Keir Starmer will get very little from the EU if he tries to “Make Brexit Work” and get a better deal. But what he’s doing should still scare the hell of out the Tories. Here’s why As the latest tranche of Starmer’s bid to “Make Brexit Work”, he’s announced that he will try and get a better trade deal than the one Boris Johnson got from the EU. I don’t actually have a problem with him doing this. As I’ve said many times before, I think Labour having a go at trying to make something of Brexit (and obviously failing) is an important step in reversing the worst of Brexit eventually. This is something that, sadly, has to happen.
"No, Starmer will get very little from the European Union."
Yes and no. If there is one thing about the EU I have understood, it is that it is a "perpetual negotiation machine" - and I don't mean that negatively. The EU doesn't even give up on hopeless cases like Lord Frost. It will find little improvements to the TCA that make life easier for the EU and the UK.
The problem is that there still are many people in the UK who think that there is a way to have "frictionless trade" as promised by Ms May while being outside the EU. The last seven years should have told the UK that even if possible, the EU won't offer it. There are more than 100.000 pages in the acquis communitaire which makes the Single Market possible. That will not be replicated for UK access to the SM and therefore the friction will remain. In that sense, Labour's slogan of "make Brexit work", is a lie. And Mr Starmer is a liar when saying that "there is no case for the UK rejoining the EU" or the Single Market.
IMO the UK politicians, including Mr Starmer, are still in the lying phase of Brexit. The EU will have little interest in making qualitative changes to the TCA until that stops. If that's another stage you in the UK need, by all means go for it. But I don't think that Mr Starmer writing an article in the RW press that the EU is "nicking our dinner money" will go unnoticed in the EU and improve Mr Starmer's standing.
I agree that the lack of seriousness in Labour's approach will be a limiting factor of what will be able to achieve.
As long as there is no honest evaluation of how dire the current situation is and how much effort will be required to rectify it, there won't be any major improvements.
However, I am also somewhat more optimistic that even the things that can be achieved will have significant positive impact and potentially allow the approach to become more serious.
There are a couple of low hanging fruits that are beyond the Tory grasp but within Labour's reach.
For example dynamic alignment in areas like food, plants and animals has always been on offer by the EU and is within Labour's red lines but outside those of the Tories.
This could mean a significant improvement for British farm and fishing industries, especially in the context of broken Brexit promises and disastrous portions of the deals with Australia and New Zealand.
On the EU side this would create certainty for their food industry which is currently in prolonged limbo while the UK is delaying its introduction of border checks again and again but officially still planning to do it at some point.
And it has the bonus of sending the message, that improvements can be gained by having a government not lead by dogmatic hard liners.
Which could strengthen the more moderate and pragmatic wing of the Conservatives and thus enable further shifting of red lines.
Pretty much. But I am continually struck by the tone in the British press that all of the relationship with the EU is determined solely by what is decided in Westminster. There appears to be (with extremely rare exceptions) little understanding that the EU has moved on from Brexit and simply doesn't want to be bothered because the TCA is working pretty well from the EU point of view and they have many other more important internal and external issues to resolve.
I think the best outcome for the UK would be for Labour, in its next election manifesto, to make some (perhaps ambiguous) reference to dynamic alignment to the EU sanitary & phytosanitary rules. This might, with EU concurrence, allow for some improvement of UK trade and reduce the problems with the border in the Irish Sea in ways that positively affect a significant (or at least visible) fraction of the population.
This could set the stage for Labour to argue at the following election in favour of joining the Customs Union which would solve a larger set of problems.
Rejoining the EU is completely off the table until the Tories openly and publicly argue in favour of it over a sustained period of time. Even then, it will require openly committing to the political dimension of the union and renouncing the transactional attitude to the relationship that has existed since first joining the EEC.
But to get the attention of the EU for any of this requires publicly offering things that are of interest to the EU, and not addressing issues solely in terms of how the UK will benefit. I do not see any of this yet from Labour or the LibDems. The Tories, of course, will have to be in the wilderness for at least a decade for any of this to sink in.
