Neil Kinnock: Delays to Keir Starmer’s Brexit reset are driving me nuts ...Middle East

Sir Keir Starmer needs to move faster and further in securing his much-vaunted Brexit reset, former Labour leader Neil Kinnock has warned.

In an exclusive interview with The i Paper, the Labour peer launched a frustrated, impassioned and sometimes angry broadside at what he said were his Labour successor’s failure to so far show concrete results from his overtures to Europe.

The slow pace “drives you nuts” he said. “In some ways, I’m glad I haven’t got any hair.”

He also suggested Starmer risked squandering the goodwill for a new government. “There is a period during which expectations for a new government with a different orientation will try to assert reality,” he said.

Kinnock, 82, a Europhile with long-standing links to the EU, was talking ahead of the fifth anniversary of Britain’s official exit from the bloc next Saturday.

Now sitting in the House of Lords as Baron Kinnock, the grandee is credited with making his party electable again after Labour suffered three heavy defeats to Margaret Thatcher between 1979 and 1987 – despite overseeing the last of these himself, and narrowly losing out a second time to John Major in 1992.

He also implied that there are tensions within government at the slow progress of the Brexit reset.

“I can’t see evidence of achievement,” he said. “There is real determination to achieve and operate a reset among several government ministers, including at this very senior level. But getting tangible proof of occurrence has proved, thus far, to be beyond my persuasive abilities.”

“There’s a kind of restrained mood of continual waiting,” he added. “You will find many, many people who say, ‘What’s happening? I hope things are going in the right direction.’ The frustration emanating from that is boundless.

“It would help if the signals sent out from Number 10 and the Treasury were published rather than conveyed by semaphore.”

The sense that the reset is already floundering is also reflected in Brussels, where EU officials are puzzled by what they see as Starmer’s reluctance to leverage his massive parliamentary majority to push ahead with concrete rebuilding measures, even though the full reset negotiations are not set to start until the Spring.

Starmer’s Brexit reset so far

Keir Starmer has made resetting relations with the EU after Brexit a cornerstone of his government. He travelled to Brussels in October last year to meet European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

“There will be issues which are difficult to resolve and on areas on which we will stand firm,” he said after the meeting, “but we will find constructive ways to work together.”

Starmer and von der Leyen agreed to hold regular EU-UK leader summits, with the first set to take place in the Spring

The Prime Minister has ruled out any return to the EU’s single market, its customs union or freedom of movement arrangements. He has also ruled out a youth mobility programme – which would allow those under-30 to travel to the UK for a set period, despite indications from the EU that this would be a key demand of their.

Earlier this week the EU’s Brexit reset negotiator Maros Sefcovic suggested the UK could join the Pan-European Mediterranean (PEM) trade scheme, which is a convention between the EU and other non-EU European and some African countries to streamline trade.

Observers suggested the EU making suggestions is a sign it is trying to cajole the UK into treating the reset with more urgency.

Simon Usherwood, professor of politics and international studies at the Open University, said: “The simplest explanation for these comments is that the EU Commission wants something to show at the summit in the face of inertia in the UK.”

Kinnock added that while he had “endless respect” for Starmer, and “rejoiced” at Labour’s landslide election victory last July, progress on the reset, if it was happening, was painfully slow.

This exasperation about the progress, he added, is partly because the government has expressly made the UK-EU reset one of its priorities.

“I have absolutely no doubt at all about the recognition of common sense, of the need for mutual advantage to be explored and then exploited, and the desire to be engaged economically and politically with the rest of Europe.

“There’s no doubt at all that this is what they want to do. And I don’t understand the inhibitions that exist about doing exactly that.”

““Either they are the most disciplined politicians in history who won’t disclose success until they’ve got a real, really big achievement to celebrate, or they haven’t yet felt able to register elements of progress. The fact that I know that they are beavering away and still unable to announce real developments is frustrating to the point that it drives you nuts,” he said. “In some ways, I’m glad I haven’t got any hair!”

Kinnock, who led the Labour Party for almost nine years between 1983 and 1992, served two terms as an EU Commissioner from 1995 to 2004, the second as Commission Vice-President

He is now the Honorary President of the Labour Movement for Europe (LME), a group within Labour that boasts more MPs than there are Conservative MPs.

He was recently in Brussels with Stella Creasy, the Walthamstow MP and LME Chair, where they met key EU figures. Creasy has backed Sefcovic’s idea of the UK joining PEM, arguing it would “undo the damage’” of Brexit by reducing red tape.

