Keir Starmer has made the anodyne demand that Britain seek a ‘closer trading agreement’ with the EU. But why doesn’t he go the whole hog and make it Labour policy to rejoin the single market?
The Labour leader could hardly be accused of seeking to reverse Brexit. Some Leavers, prior to the 2016 referendum, wanted Britain to stay in the single market after Brexit – including Daniel Hannan and, on many occasions, Boris Johnson. So surely rejoining the single market, but staying out of the EU, could be the compromise which would please the greatest number of the public, propelling Starmer into Downing Street as a unifying force? What’s more, he would win a huge slice of the business vote, such as that of car-maker Vauxhall and its parent company Stellantis which warned this morning that the UK car industry is doomed unless trading relations improve with the EU. One of its bugbears is that zero tariffs on cars exported from Britain to the EU only apply if 45 per cent of the value of a the components that go into the car are made in either the UK or the EU. Otherwise, a 10 per cent tariff is imposed.
Starmer may be dull but he is not entirely devoid of political sense
So why not, then, make Labour the party of the single market and scoop up the business vote, the unity vote, not to mention the votes of holidaymakers angered that they will soon have to buy a visa waiver before travelling to the EU – while avoiding the charge of reversing Brexit?
Starmer may be dull, and he may have a much less-good political antennae than did Tony Blair in the mid-1990s, but he is not entirely devoid of political sense. He realises that what might on paper look to be an ideal compromise would, in practice, prove deeply unappealing to British voters.
Leaving the EU but remaining within the single market might have seemed right prior to the referendum but it now comes with some very heavy baggage. The very thought of Britain re-opening negotiations brings back memories of the long years of negotiations between 2016 and 2019 when Theresa May’s government seemed to be floundering and the EU appeared to be scheming at every opportunity to ensure that Britain was left with a bum deal.
The Norway option, as post-Brexit membership of the single market became known, turned from being the best of all worlds to the worst of all worlds. It is now widely seen as an arrangement by which the EU could force Britain into its regulatory orbit without having a say in EU regulations – Jacob Rees-Mogg’s famous ‘vassal state’ in other words.
The key to Starmer’s position can be found in a poll conducted by the Tony Blair Institute last October, which found that while 70 per cent of people favoured closer economic ties with the EU, only a third of people wanted to rejoin the single market. The European Free Trade Association – under which guise Norway remains outside the EU but within the single market, and which Britain was a member of prior to joining the then European Economic Community – seems to have become just as toxic as the EU.
Eventually, I suspect, Britain may well end up back in the single market. But clearly that time is not here yet.
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