{"id":675960,"date":"2026-01-05T18:28:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T18:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/675960\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T18:28:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T18:28:16","slug":"starmers-great-brexit-plan-giving-us-the-worst-of-both-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/675960\/","title":{"rendered":"Starmer’s great Brexit plan? Giving us the worst of both worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"

How European does Britain want to be? And how far will a leader who arrived in No 10 pledging not to undo Brexit, but who plainly hankers for closer membership of the European family<\/a>, go towards making the UK as like the EU as possible \u2013 while\u00a0remaining\u00a0outside it?\u00a0<\/p>\n

The intricacy and political volatility of this question was one of the reasons why Labour has\u00a0observed\u00a0an omerta on the subject, beyond a lengthy attempt at \u201creconnection,\u201d\u00a0in areas like student exchanges and\u00a0an\u00a0ongoing quest to help food and agriculture businesses trade more cheaply. Nice to have, but hardly the magical growth recipe we were promised.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Significantly, Starmer used his first\u00a0new\u00a0year BBC interview to suggest that he would back the great\u00a0closening: \u201cIf it\u2019s in our national interest to have even closer alignment with the single market, then we should consider that, we should go that far\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brilliant, Labour\u2019s un-quiet Remainers will have thought. But in Keir-world when something is announced, it is a long way from being a real thing. Realignment\u00a0certainly\u00a0is, when\u00a0you take away the possibilities of rejoining a customs union.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I spend quite a lot of time on the Eurostar to Brussels and\u00a0Berlin,\u00a0and\u00a0talking to EU and member governments about how they would see mutually useful relations with Britain in an era when mutual trade and defence advantages are in all our interests. Not least when the US is missing in action in Europe or otherwise deployed taking over Venezuela.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So,\u00a0I do get the desire to find a recipe to oppose Nigel Farage\u2019s narrow British nativism<\/a> and find renewed purpose for Labour as a party that connects us to the big trading bloc on our doorstep.\u00a0Even so, I am confused about what Starmer really means\u00a0by his recent statement on alignment\u00a0\u2013 beyond\u00a0it acting as\u202feasy-listen\u202felevator music to pro-Europeans in\u202fLabour,\u00a0the\u202fGreens\u00a0and Lib Dems.\u00a0Maybe that\u00a0is the real purpose, because otherwise, the content of \u201crealignment\u201d on the PM\u2019s description is\u202fhard to follow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Item one:\u00a0rejoining a customs union which reduces external tariffs on agreed goods. He\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0want to oblige Wes Streeting, David Lammy,\u00a0the Lib\u00a0Dems\u202fand others who have favoured this route\u00a0as\u00a0a way to\u00a0signal that Britain is prepared to take trade-offs\u00a0for the sake of\u00a0becoming\u00a0more akin to the trading bloc closest to us.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Keir-speak\u00a0on this is clear:\u202f\u201cI argued for a customs union for many years with the EU, but a lot of water has now gone under the bridge\u2026\u00a0I think that now\u00a0we\u2019ve\u00a0done deals with the US which are in our national interest, now\u00a0we\u2019ve\u00a0done deals with India which are in our national interest, we are better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Aside from breaking the record\u00a0on\u00a0the use of the phrase \u201cnational interest\u201d without explaining what the national interest here is in any detail, I read this as a\u00a0knock.\u00a0One\u00a0aimed\u00a0mainly at\u00a0Streeting, whose day job is Health Secretary, but is also the most promising of leadership contenders and customs union advocates.\u00a0That is, if the\u00a0ides of May\u00a0do\u00a0turn bad local election results into a hands-on contest for power in Labour \u2013 and No 10.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Item two:\u00a0essentially the\u00a0PM wants to be in the single market but not tied to immigration rules the EU itself is finding difficult. It is easy that other prosperous countries like Germany or France are hard at\u00a0work \u202ftrying\u00a0to find new inventive ways to restrict freedom of movement for similar reasons to the UK \u2013 their populations think governments were too liberal on this and moving hard to the right in protest.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But technically, it\u00a0remains\u00a0a core principle of the EU single market.\u00a0So,\u00a0if Labour would like more alignment for growth purposes, that needs to be squared against the question of whether the UK is prepared to allow EU citizens with no limit to come to the UK. To which Starmer says: \u202fhell \u201cno\u201d.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, not that aligned, then.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This leaves item three, which is in EU-speak \u201cdynamic alignment\u201d \u2013\u00a0measures on quantifiable things like carbon reduction schemes (where the UK does have\u00a0a good story\u00a0to tell)\u00a0and other \u201cunilateral measures\u201d in return for increased EU market access.\u202f\u202f<\/p>\n

On this version, countries can choose to adopt EU regulations, without any formal concessions from Brussels in return, but which means they do not diverge too far in the way they\u00a0operate. There are several variants of this \u2013 the best being the European Economic Area agreement enjoyed by Norway \u2013 and a couple of\u00a0very small\u00a0trading states.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem for Britain is that it is not Norway \u2013 in that\u00a0it did vote for Brexit and that still rankles \u2013 and does not have a big sovereign wealth fund. It\u00a0is not Liechtenstein or Iceland either, nor is it in the \u201cother countries\u201d sort-of alignment camp \u2013 Ukraine and Moldova \u2013 who are given licence by the EU for obvious geo-political reasons connected to shoring them up against Russian takeover.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Therefore\u00a0my\u202fchallenge to Starmer would be to tell us what he is talking about.\u00a0Should we exchange the possibility of further\u202ftrade deals with the US and Asia, painstakingly pursued in his first year, because any degree of proximity to the EU is more promising? He\u00a0can\u2019t\u00a0have both to any major degree.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Or is there a risk in this latest split-the-difference by a PM who often says one thing and means something subtly different, that we align with no tangible gain from the EU. In which case, this does not sound like a clinched argument.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Starmer is leaning on polling evidence which reflects a more downbeat mood of voters about the promises of Brexit as the years go by. Team Starmer\u00a0can\u00a0see renewed pro-Europeanism as a clear dividing line with Nigel Farage and to turn up the heat under Kemi Badenoch on her stance while wooing Lib Dems and Greens, who are gut pro-Europeans.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tYour next read<\/p>\n


\n\t\t\t\"Article <\/a><\/p>\n

Yet\u00a0at the same time, the PM predicts 2026 is the time when people will feel improvement in the economy<\/a> \u2013 after a year when his achievements were trade deals outside the EU. What does he think would be materially different after a\u00a0\u201crealignment\u201d,\u00a0on the uncertain terms he laid out on Sunday?\u00a0<\/p>\n

It sounds a bit like the \u201cgreat rejoining\u201d which causes all the churning\u202fdrama in Apple TV\u2019s Christmas hit\u00a0Pluribus\u00a0\u2013 the blissful idea has its own hidden catches and contradictions.<\/p>\n

The most important of which is that until Keir tells us what he means, we might\u00a0reasonably fear\u00a0getting the worst of both worlds \u2013 neither in, nor out but living in a new Labour nowhere land.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anne\u00a0McElvoy\u00a0is executive editor of Politico and co-host of Politics at Sam and Anne\u2019s podcast\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How European does Britain want to be? And how far will a leader who arrived in No 10…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,807,285,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-675960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-keir-starmer","16":"tag-politics","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115843911171277525","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}