The bold Brexit moves that could save Labour

As Labour and the Lib Dems adjust to new competition among parties of the left, the Greens have stolen a march on them when it comes to the UK rejoining the European Union.

Last month, YouGov’s Eurotrack poll  recorded that 52% of adults across England, Scotland and Wales would vote for the UK to rejoin the EU versus 29% who would vote to stay out – a divide that widened to 64% rejoin and 36% stay out when you exclude those who told the pollster they don’t know, wouldn’t vote or wouldn’t say. Yet only the Greens are unabashedly pro-Rejoin, pledging at 2024’s general election to “Re-joining the EU as soon as the domestic political situation is favourable and EU members are willing.”

Meanwhile the most the government can manage is talking up a forthcoming Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement with the EU. That might be welcome for importers and exporters, and ultimately for shoppers, but it hardly sets pulses racing.

The left’s disarray on Europe isn’t mirrored on the right of British politics. If you’re among the 29% of voters who want the UK to stay outside the EU; the 11% who tell YouGov they believe that the UK’s exit from the EU was more of a success than a failure; the 12% who oppose the UK rejoining the Erasmus+ student exchange programme; the 15% who are against a UK-EU Youth Experience Scheme, allowing young Brits reciprocal rights to work, study or volunteer in the EU on time-limited visas; or the 29% who want the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, there are two parties – Reform and the Tories – to choose from.

New World readers would say those parties are on the wrong side of the argument, but at least there is certainty of having picked a side. Labour continue to waver.

Suggested Reading

Blair has handed Starmer the best PR any embattled PM could wish for

Matt Kelly

The government’s anti-Rejoin position persists despite its search for a plausible alibi for anaemic economic growth, stagnant living standards, lack of affordability and unstable public finances as well as for solutions to these. Dire election results, grim polling for Labour and the fact that support for EU membership is even higher among Labour, Green and Lib Dem 2024 voters – 82%, 80% and 67% respectively on YouGov’s numbers than among all voters – cannot seem to dislodge the anti-Rejoin feeling. 

In fact, the party’s 2024 general election manifesto line – “there will be no return to the single market, the customs union and free movement” – remains intact even despite the recent departure of its author, former key prime ministerial adviser and Labour election strategist Morgan McSweeney.

Nonetheless, Labour’s leadership increasingly skirts around the party’s self-imposed restrictive red lines. Last month, Starmer declared at the Munich Security Conference: “We are not the Britain of the Brexit years”, while chancellor Rachel Reeves recently opined in a London School of Economics speech: “There are three big economic blocks: U.S., China and Europe… ultimately one of those is on our doorstep so the biggest prize is closer integration with Europe.” 

In effect, Labour seems to be saying this: Yes, leaving the EU was a disaster. But nothing can be done about it.

As a result, Labour’s path to Europe can disappointingly be measured only in small steps to date. There has been a widely welcomed a UK-EU agreement to rejoin Erasmus+, the EU’s student exchange programme, which British students will be able to access starting academic year 2027-28. The government has also elevated the position of minister for the constitution and the European Union, currently Nick Thomas-Symonds, to cabinet level. 

Behind the scenes, it has invested heavily in repairing ruptured relationships with European allies via bilateral meetings with peer powers France and Germany; working within the new 44-nation European Political Forum of EU and non-EU members; and as part of the E5 – with France, Germany, Italy and Poland – of Europe’s biggest defence spenders.

Meanwhile, as well as the SPS deal that will reduce border checks on agricultural products, negotiations are ongoing to link UK and EU carbon trading systems, to ensure mutual recognition of professional qualifications, to ease restrictions on touring artists and to secure UK access to EU border E-gates.

Sadly, there are also setbacks, notably the failed effort to date to join SAFE, the EU’s Security Action for Europe defence procurement fund – the government baulked at the proposed entry and participation fees. 

None of the positive but complex, technical fixes is moving the polls for Labour, or exciting Rejoiners. Yet there is a policy that is more eye-catching and tangible for voters. 

The government has agreed with the EU a UK-EU Youth Experience Scheme allowing young Brits to work, study and volunteer in the EU, and vice versa, likely ultimately covering the 30-nation European Economic Area of the EU plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. As a first step to a bolder bid for European integration, Labour should ignore phoney accusations of a return to free movement and secure a YES visa programme at least as generous as the terms currently extended to Australia, Canada and New Zealand. 

These Commonwealth nations’ combined population is about 75 million, with 61,500 youth mobility visas between them. A comparable ratio for the roughly 450 million-person EEA would mean visa numbers capped at 370,000 annually. 

Parity with these Commonwealth schemes would mean UK-EU YES visas being made available for a two-year duration, extendable for a further year, with 18-35-year-olds eligible for participation. There is no real political downside to an expansive scheme that could be expanded in visa numbers in future years: 76% of the public, 62% of Tory and even 55% of Reform voters favour a YES-type scheme according to YouGov polling.

Suggested Reading

Why New Labour was the last good government

Ros Taylor

A further move Labour could make without breaching manifesto red lines is to join the EU’s new AgoraEU initiative, the successor to Creative Europe, a flagship EU programme designed to strengthen and support Europe’s cultural, creative and media industries, which is merging with CERV – Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values – which supports and promotes democratic and civic engagement EU-wide. This would re-engage the UK with European partners in these areas, showing solidarity at a time when Europe’s values and institutions are under attack globally.

