Photograph: iStock.
Migration + EU Reset = Brexit Reignited
That’s the equation that guarantees that Keir Starmer’s controversial speech and White Paper on migration twinned with his equally controversial EU reset has catapulted Brexit back to the top of the political and media agenda right through to the next general election.
Both represent the interlinked gamble on which the prime minister is staking his personal future and that of a Labour government whose landslide majority no longer looks inviolate in these turbulent times and the spectacular electoral insurgency of Nigel Farage’s Populist Reform UK.
As sure as proverbial night follows day, the reaction of the British press has split on predictable left / right, pro-Brexit / anti-Brexit lines reflected in a tsunami of splash headlines, leader columns, star columnists veering between the horrified, the hopeful, the hyperbolic and everywhere in between.
Take the Daily Mail of May 20th, the morning after the Starmer EU ‘reset’, for example. ‘STARMER’S SURRENDER’, the big bold all-caps front page with its sub-deck, ‘Sir Keir accused of a Brexit betrayal as he caves in over fishing rights — and leaves us subject to EU laws and courts while PAYING for the privilege’.
Death of the Brexit dream?
The front page also carried, beneath a bright red ‘Day the Brexit dream died’ tag, blurbs for inside columns from Richard Littlejohn, ‘Done up like a kipper doesn’t even begins to cover the PM’s sell-out’, and Andrew Neil, ‘The rush to throw in our lot with the stagnant EU is unfathomable’. Space inside too for a big page lead headlined ‘Boris leads Brexiteer anger as Tories vow to ditch deal… Ex-PM who set Britain free from Brussels blasts Starmer’s ‘appalling’ pact’. Plus a full-page doomsday Mail leader headlined: ‘This was the day the Brexit dream died. Voters will repay Starmer by sweeping his hapless government straight into the dustbin of history’.
The Mail was still in full attack mode on May 21st with a leader headlined, ‘EU deal is a lose lose’ that kicked off with, ‘After the giddy celebrations, vainglorious boasting and orgy of mutual backslapping comes the hangover. Sir Keir Starmer’s description of his new Brexit ‘reset’ as a win win for Britain was never convincing. In the cold light of day it looks more than ever like lose lose’. Branding the prime minister, ‘Sir Shifty’, the diehard pro-Brexit Mail largely ignored the fact the UK business sector has largely welcomed the deal and that, despite both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage hyperbolically declaring it the death of the British fishing industry, reality is rather more nuanced. The salmon and shellfish sectors stand to benefit substantially from the deal and some other areas of fishing will be able to get fresh fish more easily into the European market.
It is noticeable that Farage took a marginally more measured position than the beleaguered Badenoch. The Reform leader might well be alert to the possibility the reset deal boosts some Red Wall areas significantly and that softer Brexit voters might not be dedicated to the Reform cause come polling day. With his strategy of targeting both Labour and Tory voters, Farage is shrewd enough to weigh up the great go figure paradox in which public opinion polls consistently show a clear majority of people regretting Brexit while polls and election wins simultaneously put Farage and Reform ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives.
It was significant that Nigel Farage was prepared to risk opposition mockery by staying on his overseas holiday rather than attend the Commons debate following the Starmer / von der Leyen announcement. While the Mail’s ‘Columnist of the Year’, Sarah Vine, was accorded a full page rant featuring an image of Starmer and von der Leyen celebrating headlined: ‘What a snapshot of pure, elitist smuggery — two chuckling career bureaucrats who know they’ve just stuck it to voters’.
Farage certainly parked his tanks on the Labour government’s lawn by briefing the media that Reform would both support scrapping the 2-child benefit cap and restoring universal pensioner winter fuel allowance.
On the former, the Reform leader opportunistically moved to embarrass both Keir Starmer as the prime minister agonised over doing so and Kemi Badenoch who opened blue water between the Tories and Reform by adamantly telling interviewers she backed the benefit cap. The huge question facing Farage now will be how he can credibly explain funding those boasts alongside his pledge to slash income tax rates.
