No Brexit renegotiation without free movement, warns Barnier

I mean it would be difficult to rejoin the EU without agreeing to one of the 4 pillars. I know we’ve done it before but we are in a lot weaker negotiating position

Obviously. The scope of the current agreements is limited because of the UK’s red lines at the time. If the new UK government takes the same position on freedom of movement a regulatory and a customs union, then any renegotiation will result in more or less the same set of agreements. You can’t give someone the benefit of a common market without insisting they uphold the corresponding obligations, because allowing that to happen would undermine said market. The member states didn’t budge then, they won’t now. And note that this is not stubbornness or spite: allowing a non-compliant third party full access to the single market would destroy their capacity to regulate their own economies and societies. No country would ever agree to that, so the outcome would be the same as last time.

So, from the point of view of the member states, why should they go through all the trouble of renegotiating these agreements when doing so will result in no substantial changes? Especially as the current agreements have not been fully implemented yet? The EU will obviously be willing to keep talking, and some marginal improvements can be made (i.e. a veterinary agreement), but any fundamental improvement can only be made if the UK is willing to substantially change its position.

The current position is entirely the consequence of the choices the UK made back then and would, according to its politicians, make again. This is the hard Brexit the UK government asked for in 2017 and subsequently negotiated. Other options were available, and probably still are, but came and come with a set of trade offs that might not be politically acceptable (as they were not back then). Note that there might not be a solution. It’s perfectly possible that none of the possible post-Brexit positions, including the current hard Brexit or, at the other end, single market membership, are politically acceptable or sustainable in the long run. I.e. that what the UK wanted or wants does not exist. Politics exists partly to manage such situations, but it does not always succeed in doing so.

We can return to free movement. Nobody in the EU would want to move to the UK in its current state anyway. We’ve already seen that leaving the EU has done fuck all to stop immigration.