You are a hopeful for the Labour top job, seeking to replace the Prime Minister’s beta performance, but getting a mixed reception from a shaken party to your dramatic Wesignation.
You need a message to exemplify the difference between you – and the mediocrity of Keir Starmer’s premiership – and draw a contrast with the foggy contours of Andy Burnham’s views.
In the crude algorithm of political positioning, one under-occupied piece of territory lies open to you: pledging to rejoin the European Union. So, Wes Streeting has gone and said it at a conference this weekend, pledging to put the UK back among the yellow stars on the blue EU flag. He wants to “rebuild our economy and trade, and improve our defence against the shared threats from Russian aggression and America First”.
In short: why go for all that faffing about with the detail of numbers in youth mobility schemes with the EU? Why endure painstaking negotiations of electricity, food and agri-product deals, when you could just pledge that via entry to a customs union and “one day” undo the dastardly Brexit, reshape the UK’s fragile economic outlook and erase the inconvenience of the Brexit vote a decade ago?
Such is the inviting Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – and Streeting is an engaging and entertaining Parnassian on this issue. In a party which is losing votes to the left while under attack on the right from Reform, it is an attempt to choose a clear path. It aims to garner votes among progressive, pro-European voters before the next general election, and isolate Reform and the withering Tories on the right in the hope that it denies them a joint majority.
And as Streeting would doubtless point out, it’s not like post-Brexit UK has seen a roaring success as a result of leaving the trade bloc. Trade frictions abound and the Starmer recipe of steady rapprochement is like pulling teeth, when Brussels is still in “told you so” mode about the UK.
Fans of the Imaginarium approach also note consistent opinion polling that around 60 per cent of people would vote to rejoin. The hitch is that the question does not go into detail about what exactly they would be rejoining prospectively and on what terms. The Eurozone, with all the constraints and budget contributions that entails? A “pay to play” deal in which the UK would have to pay a contribution in return for market access, from a bloc that is cash-strapped itself and has so far expressed limited interest in having Britain back?
Indeed, why send the King, no less, to the US to get relief on Scottish whisky tariffs and help the Government sweat out preferential tariffs in the automative sector, escaping Trump’s latest ratchet on levies of cars and lorries from the EU to a whopping 25 per cent – only to tear up these freedoms? That is what re-entry to the customs union means.
In fairness to Streeting, his main opponent Andy Burnham is discomfited by having made a similar gut pledge last autumn, saying “I want to rejoin the EU”. This is a heavy millstone round his neck in the Makerfield by-election, with Reform surging around Manchester seats. It is a snooker move from Streeting to embrace a pledge your competitor has also made – but now needs to hastily back away from. Yet there are good reasons why many of his colleagues regard this big, fat European promise as more of a Pandora’s box than a cunning plan for revival.
The first is that it effectively gives up on hopes of bringing back Reform voters by proving that you can regain their trust. If the country is really as desirous of moving back into the EU as advocates claim, it has a funny way of showing it come election times. That worries hard-headed senior figures like Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, who expressed perturbation on restarting the Brexit wars because “essentially what we’re saying to people is ‘life was fine in 2015, we just need to go back there’”.
Shellshocked MPs in my native North East, seeing the “turquoise wave” of Reform race decimate Labour in the Red Wall, are gobsmacked too. Emma Lewell, the South Shields MP, rapped in her letter enjoining Keir to quit after disastrous local results on 7 May: “I get the points made about battling Reform and Greens, but all that does is harden their base and insult those who voted for them. As for rebuilding our relationship with Europe being a key flank of this speech – I despair.” These are views a new leader would at least need to take seriously.
Underlying this unease is a doubt over whether full-on realignment with EU is the answer to the UK’s economic problems of drift, under-investment and lack of productivity vis-à-vis the US and emerging economies in Asia. All the more given the additional challenges of AI are about to hit home in the job market. The growth rates of the UK and EU are not markedly different, so there’ s no case, prima facie, for believing Europe has solutions the UK has not found – many structural problems are indeed similar.
In fairness, the main gain would be the end of unnecessary trade frictions and red tape which prevent British companies from exporting as much as they can to the continent. But how much is gained and lost here really depends on how we see our leading drivers of growth shaping up.
Let’s say Wes made it to Number 10. He and his Chancellor (Ed Miliband?) would be lobbied by the most promising UK-based AI, fintech and quantum computing companies to avoid getting caught up in the tangles of European regulation. All while competing economies are moving ahead at a pace the EU’s institutions cannot match, or are bogged down in defending their own companies – take for example the recent stand-off between France and Germany over their joint fighter jet project.
Many of the entrepreneurs in defence technology, drone-based innovation and the cutting edge of digital companies are in the UK right now precisely because they don’t have to deal with the EU. And if the major growth path is in digital services rather than goods, it’s optimistic to think European countries would relish a deal, which would let the UK innovate outside its standards and constraints, while giving us the benefits of the single market.
It is no crime of Streeting’s to be instinctively in favour of a pivot towards Europe and a rethink about how that should occur. But the terms matter – and so do the trade-offs – and honesty is the better policy than a wishful thinking. There is a lot more thinking and calculation to be done on this than fits on a bumper sticker, however short the leadership campaign.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at POLITICO and co-host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s Podcast
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