While Farage’s lavish all things to all men policy pledges gained the media attention he sought, the Times main leader (May 28th) headlined, ‘Promises, Promises’ pointedly argued, “The Reform leader is trying to outlflank Labour on the left, his pledges come with no plan to balance the books… On the evidence this week, Farage knows all about how to order, loudly and lavishly at the bar of public opinion. But he still has very little concept of how to settle the bill.”
Most economists estimate Farage’s plans would cost an eye watering £50-80bn without a coherent strategy for funding them.
Goodbye Kippers, Hello Surrender.
‘Kiss Goodbye to Brexit’ was the Daily Telegraph’s hostile May 20th front page headline above another image of Keir Starmer kissing EU leader Ursula von der Leyen on the cheek as they sealed their Lancaster House reset deal.
The Daily Express page 1 settled for Keir’s ‘abject surrender is betrayal of Brexit Britain’. The Sun couldn’t resist the capitalised, ‘DONE UP LIKE A KIPPER’, splash headline accompanied by a list of perceived list of Starmer ‘sins’…
- TAKE rules from Brussels
- BOW down to EU judges
- PAY billions for privilege
- THROW open our borders
- LET French plunder our fish for 12 YEARS (in return he gets, er, 0.3 percent growth by 2040).
Interestingly, The Sun’s Murdoch stablemate The Times struck a more positive tone with a straightforward front page headline, ‘Starmer hails Brexit reset as ‘new era in EU relations’ while the Thunderer’s main leader headlined ‘Rapprochement’, declared, “Sir Keir has injected a healthy dose of pragmatism into relations between Britain and the European Union. The new partnership will foster trade and trust.”
A broadly supportive note was also struck by leading columnist and former Tory foreign secretary, William Hague, who acknowledged in a thoughtful piece: “The British public could be forgiven for thinking that we have been plunged back into the interminable arguments of the long years of Brexit negotiations. Conservatives cry ‘surrender’ while Nigel Farage promises a reversal of everything proposed… Voters deserve clarity about the country’s approach so that millions are not left feeling Brexit is being reversed while just as many hope that it will be… but that is not what the new agreement between the UK and EU is about.”
Hague went on to pinpoint the challenge Starmer faces and his opportunist (arguably wilfully blinkered) political and media critics prefer to downplay or ignore… “The prime minister will need to explain in coming days that the world has changed dramatically since the referendum of 2016, with far greater threats to Europe’s security and the control of its borders on which we need to stand with our neighbours. His critics in opposition parties need to acknowledge…”
Fear and loathing
Predictably enough, the prime minister received warm responses from the Brexit sceptic titles with the Guardian’s May 20th front page headline ‘EU deal puts Britain back on the world stage, says Starmer’. Columnist John Crace kicked off his reaction with, “In the post-post- Brexit era, fear and loathing for our EU allies is just as deranged as ever”. He went on to laud the PM as, “flushed with success after his trade deals with India and the US. This was a triumph. No return to the single market or the customs union. But the next best thing. It was the past part of the British media wanted to interrogate, though. Hadn’t we surrendered to the EU? Sold out our fishers? Become a nation of rule-takers? Brexit Derangement Syndrome had gripped the broadcasters, GB News could barely contain itself while Keir Starmer reminded everyone he was creating jobs, facilitating trade and growth.”
Fellow Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee adopted a supportive role beneath a headline, ‘Starmer’s deal is a fresh start with the EU — and his voters’. She argued: “Everything has changed’, said the prime minister and so it has. Once nestled in the arms of NATO, now alarmingly alone, we have no choice but to embrace the neighbours we had shunned. Thanks to Vladimir Putin, (nearly) all Europeans now see clearly what was always the case…. In danger we need each other, never mind fish or dynamic alignment.”
Pertinently, Ms Toynbee wasn’t alone among supportive commentators to flag up that the reset deal’s 12-year fishing extension of Boris Johnson’s deeply flawed Brexit along with the important statistic that the fishing sector contributes just 0.03% of UK GDP and 10,000 jobs.