Yet another step Labour could take within the confines of the party’s current red lines would be to use the government’s control of the statute book to create a royal commission to assess the impact of the UK leaving the EU across the board. Areas to investigate, request expert evidence, and publish findings could include how leaving the EU impacted (i) the strength of the UK economy; (ii) the influence of the UK in the world; (iii) the health of the UK’s public finances; (iv) the UK’s politics, government and internal cohesion; and (v) the UK’s ability to deal with global challenges.

There is a long history of governments using royal commissions to push past political logjams or expand debate when parliamentary and legal opinion is at odds with public opinion. Examples include the 1949-53 Gowers Commission that examined the death penalty, foreshadowing abolition; the 1977-81 Phillips Commission which recommended strengthened protections for police suspects; and the 1991-93 Runciman Commission that proposed new legal safeguards to protect against miscarriages of justice.

Royal commissions on constitutional questions have included the 1969-73 Kilbrandon Commission that reviewed the case for the devolution eventually implemented in the late 1990s and the 1999-2000 Wakeham Commission on House of Lords reform, which remains a work in progress.

A commission to examine the impact of the UK being outside the EU could meet, supported by a secretariat and inviting expert evidence from June this year, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of 2016’s vote. Informed, data-driven evidence could be invited from business, finance, trade unions, the third sector, academia, the intelligence, diplomatic and civil services, among others, with interim reports and a final report to inform public debate before any general election in the summer of 2028 or 2029.

The government’s appointment of commission members has the capacity to be controversial but may be advantaged by the fact that the leading proponents of the UK remaining outside the EU, Reform and the Conservatives, don’t want to talk about what they once championed as their signature achievement. Whether the Commission had a simple majority of those who backed Remain, reflecting current public opinion, or ended up entirely composed of such figures owing to a refusal of the Leave side to participate, it could usefully include eminent elder statespeople. 

These could be drawn from among former prime ministers John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown; foreign secretaries Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind, Jack Straw, Margaret Beckett and William Hague; and ex-chancellor Ken Clarke, among others.

Suggested Reading

Whisper it, but Starmer might be getting it right on Iran

James Ball

One more path within Labour’s red lines to help change the debate would be to allow the party’s mayoral candidates and Scottish and Welsh parties to advocate for Rejoin, building on the lead taken by London mayor Sadiq Khan and Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.

Obviously, the government’s current unpopularity may make Labour’s leadership wary of breaking major election pledges, however cumbersome to effective governance and politically unrewarding they have become. However, there is a precedent for a UK government ditching a flagship election pledge and surviving reelelection. 

In 1991, the Conservatives announced the deeply unpopular poll tax would be replaced and secured reelection in 1992. Less encouraging for Starmer, this took place following a change of party leader and prime minister.

Of course, in the event of a Labour Party leadership change, current party policy on Europe would take centre stage. Leadership candidates would feel incentivised to go further in terms of European integration as they competed for support and courted an overwhelmingly pro-Rejoin parliamentary party and party membership. Even Starmer in his successful 2020 leadership campaign felt it necessary to promise to “defend free movement as we leave the EU.”

Whether or not Labour sticks with Starmer, the Lib Dems and Greens can play an important role in motivating a change in Labour’s position. The Lib Dems’ current policy is particularly anomalous as the party was created out of a merger of the historically – since Britain’s first 1961 bid to join the European Community – pro-Europe Liberal Party and the Social Democrats, who broke away from Labour in large part over Labour’s then hostility to the European project. 

At 2024’s general election, the Lib Dems merely stated the aim “to place the UK-EU relationship on a more formal and stable footing by seeking to join the Single Market,” more recently adding a commitment to negotiating a bespoke UK-EU customs union. 

There is plenty of upside and no real downside for the Lib Dems embracing Rejoin, unencumbered as they are by the restraints of government while competing with Labour and for disaffected Tories for votes. Not only are Labour’s 2024 voters overwhelmingly pro-Rejoin but some 26% of 2024 Conservatives are pro-Rejoin, according to YouGov.

One way to move the debate forward would be for the Greens and Lib Dems to run an explicitly pro-Rejoin London mayoral candidate in 2028. In the most pro-Rejoin part of England–63 to 28% on YouGov’s latest–this is a winning message.

In addition to cooperating over candidates, as these parties do in local government already, Lib Dems and Greens could use the provision in electoral law that allows accurate descriptions of up to six words of clearly identified party candidates: for example, “Liberal Democrats/Greens–Rejoin the European Union” to drive the point home. The Greens deciding to do so might prove sufficient for the Lib Dems to follow suit.

As polling, byelections and local election results continue to demonstrate that left cooperation will likely be required to effectively counter the threat of Reform and the Tories at the next general election, all three parties, including Labour, need to think more about a joint pro-Rejoin position. If electoral reform for Westminster is too much for Labour’s 400-plus MPs, cooperation will still be required. They might come to a constituency-by-constituency understanding rather as Labour, Lib Dem and Green targeted Tory seats were largely left to the candidate best placed to win at the last general election.

Imagine a general election with the three left parties pledging, in unison, to approach the EU to rejoin? The next Parliament could open with the words: “My government will open negotiations for the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union.”

Barnaby Towns is a former Conservative government special adviser in the last pro-Europe Tory government