Labour’s ‘crabwise’ approach to closer EU ties must address damage of Brexit | Heather Stewart
Rachel Reeves joined EU finance ministers for dinner in Washington last week, on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund spring meetings – the first time a chancellor had done so since Brexit.It was the latest symbolic step in Labour’s marked shift towards prioritising closer EU relations.That makes perfect sense against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s reckless Middle East conflict.But domestic politics and economics have increasingly aligned in favour of a lean towards the EU, too – or, rather, Labour has increasingly opened its eyes to them.As political scientists such as Rob Ford and Ben Ansell have been all but screaming for some time, Labour is losing many more voters to the left wing, pro-EU Greens and Liberal Democrats than to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
That is only likely to become more evident when the results of May’s elections come in.Since the departure of Morgan McSweeney, the government appears to have become markedly more willing to try to win some of these lost lefties back, instead of hankering after Reform-curious “hero voters” – those won directly by Labour from the Conservatives in 2024.When it comes to the economics, there is a growing body of evidence about the impact of Brexit on what is meant to be the overriding “mission” of the Labour government: kickstarting growth.In her Mais lecture last month, Reeves highlighted analysis published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and led by Nick Bloom, a British economist based at Stanford, suggesting leaving the EU may have knocked up to 8% off the size of the economy.“Brexit did deep damage,” she said.
That is significantly larger than many previous estimates.Whatever the right number, it dramatically dwarfs the potential upsides from the various non-EU trade deals the UK has struck since 2016.As Reeves put it: “No trade deal with any individual nation can outweigh the importance of our relationship to a bloc with which we share a land border, with which our supply chains are closely intertwined, and it accounts for almost half our trade.”Yet Labour’s current painstakingly discussed “reset” in relations with the EU, along the lines prescribed in its manifesto, is likely to be worth less than 0.5% of GDP, according to John Springford of the Centre for European Reform.
That doesn’t mean these negotiations – on agrifood, the EU electricity market and the emissions trading scheme – are not worth pursuing.But it makes sense that Reeves is now looking further – pointing to the possibility of “dynamic alignment”, or automatically following EU rules, in exchange for more access to the single market.Which industries she has in mind are as yet unspecified, but the government plans to give itself the legislative levers to track changes in EU regulations without putting every tweak to a House of Commons vote.It is not an unreasonable aim, although in reality Labour’s room for manoeuvre is likely to be limited.Widen the sectors at play too far, and Brussels is likely to object to a non-member “cherrypicking” aspects of the single market.
And the greater the economic benefits at stake, the more likely the UK will be urged to accept freedom of movement – crossing one of the government’s cherished manifesto red lines,The EU has recently renegotiated its relationship with Switzerland, precisely to avoid concerns about a pick-and-mix approach,The new set of deals falls short of full single market membership, but it entrenches freedom of movement and budget contributions,Anand Menon, the director of the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, says Reeves and Keir Starmer may be arguing for something undeliverable,“At a certain point, they’re not going to get the benefits without the obligations.
”There is a deep irony here, not lost on veterans of the scarring and chaotic Brexit debate in the 2017-2019 hung parliament.What Labour is walking itself towards, crabwise, has much in common with Theresa May’s doomed Chequers deal, which would also have involved aligning with the EU in key areas.“Labour would bite your arm off for that now,” says Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government.Starmer, as the shadow Brexit secretary, played a crucial role in collapsing talks with May’s government over her withdrawal agreement with the EU, not least by demanding a referendum on the deal.The prospect of collapsing her government was probably too delicious to resist, but the ultimate outcome was the triumph of Boris Johnson and his harder, narrower vision of leave.
Labour opposed that with every parliamentary manoeuvre it could muster, and ended up proposing instead to reopen the entire Brexit debate with another referendum – a policy for which Starmer was the torchbearer,Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership team was by this point exhausted and divided; but the end result of the second referendum gambit was a crushing general election defeat,Starmer’s less-than-deft political touch was evident even then, for those who cared to look,If the party is now careering towards a leadership contest, the UK’s relationship with the EU will be high on the agenda: some backbenchers are already advocating a “Swiss-style” approach,That would mean thinking the unthinkable, and making the risky political argument for a return of free movement – a hard sell, at a time when Farage’s well-funded rightwing populists are running riot, and a long way from the prime minister’s “island of strangers” speech.