If Starmer ( or a Lib/Lab coalition) offers the right mood music, promises not to lower standards, or even to go higher and attempts Swiss style sectoral agreements, perhaps the EU will see that as an improvement on the present situation, even if it did not wish to go that way.
Macron's suggestion of an outer ring of associate membership counties may be the realistic way back in, step by step, even it was to be created for the likes of Ukraine.
But without something that is damned close to the Single Market, Starmer's active industrial strategy will achieve relatively little. The LibDems are offering a 4 stage entry into the Single Market. Maybe Labour will need to cling to the LibDems for cover. "Oh dear, the LibDems made us join". Roll on a hung/balanced parliament and real PR voting.
Its interesting that the concept of a “Core “ EU based around the € zone together with the elimination of the Veto basically hands the control & running of the EU to the “Core € zone Countries”.
Non € zone countries effectively become “second class EU Citizens” but are given the option of becoming Associate members instead of full EU members.
Ultimately the general push is for the EU to become a fully fledged federal Union, leaving behind those countries unwilling to give up their Vetos or accept deeper integration.
Should even just some of these proposals be implemented have serious implications for the possibility of the UK ever rejoining the EU.
Most of the papers content is essentially formalizing the already existing situation.
People have called for multi-tier or multi-speed Europe for ages but have also ignored that this has already been the case for decades.
The EEA countries have always been a tier/ring around the original core, with member candidates being another and associated countries yet another tier.
The only "new" thing is the Eurozone as an even more deeply connected group, but even that is already two decades old.
I am assuming Starmer and Reeves are sensible enough to realise that moving the deckchairs - or robbing Peter to pay Paul - won't work. They are certainly well aware that while New Labour inherited a strong fiscal and growth platform - in contrast we now have very high debt, tax saturation and no growth (or growth plan). One viable area I think they could make "Brexit work" (to some degree) is unfreezing the investment strike - as business and the markets realise the country is again being run in the national economic interest, instead of as a Brexit propaganda unit. They have had plenty of conversations with the city and business, so this seems a reasonable assumption.
At the same time, recalibrating to the SM and CU could still be justified - either on the basis that the inherited Tory mess means we can't actually make Brexit work (sorry about that) - or as the logical next step to "make Brexit work better". The rather brilliant Associate membership concept adds a further string to the bow.
"The rather brilliant Associate membership" is little more than a footnote (one whole paragraph in 49 pages) on page 41 of a proposal by French and German academics which is not even (yet) backed by either the French or the German governments and starts:
"3. Associate Members: A first outer tier could allow for streamlining the different forms of association with the EEA countries, Switzerland or even the UK."
The idea seems to be to get the current EFTA countries into a common framework. It provides SM membership. Since it also says that associate members "would fall under the jurisdiction of the CJEU", I doubt that there will be any takers, not from the EFTA members nor the UK. EFTA at least has a fig leaf of independence in the EFTA court instead of being directly under the ECJ.
For the UK, it might also be embarrassing if they do not fulfill the requirement re "rule of law" which is repeated often in the report (mostly addressed to EU members but also associate members). No more legislating to break an international treaty and perhaps even a requirement to have a safeguard against that internally such as a constitution?
I don't think the EU will countenance us re joining the SM or CU without the approval of the Tories......and possibly the majority of the British press.
Possibly as important as what a Labour Government does with Brexit will be what happens to the Tories in opposition, the latter the most successful party in the Western world, for a reason, it's pragmatism and ruthless pursuit of power under the first past the post system. In opposition if they sense the winds of change on the EU...............
I also think that once the war is over in Ukraine the landscape and vision of the EU will change fundamentally this will in turn assist our return.
"I don't think the EU will countenance us re joining the SM or CU without" ...
I hope the EU will not countenance the UK joining the SM without the UK giving itself a constitution which prevents the UK parliament to leave the EU on a simple parliamentary majority. Yes, I know, that's unlikely to happen , so can you please try to get your own house in order before applying for any kind of membership?
