On 20 June, thousands of people will gather outside Temple station in London and march once again for Britain’s European future. To some, this may seem like an exercise in nostalgia, a rerun of arguments supposedly settled years ago. But that interpretation misses what has changed since Brexit, and indeed what has changed in the world itself.
This march is not simply about reversing a referendum result. It is about recognising that the political and moral landscape around us has shifted dramatically, and that Britain’s place within Europe can no longer be discussed as though it were merely a technical question of trade arrangements or institutional sovereignty. The question now is larger than Brexit.
It is about what kind of continent Europe will become in an increasingly unstable world, and whether Britain wishes to help shape it or merely watch from outside.
Europe is more than economics
One of the great failures of the pro-European movement during and after the referendum was its inability to articulate an emotional narrative about Europe itself. Too often, Europe was defended in transactional terms: GDP figures, trade efficiencies and market access. Important arguments, certainly, but incomplete ones.
Because Europe was never simply an economic project. For millions of people, it was lived experience.
That is why Erasmus+ has become such a resonant issue in recent months. Not because exchange programmes alone determine the fate of nations, but because Erasmus symbolises something larger: the idea that young Europeans should grow up seeing one another not as foreigners, but as neighbours.
It represented freedom in its most ordinary and meaningful form: the freedom to study abroad, fall in love abroad, make friends abroad and build a life across borders without constantly being reminded where one nation ended and another began.
Borders don’t have to be barriers
I understood that freedom long before I understood its political significance. Many years ago, when my sister was studying in Cambridge, a small parcel would arrive every winter from our grandparents in Sicily. Inside were handpicked Sicilian oranges, carefully wrapped and sent across Europe with little more than a postage label and a goodbye at the local post office. Nobody thought twice about it. No customs declarations, no fees, no bureaucratic anxiety. It was simply Europe functioning as an invisible space of connection and trust.
I experienced that same ease while studying and working across France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and the UK. I learned and communicated in different languages. I made friends from every corner of the continent and crossed borders without even noticing them. There was a quiet but powerful confidence in knowing that borders did not have to mean barriers.
Unwelcome friction
Today, much of that ease has become harder to take for granted. The parcel of oranges that once crossed Europe effortlessly is now tangled in paperwork and restrictions. A small thing, perhaps. But Brexit has consisted largely of thousands of these small ruptures accumulating into something much larger: friction where there was once ease.
Young British people lost access to Erasmus. Universities became more isolated. Small businesses found themselves navigating customs paperwork and rising costs. Musicians, researchers and artists discovered that mobility, once taken for granted, had become conditional again.
And yet, paradoxically, support for closer European ties appears to be growing once more in Britain, particularly among younger generations. Erasmus+ has returned to political discussion because it touches something deeper than policy: a growing awareness of what has been lost.
The world has changed
But the argument for Europe today is no longer only about recovering what has been lost. It is also about responding to a world that has fundamentally changed since 2016. Europe matters more urgently today than it did a decade ago because the world that produced Brexit no longer exists.
When Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, many assumed that the broader western democratic order was stable enough to survive fragmentation. The US still appeared to anchor the liberal international system. NATO, democratic institutions and transatlantic alliances seemed permanent, even if occasionally strained.
A framework in danger
Today, that confidence has collapsed. Donald Trump’s return to the centre of American political life has exposed how fragile those assumptions really were. The rhetoric coming from the US increasingly resembles the language of intimidation of a bully rather than democratic leadership: threats against political opponents, open admiration for authoritarian strongmen, casual talk of “finishing” enemies abroad and governing through force and spectacle.
What is most disturbing is not simply Trump himself, but the growing normalisation of this language. Statements that once would have been politically unthinkable are now absorbed into public discourse almost without reaction. Aggression becomes performance. Democratic norms become negotiable. International politics begins to resemble permanent escalation.
And when the US, long the self-appointed guarantor of the liberal democratic order, begins to retreat from the very principles it once claimed to defend, what is shaken is not only an alliance, but an entire moral framework that shaped the postwar western world. Particularly, the belief that democracy is stronger than authoritarianism, that power should be constrained by law, that human rights are universal, and that international cooperation is preferable to nationalism and brute force.
If those values are abandoned by the US, then someone else must defend them. And realistically, who else but Europe? If democracy, human rights, pluralism and the rule of law cease to provide the organising principles of international order, then what remains except the logic of power itself, military, economic and technological force unconstrained by shared norms, restraint or legitimacy?
This is not an abstract concern. It is the direction in which the world is already moving, which is why the European project matters today far beyond economics.
Europe must step up
At its best, Europe is not simply a market or a set of institutions. It is one of the few political attempts to carry forward the postwar conviction that power must be limited by law, that cooperation is stronger than domination, and that nations are bound – however imperfectly – by shared democratic principles.
If those principles are no longer consistently upheld by the US, then the responsibility does not vanish, it shifts. And Europe becomes, whether it wishes it or not, the primary custodian of a political order built on those values. That is the role history is now pressing upon it. And that is precisely why Britain cannot pretend that this is a conversation happening somewhere else, to someone else, without consequences.
This is why I will be marching on 20 June. Not out of nostalgia, but out of responsibility, because the argument for European cooperation has become stronger, not weaker, in the years since Brexit and because I want future generations to have the same opportunities I had: to move freely, learn openly, and build lives that cross borders with confidence and pride.
Because I believe Britain is stronger, safer and more itself when it looks outward and not inward.
In a world drifting towards nationalism, authoritarianism and geopolitical instability, Europe remains one of the few places still attempting to defend democratic internationalism as a political ideal. That project is worth defending and Britain still belongs within it.
The National Rejoin March will assemble at Temple station at noon, and East Anglian groups will be there.
- Cambridge for Europe will take the 10:10 train from Cambridge to King’s Cross (10:03 from Cambridge North). Come and join us!
- Suffolk for Europe will take the 09:47 train from Ipswich to Liverpool St. They will gather by the Embankment river wall across from Temple Stn from 12pm. Look for the SfE flag.
- Norfolk for Europe – look our for the NfE banner
The significance of the day extends beyond one demonstration. The anniversary of the Brexit referendum falls three days later, on 23 June, and nearly a decade on, Britain is still reckoning with what that decision meant not only economically, but politically and culturally.
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