UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he will pursue greater access to the European Union’s single market, setting up a political fight with Nigel Farage that he hopes will help turn his government’s fortune around this year.

“If it’s in our national interest to have even closer alignment with the Single Market, then we should consider that, we should go that far,” Starmer told the BBC on Sunday. The UK is better placed to gain more market access than form a customs union with the bloc because it avoids unravelling trade agreements brokered with the US and India last year, he said.

It marks Starmer’s strongest language yet on his desire to soften Britain’s Brexit deal, nearly a decade on from the referendum, and follows a growing debate in the final weeks of 2025 about forming a customs union with the EU in a bid to revive the British economy. Even Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy — two likely leadership hopefuls if Labour challenges Starmer — recently suggested they’d be supportive of such a move, despite an election promise not to do so.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel described Starmer’s interview on Sunday as a “desperate bid to appease his backbenchers.”

Risk of disappointing party members

Still, wanting to pursue greater single market access, rather than brokering a customs deal, also risks disappointing party members. In the same BBC interview, Starmer warned that any attempt to remove him as premier this year would plunge Britain into “utter chaos” and open the door to a far-right government.

“The next election is going to be unlike any election we’ve seen in this country for a very, very long time because my strong view is it will be a Labour government up against a very right-wing proposition in Reform,” Starmer said. Reform “will be a proposition of toxic divide of this country,” he added, drawing parallels to similar political environments in Germany and France.

Farage told Bloomberg that Starmer “is breaking faith with his manifesto pledges on the EU” by promising to align more closely with the bloc’s rules and regulations. Starmer is suffering the worst satisfaction rating of any premier of the past half century, and a poll published Sunday by More in Common projected that Farage’s Reform would secure a majority of 115 seats if an election were held tomorrow.

Labour strategists believe Reform’s economic and foreign policies are Farage’s weakest areas and want to simultaneously exploit this while answering a shift in political opinion on Brexit among voters over recent years. They point to an upcoming second UK-EU summit as an opportunity to launch any further negotiations on Single Market access. Starmer said there are other areas beyond the deals the UK is negotiating on food, agriculture and energy market alignment that he will consider on a sector-by-sector basis.

Freedom of movement

But the fight may be futile. Rejoining the Single Market would mean a return to freedom of movement, which would risk Starmer’s promise to reduce net migration. The EU has also long been clear that it doesn’t like third countries cherry-picking areas where it does and doesn’t wish to align its rules.

“As ever with the Brexit debate, what it suits politicians politically to say here at home may bear precious little similarity to the kinds of things the EU is willing to discuss,” Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe, told Bloomberg.

The Think Tank pointed out last month that Switzerland’s broad access to the EU single market was built up over years, through repeated negotiations and referendums, and requires the nation to accept freedom of movement and make substantial financial payments in return. Indeed, the UK failed to gain full access to the EU’s weapons fund late last year because the bloc wanted to charge it billions of pounds.

It’s why some in Starmer’s party, as well as the Liberal Democrats, believe forming a customs union is more achievable. The Lib Dems will table an amendment to upcoming government legislation to try to place a legal duty on Starmer to begin negotiations on a customs union with the EU, to be implemented by 2030.