If it’s Tuesday, it must be Paris. In the past few days, a whirlwind foreign tour has given Sir Keir Starmer the chance to pose as Britain’s prime minister in waiting, ahead in the polls and probably heading towards Downing Street next year. A visit last Thursday to The Hague, where he held talks with Europol officials, was followed by a weekend trip to Montreal, where discussions took place with Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau.
Easily the most significant appointment in the Labour leader’s diary was Tuesday’s tête-à-tête with Emmanuel Macron in the Élysée. Protocol dictated that no television footage of the meeting would appear, given Sir Keir’s status as an opposition leader. But this was about much more than looking the prime ministerial part. For one thing, if a future Labour government is to make good on its pledge to “make Brexit work”, French goodwill will be crucial. Mr Macron’s agreement to meet the Labour leader offered a first opportunity to test his ideas regarding future relations with the European Union.
As it turned out, Mr Starmer seemingly chose to skirt the issue, which may have been wise. Because those ideas remain very much a work in progress. As underlined in an interview given by Sir Keir in Montreal, Labour wants to seek to significantly rewrite the “thin” Brexit deal signed by Boris Johnson when it comes up for review in 2025. A “closer trading relationship” with the EU, Sir Keir told the Financial Times, would be “a better deal for the UK”. Yet, at the same time, Labour is sticking to its refusal to countenance rejoining the single market or customs union.
To put it mildly, this balancing act would be a very hard sell. A Franco-German working group paper on EU reform, published as the two leaders met, describes the union as facing “a critical juncture marked by geopolitical shifts, transnational crises and internal complexities”. Eastwards expansion and the question of Ukraine, a migration crisis and colossal economic challenges all dominate EU leaders’ minds. There is no bandwidth or political will for relaunching time-consuming Brexit negotiations to address another set of bespoke British aspirations.
Any major rewrite of the current deal is therefore likely to come about only through major offers from a future Labour government – in areas such as common trade rules, migration, and defence and security. That may mean red-line breaching concessions that antagonise leave voters, whose support the party is desperate to win back. To pretend otherwise would be to indulge in the delusional cakeism that landed the country in the present mess. Even were such offers to be made in a first term of office, Sir Keir’s efforts to reach agreement with Brussels may be made harder by the presence of a Tory opposition committed to overturning any new deal.
That is not to say that Labour has no room for manoeuvre. The latest polling suggests that support for Brexit has now fallen to 32%. The negative economic consequences of leaving the EU have become unarguable, and the vacuity of Conservative rhetoric championing “global Britain” has been exposed. Sir Keir may not have directly addressed Britain’s relations with the EU in his Élysée meeting. But he sought to show that a Labour government, could bring a new collaborative mood and fresh thinking in turbulent times. That was an early message eminently worth sending. But when it comes to Europe, future aspirations will need to be accompanied by meaningful actions.