Despite accepting that the UK is not likely to rejoin the EU Kinnock also claimed that the public was in favour of closer ties to the EU.

Treasury an ‘anti-growth department’

Kinnock also criticised Rachel Reeves and the Treasury’s handling of the economy so far, with growth data gloomy and public services facing further sweeping cuts.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been criticised for increasing Employers’ National Insurance contributions (Nics) which it is argued will slow growth either through businesses passing the rise on to customers, meaning higher prices, or employing fewer people.

Reeves argues the measure was necessary to plug a claimed £22bn black hole in the nation’s finances left by the last government. But with high borrowing figures also challenging her slim £9.9bn fiscal headroom there are fears she may to go further than anticipated in spending cuts.

The government has earmarked economic growth as a major priority and Reeves will set out some of her plans in a speech next week, but so far the economy has been flatlining in the months since the Budget.

“I understand that the government is daunted,” Kinnock said. “I support and respect them, and they’d be stupid to make just audacious cavalry charges, so I don’t blame them for being cautious.

“But what they’ve got to do, however, is to get the Treasury to understand that it’s a Department of State, not an independent republic.

“That it’s there to serve progressive purposes of a progressive government, and not to act as if conserving money is its sole focus. Right now, it’s an anti-growth department, and the Labour government has got to overcome that.”

Last month, a poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that 55 percent of people in the UK think Britain should get closer to the EU, compared to 10 percent who want a more distant relationship, while 68 percent of respondents said they would be happy for Starmer to drop his red line on the free movement of people.

Kinnock, who was MP for the Welsh constituencies of Bedwellty and Islwyn for 25 years until 1995, said the government should recognise what he claimed is the shift against Brexit.

“Fewer and fewer people will even search around to find any kind of advantage in not being in the European Union. Only the real hardcore of the deluded,” he said.

He reeled off a long list of areas where he believes the UK can set up a new relationship: youth mobility, phytosanitary inspections (agricultural imports and exports), acceptance of common qualifications, aligning regulatory regimes across all business areas.

“None of that would constitute surrender by anybody on either side – it would be a mutual advantage,” he said. “I can only record regretful surprise that that isn’t manifestly underway.”

“I just wish that they had teams in the relevant ministries now finalising the detail in company with their counterparts in the European Commission to implement agreements by mid-to-late this year. That could be done. And it wouldn’t frighten anybody. It would be treated with relief.”

He also warned that the global context, notably with Donald Trump’s return as US president, meant Britain would need to forge tighter bonds with the EU.

“In a very, very fragile world and a continent with a war raging in it, we need – and Europe needs – British participation at the deepest, strongest level,“ he said. “A new government has the means to advance both economic and political areas, and to do so with mutual advantage. Sensible observers would have hoped that they would have been progressed by now.”

Starmer will be meeting EU leaders next month to discuss defence. It’s understood he will also discuss closer working on the European defence industry as Donald Trump pressures Nato allies to spend more.

An EU source said: “We are in the same space on security and defence. We want to ensure we have a credible deterrence in Europe, for Europeans. We need to stick together, because Russia will be an enemy potentially for decades.”

Kinnock was also scathing about Starmer’s red lines in his EU reset, including ruling out a return to the Single Market. “There’s no reason why he should have said that so soon,” he said. “There’s a real danger of people – and not just politicians: people in the civil service too – overcomplicating the possibilities that exist.”

He added negotiators impose “inflexibility and paralysis” when they box themselves in with red lines.

“The term red lines should be eradicated from any kind of political discourse, partly because, of course, they never exist. In the end, they’re always, always, always breached. They are usually asserted under pressure, and then circumstances change. I also don’t think they impress the public generally,” he said.

Kinnock added that many government figures were still scarred by the 2016 referendum.

“Haunted is the word,” he said. “There’s always the danger of fighting the last war. In the wake of the referendum, people weren’t just dejected by the result – they recoiled as if they had an electric shock.”

His own experience of the referendum was that the Remain campaign was doomed. “Most of the time I knew we were going to lose. I could taste it,” he said. “That feeling increased with the utter bloody incompetence of the Remain campaign led by David Cameron.”

He said Labour pro-European figures had resigned themselves to accepting that Brexit reflected deep-rooted beliefs. “They convinced themselves that there were clearly identifiable major reasons for the leave vote – and that they were irreducible because they reflected a set of ingrained values,” he said.

“But it’s bloody rubbish! For a couple of years afterward, everyone was coming to conclusions that led them in the wrong direction.”

The government has been approached for comment.

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