Any would-be candidate hoping to make that case, though, might take inspiration from the words of another putative party leader, who said at his campaign launch: “We welcome migrants; we don’t scapegoat them,Low wages, poor housing, poor public services are not the fault of people who come here: they’re political failure,So we have to make the case for the benefits of migration; for the benefits of free movement,” That candidate? Not Zack Polanski, but Starmer,
MoD has lost track of veterans on recall list, says defence adviser
The Ministry of Defence has lost track of military veterans they intend to recall at a time of national danger, according to a key government adviser.About 95,000 former soldiers and officers are in the strategic reserve but it is claimed that officials have failed to maintain a full record of their contact details.George Robertson, a former defence secretary and head of Nato who co-authored last year’s strategic defence review (SDR), made the claim at an event in Salisbury, Wiltshire.“What the review talks about is having the strategic reserve, that is, all of the people in this room who’ve been in the forces who have got a continuing obligation,” the Labour peer said. “But the Ministry of Defence at the present moment doesn’t even know where most of them are
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Kezia Dugdale, the former leader of Scottish Labour, says she is now “quite scared” as a lesbian in Britain and has started to feel nervous holding her wife’s hand in public.Speaking to the Guardian in Edinburgh on the announcement of her appointment as the chair of Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity, she said it was “completely possible” gay rights in the UK could be eroded with the rise of rightwing populism.Equal marriage could not be taken for granted, she cautioned. “I don’t think it is an implausible argument now in the way that it maybe was five years ago. My rationale for that is: look at Italy, for example, where you see a rollback of rights for LGBT people
Two more Reform local election candidates accused of offensive posts
Reform UK’s checks on candidates are “clearly not fit for purpose”, Labour has said after two more candidates in May’s local elections were accused of making offensive or potentially racist social media posts.Meanwhile, it emerged that Restore Britain, the party set up by the MP Rupert Lowe after he left Reform, appeared to have accepted a donation from someone who has called publicly on social media for “another Hitler” to come to power.Reform has faced a series of controversies about some of its candidates in the local elections in England on 7 May, as well as some people standing for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, despite Nigel Farage saying the party had greatly improved its vetting.Images of Facebook posts by Alan Stay, a candidate for Reform in the Isle of Wight, show he shared racist and sexist messages, including one that repeatedly used an explicitly racist epithet, arguing that it was not a harmful word. The post was made in response to a news story about a DJ losing their job for playing a record that featured the word
Mandelson scandal is biggest crisis for diplomatic service in decades, says ex-Foreign Office chief
The Peter Mandelson security vetting scandal is the biggest crisis for the diplomatic service in decades, a former Foreign Office chief has said.Simon McDonald, who was the permanent under-secretary of the government department until 2020, has spoken out in defence of Oliver Robbins, saying the civil servant was “thrown under a bus” by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, when he was dismissed from his role on Thursday.Robbins was sacked as permanent secretary of the Foreign Office hours after the Guardian revealed that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting in January 2025, during the process to appoint him as ambassador to the US.It is said that Robbins knew about Mandelson’s failure to pass the UK Security Vetting (UKSV) assessment but did not forward that information to ministers. Starmer claims he was not made aware of the outcome of the vetting process until this week
‘Pure shock’: how ministers reacted to revelation of Mandelson vetting failure
When the Guardian revealed that Peter Mandelson had failed his vetting checks before being appointed as British ambassador to Washington, members of Keir Starmer’s cabinet, who were scattered around the world on government business, were caught by the same element of surprise.In Washington for the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had just come out of a meeting with the Ukrainian finance minister when she was told the breaking news.“I didn’t know anything about the vetting process,” she told reporters. “I’m the chancellor, I’m not the foreign secretary and I’m not 10 Downing Street, so I can’t give you any more information on that.”David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, was on a military flight back from the Middle East when he was summoned to the cockpit by the captain who told him that No 10 needed to speak to him over the radio
Green MP: Labour caricatures working-class people over greyhound racing
Labour is “offensively caricaturing” working-class people by saying they do not want a greyhound racing ban in England, the Green party MP Hannah Spencer has said.The sport has traditionally been associated with working-class culture and has historically been popular in so-called red wall areas, which Labour insiders suggest is part of the reason why there are no plans for England to follow bans announced last month in Scotland and Wales.The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, said in parliament on Thursday that the gambling industry “brings joy to a lot of people”. She said: “The industry as a whole brings positive benefits to the United Kingdom.”Spencer, who won the Gorton and Denton byelection in February and has four rescue greyhounds, said: “Lisa Nandy just continuously offends people by saying that working-class people don’t care about dogs or each other
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