As you allude, it's impossible to foresee how the Tories will work in opposition. We tend to forget it was only a couple of years ago that Chesham and Amersham was widely derided as a "blip", and no-one predicted an eighty seat majority could possibly be overturned an a single parliament.
But I think for this reason, the EU will not be concerned about the Tories. Brexit was a black swan - and the world must now move on in a new direction.
Successive UK Governments blocked UK integration into the EU because they never managed to convince UK voters that the UK needed to join the € , Schengen etcetera.
The UK stayed at the margins of the EU, half in & half out & never committing to the EU as a political & monetary Union. all UK Governments exclusively talked about was the EU as a Trade Union.
Brexit was never really a surprise for the rest of the EU, the surprise was that it took so long to actually leave the EU.
I agree in principle but I think it is actually worse.
You write that the governments blocked integration because they couldn't manage to sell it.
I think it is the other way around and they managed to convince the voters that opt-outs were good because they wanted to block integration.
If we look at the opt-outs more closely they were all designed to deny the British people access to achievements of European cooperation.
How they managed to sell this denial as something positive is beyond me.
I mean how to you sell having to queue at passport checks when people on the continent travel across borders as if they were county boundaries?
The government signed up for all the bits of Schengen that benefited their work, such as data sharing or police cooperation but opted out of the only bit that would have been a tangible improvement for normal people.
Yet you see "but we would have to join Schengen" as a kind of negative in every re-join discussion.
Neither the famous British love for queuing nor the equally infamous British exceptionalism can fully explain how anyone would manage to sell this opt-out as a positive.
All UK prime ministers, except for Margaret Thatcher’s last couple of years as PM were pretty much all convinced of the fundamental ideal of the EU & it’s attempt to end wars in Europe by handing over sovereignty to Brussels; they all wanted the UK to be part of the EU.
In the beginning UK politicians outrightly denied that being part of the common Market/ European community would entail handing over UK sovereignty to Brussels.
As the quality of UK politicians slowly declined, the idea of convincing UK voters to be part of an international political & monetary Union was seen as too much unneeded work when simply denying that the EU was anything other than a trade deal was doing the job of keeping voters happy quite satisfactorily, until it wasn’t; by then it was too late.
Even now, after Brexit you will not find one single pro-European UK politician willing to tell UK voters that the EU is above all a Political & Monetary Union; those who wish to rejoin only exclusively talk about the EU a if it were the common market of decades ago. They even deny that the UK would have to join the €, Schengen, & all the resto of the EU Acquis, be it a Debt Union, not having any Vetos or EU armed forces
When the supporters of re joining the EU are not capable of telling the truth about UK membership of the EU, what chance is there of the UK ever becoming a committed member of the EU
Each of the opt-outs was sold a something positive and thus made it much more difficult keep being a member.
If they all wanted the UK to be part of the EU, why make this increasingly a lost cause?
That would require more incompetence than what I would have thought possible. Keeping all these advantages of European cooperation out of reach for the British people might have made them want them more, but telling them that the were better off without them?
I mean I can understand that it would have been painful to face the embarrassment of failing to stabilise the Pound for long enough to be part of the initial Euro group.
But dressing that as an opt-out and selling it as a "win" made any further attempt near impossible.
Even if the UK were to re-join its government of the day would not even be able to attempt fulfilling Euro membership criteria, let alone achieving that goal.
"But I think for this reason, the EU will not be concerned about the Tories."
True. What the EU hopefully is concerned about is that the UK currently is a completely unstable neighbour and that the UK political system allows the government to renege on treaties.
I think you are correct that the Tories as a party are not much of a concern for the EU.
However, what has always been, is and will continue to be a concern is the massive and sustained misinformation and disinformation campaigns against anything related to the EU or European cooperation in general.
This used to be annoying but bearable while UK governments of both main parties managed to be somewhat responsible players on the European stage.
It became unbearable during the Brexit proceedings when the government, many MPs and traditionally moderate media became part of and fueled these campaigns.
