After a rough old decade for the nation’s Europhiles, Remainers finally have their tails up again. Everywhere you look, Brexit is being chipped away at, critiqued and subverted.
On Wednesday the government signed a deal costing £570 million a year to revive the Erasmus student exchange programme from 2027. The Erasmus agreement also resulted in the EU agreeing to set firm deadlines for upcoming deals on agriculture and emissions trading, so wrangling between Brussels and Westminster is going to be a feature of 2026 as well.
But some in Labour’s government are dreaming much bigger. During the recent budget negotiations, as the problem of Britain’s sclerotic growth arose, several officials raised the idea of rejoining the EU customs union. This idea was expanded considerably when the deputy prime minister, David Lammy, went on a podcast this month to muse about the benefits of Turkey’s customs arrangements with the EU.
“Those comments triggered a lot of reflection on Europe inside the party,” says one government source. “Ministers are staking a lot on long-term plans for economic growth, building houses, AI or nuclear power plants. But in the shorter term, they are realising that the only real growth to be found is in much deeper alignment with the EU.”
Figures on the benefits of drawing closer to the EU are pinballing around Labour circles. Last month, during his Isaiah Berlin lecture, the former foreign secretary David Miliband estimated that being outside the customs union was costing Britain £15 billion to £30 billion a year. Others quote research from Best for Britain, a think tank set up by the Remain campaigner Gina Miller, which estimates that “deep alignment” with the EU on goods and services would give the country a 2.2 per cent bounce in GDP, equivalent to £64 billion a year.
Like First World War soldiers who found themselves re-excavating trenches on the Marne four years after they dug them, familiar battle lines are being redrawn. “We are Europeans,” insisted Polly Toynbee in Friday’s Guardian. “A Brexit betrayal” thundered Thursday’s Daily Mail.
So are we really heading back into the Brexit wars? Where does the Europe debate go from here?
The prime minister, who made his political bones opposing Brexit under Jeremy Corbyn, has long signalled his desire for a closer alignment with the EU. But he is also adamant that this should be a incremental process, deal by deal, first fish, then students, then perhaps youth mobility and agriculture.
Starmer has ruled out rejoining the customs union, which was a “red line” in the Labour manifesto and would undo much of the work his government has done striking trade deals with India and America. Instead, he is pursuing what has been described as a “Swiss cheese” settlement with Europe, full of holes and gaps, not unlike Switzerland’s.
As ever with Starmer, the more pragmatic, gradual path is the likely one. But the prime minister’s political weakness means this issue may be moving faster than he wants it to.
If a Labour leadership fight takes place next year, it’s likely that the Europe debate will form an important part of the contest. Indications are that Wes Streeting for one is willing to go further and faster than Starmer on Europe if he needs to court MPs and party members. “Wes could do with a membership-friendly idea,” one party source says.
Streeting amplified speculation over Europe this weekend in an interview with The Observer. “We’ve taken a massive economic hit leaving the European Union,” he said. “The best way for us to get more growth into our economy is a deeper trading relationship with the EU.”
The “go faster” camp also points to next year’s presidential elections in France, with the distinct possibility of a hard-right Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella government, which would rather complicate France’s position in any UK-EU negotiation.
Another factor is the increasing volatility and, at times, seeming hostility of the Trump administration towards Europe. Only last week, Britain’s much-heralded £31 billion “tech prosperity deal” with America was paused. Starmer is proud of his work maintaining the special relationship with Trump so far and security officials in Whitehall still see the US bond as the cornerstone of Britain’s foreign policy. But if Trump continues to gnaw away at the transatlantic alliance, a turn towards Europe could make increasing geopolitical sense.
It’s also the case that Starmer has struggled to define and maintain a clear agenda in office. In the absence of a defined mission, the party’s anti-Brexit forces are more than happy to supply one for him. Lammy has already pushed beyond his leader’s position. There has also been newspaper speculation that a trio of closely linked Europhile heavyweights, the Downing Street communications chief Tim Allan, the Starmer biographer Tom Baldwin, and Alastair Campbell, have banded together to press the prime minister to go further on Europe.
Campbell describes this story as delusional. What’s true is that he and other pro-EU power brokers do sense a window of opportunity is opening. Starmer can be slow to alight upon a course of action, but once he gets there he can move quite decisively, as he did at the Labour Party conference in 2018, when after months of being cajoled he suddenly and unexpectedly opened the door to a second referendum on EU membership.
“The Erasmus renewal is a small step towards repairing the huge damage Brexit has caused,” Campbell says. “I look forward to more such steps in the future.”
The other argument in favour of pushing harder at the EU issue is that progressive voters are abandoning Labour in their millions, flocking to the siren call of Zack Polanski’s insurgent Green Party or throwing their lot in with Sir Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats. Those two parties between them hold 30 per cent of the vote, according to the latest YouGov polling. Labour has just 18 per cent.
Brexit preference is still the dividing line between right and left in this country. A large majority of Labour-Lib Dem-Green voters opted to Remain. Most Reform-Tory voters went for Leave. And so some in Labour hope that by reopening the Europe debate, progressives from Brighton to Bristol would rally to their cause, making the next election a battle between an “undo Brexit” left and a “finish the job we started” right.
“We’ve clearly got a problem in the polls,” says Adam Langleben, executive director of Progressive Britain, a Labour pressure group. “Part of the answer is reconnecting with voters who see the value in a closer, more co-operative relationship with Europe. That can give Labour a clearer identity and stronger message.”
This would be a considerable shift from the Morgan McSweeney-led strategy that won Labour the 2024 election, which put considerable focus on wooing “hero” voters in white working-class towns and red wall seats across much of the north. “Morganism has run its course,” says the Labour source. “As the cabinet reflects on that, they’re thinking about how you reunite the left at the next election.”
In the country at large, it’s true that 56 per cent think Brexit was a mistake and 31 per cent the right choice. But the issue is also far from top of mind for most voters, who are far more worried about the cost of living and the NHS. Nevertheless, it does seem that the direction of travel is towards more Europe.
But where exactly Labour’s blue and gold brigade want to go is less clear. A customs union might reduce trade frictions and bring down the prices in supermarkets, but it only delivers significant growth if it comes with deeper regulatory alignment. A single market, on the other hand, would deliver more growth than a customs union, but then we would end up as takers of EU rules without any ability to shape them, with the return of free movement a probable corollary.
The logical conclusion, once you start down this path, is ultimately to rejoin the EU fully, though inevitably with worse terms than those on which we left. The whole thing is exhausting just to contemplate.
One idea being bandied around Whitehall is that the UK could rejoin the EU alongside Ukraine, on some kind of “associate membership”. Yet as it often has before, Britain may be overestimating our ability to get good deals from Brussels, for whom highlighting the errors of Brexit has often been more important than reversing them.
“A customs union is not an easy thing,” says David Henig, director of the UK Trade Policy Project. “There’s a danger that this debate continues the trauma of UK folk talking to themselves about what might be possible without having a clear path to get there. The EU is always going to be a tough and horrible negotiator.”