Keir Starmer will never rejoin the EU The land of Remainer dreams is finished

As sound as this reasoning is, it gives Starmer too much credit. He is no more serious about rejoining the EU than he was about Labour’s Green New Deal or boosting house-building. Both of these were supposedly flagship policies, and yet his party rapidly retreated from them at the slightest hint of contention or opportunity. In the first instance, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves pulled back from her much-vaunted programme of “Securonomics” and a “green prosperity plan” when it was pointed out that it would cost money. Then, more recently, Starmer helped to torpedo the efforts of Levelling Up minister Michael Gove, who was hoping to lift environmental restrictions on house-building.

But if Starmer’s pledge for a new Brexit deal is equally insincere, what is really going on here? In truth, his promises are less about Brussels than they are about managing his own party and manipulating the hopes of voters. There is a huge subsection of the British middle class, many of them supporters of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who have never recovered from the trauma of losing the EU referendum. For these people, Brexit has become the default explanation for everything that has gone wrong with the country and in their own lives — from energy costs and food inflation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and long airport queues. Recognising this psychic pain, Starmer is dangling the prospect of an existential salve; he is, in short, virtue-signalling.

However as with most virtue-signalling policies, it will have no effect on the status quo. But the status quo is, in fact, a drift back towards the EU. And this drift, much like other policies associated with the liberal Left — from Net Zero targets to pro-trans social policy — has taken place under Tory rule. It was, after all, the Tories’ support for Nato’s war in Ukraine that has kept Britain entwined in the geopolitics of Brussels. Nothing symbolised this better than Boris Johnson flying to Kyiv rather than attend a party meeting in the Red Wall constituency of Doncaster in June 2022 — the same Red Wall constituencies that are now likely to swing back to Labour at the next general election.

And it was the current Tory Prime Minister who signed off on the Windsor Framework that has helped shore up the Northern Ireland Protocol. By ensuring that Northern Ireland’s economic integration into the Single Market is not compromised, Sunak is again undercutting the prospect of regulatory divergence from the EU. It was also Sunak who, in in October 2022, joined Emmanuel Macron’s so-called European Political Community (EPC) initiative — which is envisaged, in the new Franco-German report on restructuring EU membership, as the outermost tier of EU membership. Starmer’s declaration in Montreal at the weekend that he has no intention of diverging from the EU is not radical; after all, neither do the Tories.

A sovereign British foreign and economic policy in the medium term seems unlikely, then. Nonetheless, there are grounds for optimism for those who cherish national independence. Ultimately, the closer Britain draws to the EU, the more the shimmering mirage of Rejoin will fade, and the more difficult it will be to portray the EU as a cure for all our ills. The truth is that, for Rejoiners, no amount of rejoining will atone for our democratic sins. And even if Britain traversed all the tiers and outer layers of “associate EPC membership” to “full membership”, which would include membership of the Schengen Zone and even the eurozone currency union, the EU the Rejoiners know and love will already be long gone. Indeed, that same Franco-German report sees the future of the bloc as a series of concentric rings with multiple tiers of membership rather than a simple club of member-states.

The hard truth is that the EU of Rejoiners’ imagination disappeared in June 2016. It was an artefact of the era of US unipolarity and high globalisation. The very fact that Britain decided to withdraw was not a historical accident that can be rectified; it was a reverberation of deeper structural shifts in the global order, signalling the beginnings of a retreat from globalisation well before the pandemic and Russia’s invasion. This is Starmer’s Brexit mistake: as the EU dissolves into tiers, the politics of nostalgia will become increasingly impotent. 

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Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is author or editor of eight books, as well as a co-author of Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit (2023). He is one of the hosts of the Bungacast podcast.

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