This will continue to be a concern for the EU independent of parties or whether the Tories U-turn on their current position
"No, Starmer will get very little from the European Union."
Yes and no. If there is one thing about the EU I have understood, it is that it is a "perpetual negotiation machine" - and I don't mean that negatively. The EU doesn't even give up on hopeless cases like Lord Frost. It will find little improvements to the TCA that make life easier for the EU and the UK.
The problem is that there still are many people in the UK who think that there is a way to have "frictionless trade" as promised by Ms May while being outside the EU. The last seven years should have told the UK that even if possible, the EU won't offer it. There are more than 100.000 pages in the acquis communitaire which makes the Single Market possible. That will not be replicated for UK access to the SM and therefore the friction will remain. In that sense, Labour's slogan of "make Brexit work", is a lie. And Mr Starmer is a liar when saying that "there is no case for the UK rejoining the EU" or the Single Market.
IMO the UK politicians, including Mr Starmer, are still in the lying phase of Brexit. The EU will have little interest in making qualitative changes to the TCA until that stops. If that's another stage you in the UK need, by all means go for it. But I don't think that Mr Starmer writing an article in the RW press that the EU is "nicking our dinner money" will go unnoticed in the EU and improve Mr Starmer's standing.
I agree that the lack of seriousness in Labour's approach will be a limiting factor of what will be able to achieve.
As long as there is no honest evaluation of how dire the current situation is and how much effort will be required to rectify it, there won't be any major improvements.
However, I am also somewhat more optimistic that even the things that can be achieved will have significant positive impact and potentially allow the approach to become more serious.
There are a couple of low hanging fruits that are beyond the Tory grasp but within Labour's reach.
For example dynamic alignment in areas like food, plants and animals has always been on offer by the EU and is within Labour's red lines but outside those of the Tories.
This could mean a significant improvement for British farm and fishing industries, especially in the context of broken Brexit promises and disastrous portions of the deals with Australia and New Zealand.
On the EU side this would create certainty for their food industry which is currently in prolonged limbo while the UK is delaying its introduction of border checks again and again but officially still planning to do it at some point.
And it has the bonus of sending the message, that improvements can be gained by having a government not lead by dogmatic hard liners.
Which could strengthen the more moderate and pragmatic wing of the Conservatives and thus enable further shifting of red lines.
Pretty much. But I am continually struck by the tone in the British press that all of the relationship with the EU is determined solely by what is decided in Westminster. There appears to be (with extremely rare exceptions) little understanding that the EU has moved on from Brexit and simply doesn't want to be bothered because the TCA is working pretty well from the EU point of view and they have many other more important internal and external issues to resolve.
I think the best outcome for the UK would be for Labour, in its next election manifesto, to make some (perhaps ambiguous) reference to dynamic alignment to the EU sanitary & phytosanitary rules. This might, with EU concurrence, allow for some improvement of UK trade and reduce the problems with the border in the Irish Sea in ways that positively affect a significant (or at least visible) fraction of the population.
This could set the stage for Labour to argue at the following election in favour of joining the Customs Union which would solve a larger set of problems.
Rejoining the EU is completely off the table until the Tories openly and publicly argue in favour of it over a sustained period of time. Even then, it will require openly committing to the political dimension of the union and renouncing the transactional attitude to the relationship that has existed since first joining the EEC.
But to get the attention of the EU for any of this requires publicly offering things that are of interest to the EU, and not addressing issues solely in terms of how the UK will benefit. I do not see any of this yet from Labour or the LibDems. The Tories, of course, will have to be in the wilderness for at least a decade for any of this to sink in.
If Starmer ( or a Lib/Lab coalition) offers the right mood music, promises not to lower standards, or even to go higher and attempts Swiss style sectoral agreements, perhaps the EU will see that as an improvement on the present situation, even if it did not wish to go that way.
Macron's suggestion of an outer ring of associate membership counties may be the realistic way back in, step by step, even it was to be created for the likes of Ukraine.
