No doubt Keir Starmer wants us to think he is being ‘grown up’ in accepting an invitation to dinner at an EU summit. But it is actually the reverse: he is behaving like a toddler in danger of being enticed into a stranger’s car by a bag of sweets dangled out of the window.
As the Times reports this morning, Emmanuel Macron views him as a supplicant who is desperate to beg to be allowed partly to re-join the EU because Brexit has failed and immiserated the UK economy. The French president intends to take every advantage and to finish the job that wasn’t quite finished during the Brexit negotiations: to try to snare Britain within the EU’s regulatory orbit, and to tie our hands behind our backs when it comes to trade deals with the rest of the world.
Macron might have convinced himself that Britain’s economic slump is down to Brexit – ignoring the obvious evidence that France is not doing much better than Britain and that the German economy, which is entering its third year of recession, is doing far worse. But what he and many EU leaders fear below the surface is that a Britain with a more ambitious leader could one day turn Brexit to its advantage and use its freedoms to escape Europe’s low growth trajectory.
The timing could not make it clearer. As EU leaders meet in Brussels, Donald Trump is warning the EU that it is next in line for the punitive tariffs which he has just imposed on Mexico and Canada. Yet he is simultaneously suggesting that Britain could escape such sanctions. Trump is saying this because he believes that the EU is using all the means it can – especially non-tariff barriers such as the ban on chlorinated chicken, spuriously dressed up as a health and safety measure – to keep US goods out of Europe. Britain, he believes, is much less inclined towards protectionist measures (although for now measures inherited from the EU such as the chlorinated chicken ban remain in place).
The consequence is that we could soon have a trade war between the US and the EU in which Britain remains neutral. That would show up one advantage of Brexit for all to see. It could mean the UK continuing to trade with its single biggest trading partner, the US, while European exporters and importers are whacked with high tariffs. Moreover, under the terms of Britain’s trade deal with the EU, the UK could continue free – or at least freeish – trade across Europe. That would be a dream scenario for Britain, and a nightmare for the EU.
Small wonder, then, that the EU is subtly trying to lure Britain back within the EU customs union. This appears to be on the table in Starmer’s talks with the EU, along with free movement for 18 to 30-year-olds. Starmer, to be fair, has signalled his firm resistance to this, as has Home Secretary Yvette Cooper this morning. The PM suggests that his main reason for going to Brussels is to seek a new defence and security pact with the EU. But there will be many in the Labour party who will be imploring him to consider such an option. Lib Dem Ed Davey is doing all he can to woo Labour voters by advocating the customs union idea.
However, given Starmer’s history of backtracking on his promises, no one should feel confident that he won’t fold and agree to some sort of closer trading relationship with the EU which would allow it to draw Britain onto its own side in a trade war with the US. The trap has been set, and no one can be confident that Starmer will not plunge headlong into it.
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