“A UK prime minister, using the idea of getting closer to the European Union as a key way to get the British public on his side? That is certainly not something we EU-types would have predicted. Especially when you think – it’s the 10-year anniversary of the Brexit vote next month!”
This was the response of an EU contact of mine, here in Brussels. He asked to remain anonymous to be able to speak freely. We were discussing the highly anticipated speech given by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Following the massive slap in the face he got from voters last week in local elections, he launched a bid this morning to save his political life.
In what was billed to be a defiant address, Starmer pledged to lay out “a platform on which we can build” tighter links with the EU. The place to do that, he seemed to intimate, was around the next EU-UK summit this summer.
“This Labour government will be defined by rebuilding our relationship with Europe, by putting Britain at the heart of Europe, so that we are stronger on the economy, stronger on trade, stronger on defence,” he said.
The response across the Channel is mixed. Quite different on trade and the economy, as opposed to defence and security.
On defence, Europe is very much concentrating on the bigger picture: Iran, the Russia-Ukraine crisis and deteriorating relations with the US under Donald Trump. The UK is viewed as a key and constant ally inside Nato and alongside the EU. On Monday, the UK announced its latest sanctions package against Russia, for example.
There is a continental confidence, I pick up in my conversations, that UK foreign and international policy will broadly remain the same, whether Starmer remains UK prime minister, or if, over the next weeks or months, he were to be unseated by potential leadership rivals. That includes continuing to play a leading role in supporting Ukraine and trying to assemble an international maritime force to safeguard ships in the Strait of Hormuz, when the Iran crisis eventually abates.
But when it comes to economic ties with the UK, there is a sense of weary cynicism in Brussels.
On Monday, Starmer proclaimed that: “Incremental change won’t cut it on growth, defence, Europe, energy – we need a bigger response than we anticipated in 2024 because these are not ordinary times.”
But what does he actually mean by “a bigger response” on Europe?
The EU has been clear with the UK since Brexit. It welcomes the idea of getting closer again, if and when the UK decides that is definitely what it wants.
But the sectors the Labour government has so far been discussing in earnest with the EU, in terms of cutting post-Brexit red tape and barriers, are extremely limited: a food and drink safety agreement, known as SPS, a carbon emissions trading agreement, and a youth experience scheme.
The latter Starmer is now touting as a big part of his push to help especially underprivileged UK youth broaden their horizons, but in actual fact it was a) an EU ask particularly from the Germans, and b) something the Starmer government originally pushed back hard against.
In effect, none of the above will serve to hugely boost the UK economy as a whole. Nor will other sector-by-sector agreements the UK is looking at venturing closer to the EU on, like joining the EU single market in electricity.
Perhaps that is the kind of “incremental change” the PM was referring to in his Monday speech that will no longer “cut it”.
So, what could really move the dial economically, in terms of EU relations?
Big steps would be to create a customs union with the EU, getting rid of barriers to trade in goods, or joining the EU single market.
Let’s face it, the majority of the EU’s 27 member states aren’t in the club because they nurture a romantic idyll of European political togetherness. They’re in it for self-interest.
They believe that ultimately, they are stronger together when it comes to certain issues, especially economics.
But to benefit economically from the EU’s single market in services and goods, Brussels demands that countries sign up to a single market in people too – otherwise known as the free movement of workers.
Considering UK voters’ preoccupation with immigration, this free movement, along with rejoining the single market and customs union, were set as “red lines” that Labour promised not to cross when it came to closer relations with the EU.
When asked by a journalist on Monday whether this might now change, the PM avoided answering the question directly. This has led to some speculation that Starmer may be considering ditching his EU red lines in the lead-up to the next general election.
But 2029 is a long time away. And Brussels is impatient with vagaries.
The sense across Europe so far under Starmer’s government, is that – to date – talk about working more closely with the EU for UK economic advantage has been effusive in language and desperately thin in clear vision and actual content.
“For the last two years (since Labour won the UK general election), we have heard the same thing from the British government: we want a ‘reset’ with the EU after Brexit,” an EU diplomat from a country traditionally close to the UK told me.
“But what is this famous reset? The words from UK ministers like the prime minister and the chancellor sound increasingly enthusiastic but the actual steps they take are baby steps. Probably because they are clear, the closer you get back to us, the more we ask from you in return. Do their voters know that?”
Already with so far modest post-Brexit approaches to get the UK to benefit from closer EU relations, the UK has had to agree to “pay to play” as Brussels insiders like to put it.
Participation in the EU’s science programme Horizon, agreed under the previous UK government, costs £2.2bn a year. Though supporters point out that, two years on from rejoining the flagship EU research programme, the UK has emerged as a leading beneficiary.
The UK’s minister for EU relations, Nick Thomas-Symonds, told me last month that Labour was adopting a “ruthlessly pragmatic” as well as an “ambitious” approach to becoming closer to its European neighbours. It would not be making any deals with Brussels that go against UK national interest, he said.
What the government has had to do in its sectoral agreements though – like the food and drinks safety deal currently on the table – is accept aligning itself with all relevant current and future EU regulations.
The more sectors the UK aligns itself with going forward, like Labour hopes to when it comes to electricity or the chemical industry for example, the more EU legislation the UK has to sign up to.
This has provoked Nigel Farage’s Reform Party to accuse Labour of trying to reverse Brexit through the back door.
It will make it harder for the UK to seal wide-ranging free trade agreements with other nations.
When in government, the conservative party dangled a deep trade agreement with the US as one of the big prizes of Brexit. The UK-US deal agreed last year is very narrow. Of course there are many other considerations involved in agreeing a broader deal (remember the row in the UK over potentially importing chlorinated chicken from the US or selling off parts of the NHS to American companies?), but the closer the UK gets to the EU in terms of norms and legislation, the more a UK government’s hands will be tied in agreeing a more wide-ranging deal with Washington.
One thing that has definitely caught EU eyes in last week’s votes in Great Britain, is the success of Farage’s Reform Party. Farage and his deeply eurosceptic views are well known in Brussels. He was a Member of the European Parliament for over 20 years, leaving after the UK Brexit vote he so passionately campaigned for.
The idea that the UK could have a strongly eurosceptic prime minister come the next general election won’t stop the EU negotiating with the current government. But, I’m told, the European Commission may look at inserting more clauses into agreed deals, whereby the UK would have to pay a penalty if it turned its back on those agreements in the future.