But Toynbee did reflect the emotional versus economic dimension of the fishing issue, warning, “Economics be damned when an implausible picture of Nigel Farage grinning at the cameras with a box of fish as he floated down the Thames tapped more deeply into mythic memories of ancient Britain ruling the waves and sou’wester clad fishers than any spreadsheet of GDP figures. He is straight out there now, claiming this deal ‘will be the end of the fishing industry’, alongside those shouts of ‘surrender’ and ‘total capitulation’. This is the question: Will this ‘reset’ get the old war cries going, reopening the terrible times that split the country in half, broke families, turned friends into enemies? It still runs deep enough for pollsters to rely on leave / remain as a key voter identifier.”
Beware plastic patriots
Unsurprisingly, the Mirror took a powerfully positive view of Starmer’s EU reset. With chief political commentator Kevin Maguire lashing out at critics: ‘Plastic patriots inflicted huge self harm as the PM tackles Boris’s bad Brexit.’
Maguire, a passionate ‘unreformed’ Remainer who favours an eventual full return to EU membership, went on: “Keir Starmer is pragmatically ending a few of the many Brexit nightmares created by lying Conman Boris Johnson.” He added that the PM’s EU reset would benefit Britain’s economy far more than the ‘limited’ India and US deals Starmer has recently negotiated.
Overly optimistic, perhaps, The New European’s front page was dominated by a gravestone with the inscription ‘2016-2025 HERE LIES BREXIT… AND LIES… AND LIES… AND LIES’.
Beneath it a headline reading, ‘3,253 DAYS AFTER THE REFENDUM, FINALLY A BRITISH GOVERNMENT SETS OUT TO FIX THE MESS’.
Undeniably, Brexit is again the big question, the ticking timebomb that links both the May 20th EU reset deal and Starmer’s other big gamble, that migration speech and a White Paper that has alarmed many Labour supporter, MPs and commentators (me included). Migration and EU bridge-building hardly echo ‘Love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage’, the classic hit Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen wrote for Frank Sinatra back in 1955. Well, a horse and carriage might go together well enough but in Britain’s migration and Brexit songbook, it still hits more divorce notes than marital bliss ones. What chance the tune changes now?
Echoing Enoch?
Personally, even as a far from uncritical Labour / Starmer supporter, I was among those dismayed, er, no, disgusted by the prime minister’s migration speech selling pitch. The lurch into rhetoric echoing not just Farage now but that of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968 with its racist overtones was unworthy of him.
His ‘island of strangers’ reference was redolent of Powell for all the Labour leadership denials and the backbench backlash within Labour was fully justified. Equally implausible, the prime minister’s claim his words and his White Paper wasn’t at all triggered by Reform’s May Day election triumphs; believe that and you probably believe fairies populate the bottom of the No10 Rose Garden. Some Labour backbenchers had a point demanding the resignation of the unnamed speechwriter who penned Starmer’s divisive words; but briefings implying the prime minister wasn’t aware of the Powellesque undertones bear unfortunate comparison with Gary Lineker’s protestations he was ignorant of the antisemitic ‘rat’ iconography that cost the BBC’s highest paid presenter his job.
Certainly, Marina Hyde, the Guardian’s wittily wicked witch of a left wing columnist, wasn’t impressed by Starmer’s big ‘Island of Strangers’ line which she branded ‘unconvincing, excruciating and wooden’ before likening it to ‘sharing a prison cell with a Chinese restaurant’s Enoch Powell impersonator’. She also threw in that the speech somehow contrived to unite the veteran Labour refugee campaigner Lord Alf Dubbs (“I don’t think it’s what he actually believes”) with Tory attack dog Robert Jenrick (“It looked like a hostage situation where Starmer was reading out words someone else had written for him”).
Neither could Ms Hyde resist joining right wing rivals in debunking the prime minister’s same week trip to Albania where advance leaks suggested he was exploring a migrant outsourcing hub deal with the East European nation. Only to be ‘blindsided live on air’ when the Albanian prime minister ruled out any deal to take on UK asylum seekers. Subsequent claims by No10 that no such plan was even mooted sounded distinctly unconvincing.
Meanwhile, the prime minister (accurately) told a mass gathering of his MPs that Farage / Reform not the Conservatives represent the main threat at the next general election. But whether sounding more Farage / Powell than a traditional Labour leader represents the answer remains a perilous gamble.
