Sir Keir Starmer must be more vocal about his plans for a softer Brexit policy if he is to win back voters lost to the left and stave off the threat of Reform, Britain’s top elections expert has warned.
Sir John Curtice said that Labour would need to end the “strategy of silence” that it previously ran on the issue of the EU in order to stop pro-European members of the public defecting to the Greens and Liberal Democrats.
And former Labour leader Neil Kinnock predicted that the UK would eventually have to rejoin the EU to build a new “special relationship” with the continent which can replace damaged ties to the US.
The Prime Minister is facing fresh political turmoil amid the latest revelations about failings in the process of appointing Peter Mandelson as the British Ambassador to Washington – and has also clashed with Donald Trump over geopolitics, with the US President angry that Starmer did not do more to support his war in Iran.
More than half of voters back rejoining the EU, poll shows
A new report by pro-European pressure group Best for Britain, based on polling by independent pollsters YouGov, suggests that one way of restoring his fortunes could be to shift to a more aggressive position on getting closer to the EU.
Starmer is working on a Brexit “reset” which involves aligning British regulations on some goods with those of Brussels, and working more closely together on issues such as energy markets and the ability of young workers to take temporary jobs abroad.
The Best for Britain research concluded that while this policy is broadly popular, few people are enthusiastic about it with just one in five voters saying they “strongly support” the idea. By contrast, 37 per cent would strongly support rejoining the EU – with another 16 per cent mildly supporting the complete reversal of Brexit – a total of 53 per cent in favour of rejoining – compared to a total of 32 per cent against.
Crucially, rejoining is supported by a heavy margin – at least 80 per cent – of those who back one of Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens.
Curtice said that even though polling projections currently show Reform taking a large number of Commons seats off Labour, the way to stop that happening would be for Starmer to reunite left-of-centre voters rather than targeting the right directly.
He insisted that a more outspoken EU policy – rather than trying to neutralise the issue, as Labour did before the last general election – would help achieve that.
He said: “A strategy of silence, however effective or ineffective you thought it might have been up to and including 2024, certainly does now need to be reevaluated, so far as Labour’s perspective is concerned, given that their opponents are now a) successful and b) are no longer mute in the same way as Labour are.”
Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, added: “In a sense, even now the Government, in pursuing its strategy for a so-called reset, it has not really been doing a great deal about trying to advocate what it’s doing. It’s not really been trying to sell it… Whatever it’s trying to do at the end of the day, it will have to try and sell what it’s doing to the British public.”
Neil Kinnock: ‘Special relationship has to be with Europe’
Kinnock, the Labour leader between 1983 and 1992 who later spent a decade as an EU commissioner, said that while he backed Starmer’s approach it would be necessary in the future to be more ambitious and move towards a policy of reversing Brexit entirely, dependent on a democratic vote via a general election or referendum.
The veteran grandee said: “In the era of Trump’s tariffs and tantrums, of colossal Chinese advance, of Putin’s war on the west, of an intense, bloody turmoil in the Middle East… our special relationship has to be with our neighbours in Europe.
“For a country of the size and significance of the United Kingdom, it cannot be a pick and mix participation which is all pay and no say. In short, the special relationship has to ultimately mean rejoining the European Union – or to be more accurate and forward-looking in a changed and changing Europe, it has to mean joining again.”
The Government has insisted that it remains committed to the “red lines” of staying outside the single market and customs union, and not reintroducing freedom of movement between the UK and EU.
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