Six years on from the Brexit referendum, Sir Keir Starmer appears to have finally realised what leaving the European Union means. In a speech to the Centre for European Reform yesterday, the Leader of the Opposition argued the Government ‘have missed Brexit opportunities time and time again’ and set out his party’s ‘five-point plan to make Brexit work’. Central to this were pledges to not rejoin the Single Market and Customs Union, to not reintroduce freedom of movement, and to make the Northern Ireland Protocol work.
The timing of the speech is unsurprising. Although Tobias Ellwood has ensured it has not only been Labour figures who have been talking up re-joining the Single Market in recent weeks, recent comments from Sadiq Khan about the need to re-examine the shape of Brexit have made it imperative for Labour’s leader to establish a clear position on the issue. Failing to shut the Remoaners of his party up could re-open a toxic and electorally unhelpful debate.
To that end, Starmer informed those assembled that ‘you cannot move forward, or grow the country, or deliver change or win back the trust of those who have lost faith in politics if you’re constantly focused on the arguments of the past’. Not only a broadside to anyone who considers the ending of freedom of movement central to current worker shortages across various sectors, but also to any ambitious rival gesturing for support from a pro-Remain membership.
This is also another belated response to the result of the 2019 general election. Labour unambiguously accepted the result of the referendum at the 2017 election, killing Brexit as a political issue and helping them take Jeremy Corbyn almost to Downing Street. In 2019, by contrast, the party had moved towards advocating a second referendum that would offer a choice between Remain and a renegotiated deal that looked an awful lot like Remaining. As a consequence, it lost a string of Leave-voting seats.
So yesterday’s speech was another step by Sir Starmer in taking his party back towards electoral relevance. Yet it comes with serious caveats. After all, Starmer was the Shadow Brexit Secretary who spent three years dragging his broadly Eurosceptic party leader towards a position of backing a second referendum. Even in 2020, he ran on a platform to be party leader that called for the reintroduction of freedom of movement. He has hardly been a poster boy for the benefits of Brexit.
Has the former Director of Public Prosecutions therefore gone through some form of Damascene conversion when it comes to the merits of leaving the European Union? No, of course not. His leadership of his party has so far been characterised by a willingness to drop numerous long-standing and member-friendly policies in the interest of attempting to make his party more electable. If he can drop abolishing tuition fees, he can drop re-joining the European Union.
Admittedly, Starmer might be right when he says he is an ‘honest broker’ whom the European Union might trust more than the Prime Minister, and to whom they can offer concessions over issues raging from Northern Ireland to musicians’ touring rights that they would never grant to Johnson. He is cut from the same bland, centrist, technocratic cloth as the former Belgian foreign ministers or Portuguese transport secretaries who habitually clog up Brussels.
But, like voters in this country, the Eurocrats must be aware that they shall struggle to trust most of what the Leader of the Opposition says. His positions are not fixed; he is a straw blowing in the wind, or at least buffeted by focus groups. His failure to convince means he looks likely to be reliant on the SNP and Lib Dems after the next election, both parties more pro-EU than Labour. So would yesterday’s position on Europe even survive into a Starmer premiership?
It is a sign of Starmer’s lack of natural political nous that in a speech designed to shut up the Remainers and provide certainty on Labour’s Brexit position, he has managed to create a policy designed to inflame tensions with his pro-Brussels flank and highlight just how uncertain a Labour government’s positions are likely to be after the next election. Starmer may have hoped to have his party acknowledge the reality of Brexit, but he still struggles to maintain his connection to it.