Brexit was an act of “sabotage” that has made Britain up to £30bn a year worse off, former foreign secretary David Miliband claims.
He says the loss of income caused by leaving the EU is equivalent to imposing “a punishing tax every day” on the UK.
Writing in Sir Anthony Seldon’s book The Brexit Effect, which is being serialised in The Independent, Mr Miliband calls on the Labour government to “give new political momentum” to rebuilding closer ties with the EU.
And he warns that the UK will pay an even heavier price if it does not meet this challenge urgently.
The serialisation is part of a new campaign by The Independent on how Britain can rebuild its shattered links with Europe. The campaign – Europe: The Way Back – will consist of news, analysis, interviews and live events examining the impact of Brexit and what our relationship with Europe should look like.
Mr Miliband writes: “Britain remains a European country. We need to behave like one, cooperate like we understand its implications and realise that the rest of the world does not owe us anything. If we don’t get our act together, more fool us. We need to renew our cooperation that has been sabotaged by Brexit.”
Mr Miliband, who stood in the 2010 Labour leadership contest and narrowly lost to his brother Ed, a member of Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet, states: “We are suffering a punishing Brexit tax every day.
“Estimates put the cost of being outside the customs union at 0.5–1 per cent of GDP, so of the order of £15–30bn a year.
”We simply cannot afford to stand still on these matters.”
It comes as the UK’s relationship with Europe has been thrust back into the political spotlight, particularly within the Labour Party.
Sir Keir Starmer said that closer ties with the continent would be central to his response to last month’s bruising local election results, adding that he believes Brexit has “has held back our young people”.
The prime minister told The Mirror: “I'm not going to let Brexit stand in the way of their opportunities, and therefore we'll push forward on that."
With a leadership challenge to Sir Keir expected, Wes Streeting - who resigned from the cabinet following those results and declared that he would stand in any such contest - made his opening pitch with a call for Britain to rejoin the European Union.
Additionally, Andy Burnham, who has said he would join the leadership race if he is successful in this month’s Makerfield by-election, told last year’s Labour Party conference that he wanted the UK to rejoin the bloc in “my lifetime”.
The mayor of Greater Manchester added: “People prosper more when they’re part of unions. That’s my belief, and I’ll say it clearly.”
Now fighting to win a seat that voted in favour of leaving in 2016, Mr Burnham has since told ITV: “I’ve said in the long-term there is a case for that, but I'm not advocating that in this byelection.”
Mr Miliband, now president of the US based International Rescue Committee, says Britons “are £16,000 per year per person poorer in the UK than we would have been if we had sustained pre-2008 levels of economic growth.”
In December, research from King’s College London, Stanford University, the Bank of England and the University of Nottingham found that business investment is estimated to be between 12 and 18 per cent lower than the counterfactual path had Brexit not occurred.
The study also found that employment and productivity were each down by 3 to 4 per cent compared with where they would have been without Brexit.
Leaving the EU had not solved the immigration problem either, Mr Miliband said.
“Let’s remember that when we were members of the EU, we had the right to deport every person who arrived in a small boat from France back to the country in which they first touched European soil,” Mr Miliband writes.
”Orderly, fair and speedy migration rules and decisions are in the interests of refugees as well as host populations.”
Mr Miliband says the “growing global disorder” makes Britain’s relationship with the EU and other European nations ”more important not less”.
”We face a common threat from an increasingly anarchic form of ‘might makes right’ globalisation. We need to look for stabilising buoys in this stormy sea.”
He adds that the government’s aim should not be for the UK “to seek to restore lost dominance”, but to recover the “moral clarity and political vision of who we are and what we stand for”.
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