In his double page May 24th Saturday essay in the Mail, Andrew Neil launched a savage attack on the government under the headline: “In 55 years of covering politics, I’ve never accused any UK government of routinely telling untruths. But Starmer and Co have taken lying and gaslighting to a deplorable level.”
OTT, perhaps. But he had a point. His ire was sparked by the PM and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper taking to the airwaves to take credit for the 50% reduction in net migration. Undeniably, however, the bulk of the drop happened under the last government through a policy introduced by then Tory Home Secretary James Cleverley and continued by Labour after the general election — a clumsy own goal both the Conservatives and the ever opportunistic Farage were inevitably quick to exploit.
(For my part, I support a crackdown on people smugglers and accept Labour’s plan of a proportionate reduction in the unsustainable legal migration level created by Boris Johnson’s incompetence. That said, resorting to the language of Farage now and, worse still, Enoch Powell half a century ago, has the unnerving odour of political panic.)
The Eye has it
Private Eye’s 18-29 May cover certainly captured the political zeitgeist brilliantly. With a yellow helmeted Keir Starmer, aboard a channel patrol boat, and a speech bubble with the PM declaring ‘Stop the Votes!’. The main caps headline: STARMER TO HALT MIGRATION TO REFORM with a strapline ‘Labour Plan to Prevent Undesirables Entering Downing Street’. No doubt the PM hopes the latter proves prophetic. The only problem is that it was a satirical front page that probably had Nigel Farage chuckling as much as anyone.
Let’s finish this column by quoting The Times Political Sketch writer Tom Peck from a May 21st column headlined, ‘The Brexit show is back — to nobody’s delight’. Continuing with, “It’s never easy when a show returns with a new cast, especially when it’s one no one wants to see again. But still, here we are. Brexit! A play of infinite acts, all of which are the same. The same exhausted arguments, the same performative anger, now with a whole new set of weary faces. The Commons rarely provides moments that call you to feel the absence of the departed. But this was one. Cameron, May, Johnson, they’d all done what Starmer was about to do. They’d all come back from negotiating with Brussels, clutching ‘deals’.” Concluding his column, Peck suggested, “We had all very much heard enough. Down came the curtain, Please may it never rise again.”
Well, sorry Tom, but that curtain is destined to rise and fall repeatedly between now and the next general election, whenever Keir Starmer feels he can risk calling it. While, contrary to your view that the Brexit show is one nobody wants to revive, there are those who relish the prospect, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson prominent among them. Boris? Well, his former close aide Tim Montgomerie, the founder of the Conservative Home website turned Reform recruit, is telling broadcasters that Boris is back on manoeuvres convinced he can yet fulfil his Churchillian comeback dream and rescue the Conservative party from being ‘destroyed’ by Farage. My own sources confirm Johnson’s ambitions are back alive and kicking.
Bring back Boris?
The former prime minister isn’t without friends. As one very senior Mail group figure told me privately: “For the moment, we will stick with Kemi Badenoch in the hope she can up her game, but there is growing support for Boris as the Tories best hope and the belief he could yet be the one big enough figure to derail the Farage bandwagon. Otherwise we could be forced, if the polls don’t shift, to grit our teeth and throw the Mail titles behind Farage or at least a Tory / Reform electoral pact aimed at preventing Starmer from eventually performing the full scale Brexit reverse we’re convinced is his ultimate ambition.”
Badenoch’s position was further undermined by another poor, robotic, pre-scripted performance at the May 21st PMQs when she twice failed to react to Starmer dramatically revealing the government’s U-turn moves on the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, until a colleague quietly prompted her. It was a Starmer / Rachel Reeves U-turn that No10 insiders privately admit was spooked by both Labour backbench unrest and the full realisation of how hugely toxic it proved on the doorsteps during the May election campaigns.
For some of us, of course, including the majority of serious economists, rejoining the EU single market and customs union would be the UK’s best bet for achieving the major growth on which our economic future depends.
But any talk of going that far, no matter how logical or honest, is an understandable risk too far for now for Keir Starmer, a prime minister storm battered by public disillusion with established politics and menaced by the all too simplistic but alluring tick tock threat of populism Farage / Reform style.