But without something that is damned close to the Single Market, Starmer's active industrial strategy will achieve relatively little. The LibDems are offering a 4 stage entry into the Single Market. Maybe Labour will need to cling to the LibDems for cover. "Oh dear, the LibDems made us join". Roll on a hung/balanced parliament and real PR voting.
Boris Johnsons deal with the EU was always designed to be used as a foundation for building a bespoke UK/EU agreement.
At present the EU is going through it’s own introspection of what it is, what it wants to be & what it can realistically expect to be.
Here is One of the more recent contributions
https://institutdelors.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Paper-EU-reform.pdf
Its interesting that the concept of a “Core “ EU based around the € zone together with the elimination of the Veto basically hands the control & running of the EU to the “Core € zone Countries”.
Non € zone countries effectively become “second class EU Citizens” but are given the option of becoming Associate members instead of full EU members.
Ultimately the general push is for the EU to become a fully fledged federal Union, leaving behind those countries unwilling to give up their Vetos or accept deeper integration.
Should even just some of these proposals be implemented have serious implications for the possibility of the UK ever rejoining the EU.
Most of the papers content is essentially formalizing the already existing situation.
People have called for multi-tier or multi-speed Europe for ages but have also ignored that this has already been the case for decades.
The EEA countries have always been a tier/ring around the original core, with member candidates being another and associated countries yet another tier.
The only "new" thing is the Eurozone as an even more deeply connected group, but even that is already two decades old.
I am assuming Starmer and Reeves are sensible enough to realise that moving the deckchairs - or robbing Peter to pay Paul - won't work. They are certainly well aware that while New Labour inherited a strong fiscal and growth platform - in contrast we now have very high debt, tax saturation and no growth (or growth plan). One viable area I think they could make "Brexit work" (to some degree) is unfreezing the investment strike - as business and the markets realise the country is again being run in the national economic interest, instead of as a Brexit propaganda unit. They have had plenty of conversations with the city and business, so this seems a reasonable assumption.
At the same time, recalibrating to the SM and CU could still be justified - either on the basis that the inherited Tory mess means we can't actually make Brexit work (sorry about that) - or as the logical next step to "make Brexit work better". The rather brilliant Associate membership concept adds a further string to the bow.
"The rather brilliant Associate membership" is little more than a footnote (one whole paragraph in 49 pages) on page 41 of a proposal by French and German academics which is not even (yet) backed by either the French or the German governments and starts:
"3. Associate Members: A first outer tier could allow for streamlining the different forms of association with the EEA countries, Switzerland or even the UK."
The idea seems to be to get the current EFTA countries into a common framework. It provides SM membership. Since it also says that associate members "would fall under the jurisdiction of the CJEU", I doubt that there will be any takers, not from the EFTA members nor the UK. EFTA at least has a fig leaf of independence in the EFTA court instead of being directly under the ECJ.
For the UK, it might also be embarrassing if they do not fulfill the requirement re "rule of law" which is repeated often in the report (mostly addressed to EU members but also associate members). No more legislating to break an international treaty and perhaps even a requirement to have a safeguard against that internally such as a constitution?
I don't think the EU will countenance us re joining the SM or CU without the approval of the Tories......and possibly the majority of the British press.
Possibly as important as what a Labour Government does with Brexit will be what happens to the Tories in opposition, the latter the most successful party in the Western world, for a reason, it's pragmatism and ruthless pursuit of power under the first past the post system. In opposition if they sense the winds of change on the EU...............
I also think that once the war is over in Ukraine the landscape and vision of the EU will change fundamentally this will in turn assist our return.
"I don't think the EU will countenance us re joining the SM or CU without" ...
I hope the EU will not countenance the UK joining the SM without the UK giving itself a constitution which prevents the UK parliament to leave the EU on a simple parliamentary majority. Yes, I know, that's unlikely to happen , so can you please try to get your own house in order before applying for any kind of membership?
As you allude, it's impossible to foresee how the Tories will work in opposition. We tend to forget it was only a couple of years ago that Chesham and Amersham was widely derided as a "blip", and no-one predicted an eighty seat majority could possibly be overturned an a single parliament.
