UK businesses are happy to take Russian money, and that's a problem.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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Lol of the business they survived ...
I'm honestly not surprised. There is a bit of a narrative that "obviously" the UK should rejoin the EU but its actually not that simple, particularly within the UK.
Brexit was a hugely toxic and disruptive political event that dominated politics for the best part of a decade. Many people just don't want to reopen that - Brexit has been an overall negative but not as negative as feared at the time of the referendum, which has muted the fight to rejoin. And there are benefits that have come into UK politics - the big one being direct democratic accountability in so much as it is now impossible for MPs to blame the EU or Brussels for all our ills.
Brexit has destroyed the Conservative party, and seemingly destroyed the old 2 party switch between Labour and Conservatives. We've had the rise of Reform on the right but also the rise of the Greens on the left, and we are looking at a hung parliament in the next election; we have 5 parties all close to the 20% mark and the First Past the Post system means huge uncertainty with what will happen in the next election.
From businesses point of view I can see that stability and certainty far outweighs discussions around the customs union or single market. Throwing EU discussions back into the current political mix would be chaotic and toxic again. I don't buy the CBI's line about trade deals with India etc helping though; I suspect this is carefully chosen to throw a bone to the right wing anti-EU lobby so that the CBI can continue to waver on the EU.
Politically people in the UK are dissatisfied with the current order and there is a lot of uncertainty about where things will be in the next election. Europe is not part of that discussion at the moment - it'd be a gift to Reform to fight on Brexit yet again, and also divide the left who are not uniformly pro-EU. Instead we are in a period of uncertainty on who will win the next election, with discussions of devolution (akin to perhaps greater federalisation of the UK including crucially England) and electoral reform coming to the fore - things that would mean real change. Discussions around the EU would just distract from that; many people genuinely don't want to go back to elections dominated about in/out/"brexit means brexit" nonsense.
Thanks for the perspective