Labour's Pat McFadden faced tough questions from GB News presenter Camilla Tominey this morning over Andy Burnham's bid to reverse Brexit. The Cabinet minister was grilled on new research by The Growth Commission suggesting rejoining the European Union would leave the average UK household £6,500 worse off in 10 years.
Tominey asked: "Why on earth would you advocate such a policy in a cost-of-living crisis?"
McFadden defends closer EU ties
McFadden replied: "Well, I don't know exactly what the end state of the UK-EU relationship will be, but I know it can be better than now.
"And I also know that businesses have been paying huge amounts of extra costs, paperwork, bureaucracy in recent years. If we can do something about that, we should."
He added: "And we also need to cooperate more with our European neighbours on defence and security. That's been a strong message from our American allies and indeed an inescapable message from Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"So there are many good reasons to have a closer relationship. We've got a big summit coming next week, the Prime Minister is taking it very seriously."
Cost of EU reset questioned
Tominey then pressed: "There may be 21 billion reasons why you shouldn't have an EU reset, because that's the bill for the reset alone, let alone rejoin. We can't afford it, can we?"
McFadden responded: "Well, look, I think it was the Office for Budget Responsibility who said that the economic cost of leaving would be 0.4% of GDP in the long term. That is a great deal of money. So let's see where we get to with this.
"We believe we can have a better deal than the one that we've got at the moment, both economically, both in terms of cooperation on illegal migration, which has become much more difficult since we left the EU, and on defence and security. And those issues, I'm sure, will all be discussed at the summit on Friday."
Upcoming EU summit
The Prime Minister will sign a series of deals with the EU at a joint summit in Brussels this Friday, including on food and agriculture.
He is also exploring options for the long-term relationship with the bloc and has not ruled out rejoining. However, any major change would have to come after the next general election as he has pledged to stand by Labour's 2024 red lines on not returning to the single market, customs union or freedom of movement.