But I think for this reason, the EU will not be concerned about the Tories. Brexit was a black swan - and the world must now move on in a new direction.
Brexit was never a “Black Swan”
Successive UK Governments blocked UK integration into the EU because they never managed to convince UK voters that the UK needed to join the € , Schengen etcetera.
The UK stayed at the margins of the EU, half in & half out & never committing to the EU as a political & monetary Union. all UK Governments exclusively talked about was the EU as a Trade Union.
Brexit was never really a surprise for the rest of the EU, the surprise was that it took so long to actually leave the EU.
I agree in principle but I think it is actually worse.
You write that the governments blocked integration because they couldn't manage to sell it.
I think it is the other way around and they managed to convince the voters that opt-outs were good because they wanted to block integration.
If we look at the opt-outs more closely they were all designed to deny the British people access to achievements of European cooperation.
How they managed to sell this denial as something positive is beyond me.
I mean how to you sell having to queue at passport checks when people on the continent travel across borders as if they were county boundaries?
The government signed up for all the bits of Schengen that benefited their work, such as data sharing or police cooperation but opted out of the only bit that would have been a tangible improvement for normal people.
Yet you see "but we would have to join Schengen" as a kind of negative in every re-join discussion.
Neither the famous British love for queuing nor the equally infamous British exceptionalism can fully explain how anyone would manage to sell this opt-out as a positive.
All UK prime ministers, except for Margaret Thatcher’s last couple of years as PM were pretty much all convinced of the fundamental ideal of the EU & it’s attempt to end wars in Europe by handing over sovereignty to Brussels; they all wanted the UK to be part of the EU.
In the beginning UK politicians outrightly denied that being part of the common Market/ European community would entail handing over UK sovereignty to Brussels.
As the quality of UK politicians slowly declined, the idea of convincing UK voters to be part of an international political & monetary Union was seen as too much unneeded work when simply denying that the EU was anything other than a trade deal was doing the job of keeping voters happy quite satisfactorily, until it wasn’t; by then it was too late.
Even now, after Brexit you will not find one single pro-European UK politician willing to tell UK voters that the EU is above all a Political & Monetary Union; those who wish to rejoin only exclusively talk about the EU a if it were the common market of decades ago. They even deny that the UK would have to join the €, Schengen, & all the resto of the EU Acquis, be it a Debt Union, not having any Vetos or EU armed forces
When the supporters of re joining the EU are not capable of telling the truth about UK membership of the EU, what chance is there of the UK ever becoming a committed member of the EU
That's an interesting perspective!
Each of the opt-outs was sold a something positive and thus made it much more difficult keep being a member.
If they all wanted the UK to be part of the EU, why make this increasingly a lost cause?
That would require more incompetence than what I would have thought possible. Keeping all these advantages of European cooperation out of reach for the British people might have made them want them more, but telling them that the were better off without them?
I mean I can understand that it would have been painful to face the embarrassment of failing to stabilise the Pound for long enough to be part of the initial Euro group.
But dressing that as an opt-out and selling it as a "win" made any further attempt near impossible.
Even if the UK were to re-join its government of the day would not even be able to attempt fulfilling Euro membership criteria, let alone achieving that goal.
"But I think for this reason, the EU will not be concerned about the Tories."
True. What the EU hopefully is concerned about is that the UK currently is a completely unstable neighbour and that the UK political system allows the government to renege on treaties.
I think you are correct that the Tories as a party are not much of a concern for the EU.
However, what has always been, is and will continue to be a concern is the massive and sustained misinformation and disinformation campaigns against anything related to the EU or European cooperation in general.
This used to be annoying but bearable while UK governments of both main parties managed to be somewhat responsible players on the European stage.
It became unbearable during the Brexit proceedings when the government, many MPs and traditionally moderate media became part of and fueled these campaigns.
This will continue to be a concern for the EU independent of parties or whether the Tories U-turn on their current position