Only now, perhaps, do we see the sheer smallness of the man. Desperate to prolong his premiership, Sir Keir Starmer is making a series of disastrous offers to the EU. Even he does not believe that they are in the national interest but, in a vibes-driven Labour Party, totemic concessions count for more than hard advantages.
His speech yesterday was a succession of desperate, whining promises to his backbenchers. Borrowing a phrase from the lamentable John Major, he promised to put ‘Britain at the heart of Europe’, which is patently impossible on both geographical and political grounds.
What he means, of course, is that he will abandon the promises he made at the last election and rejoin the EU in all but name – only, this time, with no voting rights.
Why? I mean, if he truly thought it was in our interest to sign up to EU standards, abandoning the progress we have made in fields such as gene editing and AI by having lighter regulations, he would presumably have said so by now.
The answer is that he is totting up not the costs and benefits to our economy but the number of MPs who are sore about Brexit and who want some symbolic concessions that will annoy Eurosceptics.
Everything is now about eking out a few more days in Downing Street, buying time to build a legacy, hoping to be remembered as something other than a flop from day one.
Sir Keir Starmer will surely abandon the promises he made at the last election and rejoin the EU in all but name. (Pictured with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen)
Eurocrats grasped immediately that the PM was one of their own. They sensed that he desperately wanted to make amends for Brexit. But they also understood that he was constrained by both public opinion and the manifesto pledges he had made in the run-up to the 2024 election, when he promised not to join the single market or the customs union.
Now, those promises are being junked, the red lines scrubbed out. Starmer no longer cares about public opinion, only the opinion of a few hundred Labour MPs and activists.
Brussels is therefore raising its price. If Britain wants to participate in a common energy market or a shared emissions trading scheme – deals that will benefit the EU at least as much as Britain – it must put its cash upfront.
If Britain wants to accept EU food and veterinary standards – an unequivocal gain for Brussels, and a net loss for Britain, which will find it much harder to sign trade deals with other states – it must slap its money on the table.
If it wants to contribute to the defence of Europe, fine, but there is a price-tag attached.
That’s right. Incredibly, the EU is asking Britain to pay to agree to what are EU rather than British demands. And, even more incredibly, Starmer is ready to do it so as to appease his MPs.
Why are Labour MPs demanding such a bad deal? Are their constituents not already taxed enough? Is this the best use of our money – an increasing chunk of which, never forget, must be borrowed?
I don’t think those MPs have ever really sat down and essayed a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed EU reset. This is, for most of them and for their core supporters, an emotional rather than an intellectual question.
Have they not considered that the EU economy is also sliding steadily into decline? In 1990 the EU had a 27 per cent share of world GDP, which has now slipped to a mere 17 per cent. Indeed, they have not recovered from the trauma of June 24, 2016, when they woke up in a country that had, as they saw it, voted against collaboration with Europe.
It is no use, ten years on, trying to convince them that 52 per cent of us were not voting against friendship with our neighbours, that the vote was rather about sovereignty, democracy and global engagement.
Just as Starmer’s advocacy of ID cards turned the electorate solidly against the idea, so his self-interested and groundless Euro-enthusiasm will have the same effect, says Daniel Hannan
No, for the hard core of Continuity Remainers, which is heavily concentrated on Labour’s parliamentary benches, this is a culture war. What counts is wiping the grin off Nigel Farage’s face, hauling up the 12-star flag, signalling to the world, regardless of the financial cost, that we are an anti-racist sort of place.
If you think that sounds far-fetched, consider the way we rejoined the Erasmus Scheme, a student exchange programme which obliges participating states to pay the fees of the students they host.
Because many more EU students study in British universities than the other way around, the scheme was always going to penalise this country economically. Most estimates are that it will end up costing us more than £1billion a year.
When we left the EU, we replaced Erasmus with the Turing scheme, whereby we paid the fees of our own youngsters to study abroad. Turing was superior in every way: Global in its reach, attractive to lower-income students and much cheaper for British taxpayers. But it was junked anyway amid wild celebrations by Labour MPs who wanted to flaunt their European credentials.
The same thoughtless posturing lies behind demands to rejoin the customs union – which provides tariff-free trade across member states. I accept that I am never going to convince Euro-fanatics of the advantages of trade deals with fast-growing economies in South Asia and the Pacific. But a moment’s thought would tell them that joining the customs union would remove tariffs, not regulatory and border checks on our exports.
There is a reason that Norway and Switzerland, despite being far closer to and more economically dependent upon the EU than Britain is, have never considered joining.
One or two Labour MPs have bothered to look at the details. Stella Creasy, for example, delved into the issue and saw that, while a measure of single market participation – including further alignment with EU standards to reduce these regulatory checks – would indeed ease trade restrictions, membership of the customs union would not.
But few of her colleagues are interested in the details. As Kristian Niemetz of the Institute of Economic Affairs pointed out at the time, Labour MPs rejected the single market because they disliked the word ‘market’ and backed the customs union because they liked the word ‘union’.
Even Starmer’s murmurings of joining the single market would involve a hefty yearly fee: last week it was reported that, given that Switzerland agreed to pay 375million euros per annum to the EU’s social cohesion fund for the privilege, the UK would be looking at £1billion.
If there is a silver lining here, it is that voters can now see the shallowness of the Euro-nostalgic case. Just as Starmer’s advocacy of ID cards turned a previously evenly-balanced electorate solidly against the idea, so his self-interested and groundless Euro-enthusiasm will have the same effect. Not before time.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is a Conservative peer.
