particularly hard hit in what economists term Gross Value Added (GVA) losses. Partially because of Brexit-induced financial problems, over 50% of regional theatres in Britain are now highly vulnerable to potential closure. Brexit-induced financial problems have also led to the closure of literally hundreds of independent record labels, fashion houses and creative-arts-related transport companies. To prevent continuing and future largescale Gross Value Added (GVA) losses, the UK government must negotiate with the EU to secure sector-specific alignment deals; mutual professional qualification recognition; a comprehensive mobility framework; a streamlined, low-cost "Cultural Carnet" system; Standardise Data Adequacy and Digital Service Rules; and full UK participation in the EU’s flagship Creative Europe funding network. EMUK has produced a report highlighting the Brexit-induced problems facing the UK's creative industries ( https://www.europeanmovement.co.uk/creating-culture-together   ) - but a much more robust, grassroots public campaign is required.

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10. DEFEAT THE CROSS-CHANNEL PEOPLE-SMUGGLERS:   From a UK Border control perspective (as with so many others perspectives), Brexit was a complete con. Senior pro-Leave politicians deliberately used popular fear of migration to win support for Brexit. But the real consequences of Brexit were the total opposite of what the pro-Leave camp sold the public. Pre-Brexit, cross-channel small-boat crossings and asylum migration were relatively low. But immediately after Brexit was implemented in early 2020, they increased by 2300% and 125% respectively (indeed between 2019 and 2022 asylum seeker totals rose from 36,000 to over 80,000 and small boat migrants from less than 2000 to 46,000.. That's partly because when Britain left the EU in 2020, we lost the right to return asylum seekers to the EU countries they had first arrived in. That created a legal situation in which migrants could not be deported back to the EU and that fact was used by people-smugglers to persuade migrants to opt to go to Britain (specifically because Brexit effectively protected migrants from deportation - something the Leave camp 'forgot' to mention!).  Another way in which Brexit pushed up small-boat crossings was because people smugglers knew that Britain was no longer able to access Eurodac - the EU’s huge biometric fingerprint database (used to track and identify irregular migrants and to identify migrants who had already claimed asylum elsewhere or who had criminal records). Britain's Brexit-induced loss of Eurodac access massively incentivized people to attempt small-boat crossings because they knew that the UK could not check on any previous asylum claims. What's more, Brexit has meant that the UK has lost day-to-day intelligence-sharing with key agencies like Europol - and that has also hindered the war against people-smuggling and has therefore increased the number of small-boat cross-channel crossings and tragedies. However, very proactive measures already taken by the government have so far this year reduced small-boat crossings by some 40%. But the UK could do at least 4 more things to try to further improve the situation: (1) seek to negotiate a treaty to embed British Border Force personnel to work directly with French police; (2) establish a joint Franco-British naval command to patrol the Channel; (3) negotiate full access to Eurodac; and (4) negotiate a much closer third-party operational partnership with Europol.