Trump has turned against the UK and Keir Starmer is looking to Europe for allies. Brexit has flatlined the economy, the White House has shown its contempt, and British public opinion has quietly shifted. For the first time in years, a UK government is making a serious case for rapprochement on trade, defence, and beyond. But after years of hostility, the EU is sceptical about Britain's overtures. Is this a genuine turning point, or the same old cherry-picking?
The diplomatic relationship between the UK and the European Union has been utterly transformed since Britain finally split from the bloc six years ago. In the early 2020s relations were tense. Both Boris Johnson and the short-lived Liz Truss were anxious to prove how little Britain now needed the Union. Even the COVID pandemic was an opportunity to engage in a race to show how quickly the UK could roll out a vaccine.
All that has changed. The era of xenophobic rhetoric is over. Keir Starmer is now at pains to stress how much he wants a closer relationship with the rest of Europe. In a speech at the beginning of April he noted how much economic damage Brexit had done and said he wanted “closer economic cooperation. Closer security cooperation… A partnership for the dangerous world that we must navigate together.”
The PM did his best to placate Donald Trump and sustain the ‘special relationship’, but his refusal to agree to all the US president’s demands for help bombing Iran provoked contempt and ridicule in the White House. Instead, American planes have been allowed to take off from RAF Lakenheath to carry out ‘defensive’ strikes, and the UK has shot down Iranian missiles. This is still too much for some Britons, including the Greens and the Lib Dems. But Trump’s vitriol has put an end to the illusion that the US is a reliable, sympathetic partner. Starmer did not mention Trump in his speech, but the ‘dangerous world’ he spoke of is now much more dangerous because of the US president’s aggression.
The PM is hoping that as British voters notice the inflationary effects of the war on Iran, they too will conclude that Europe is a more trustworthy partner than the US. He will also hope that Nigel Farage’s popularity wanes as his supporters wonder why the Reform leader is such a fan of the man who boasted he was ready to end ‘a whole civilisation’ in Iran and has made their summer holidays unaffordable.
Cynics will say that Starmer has always been looking for an excuse to reverse as much of Brexit as he can. The cynics are right. But now he has the justifications he needs – both in the flatlining UK economy, where exporters to Europe have been put out of business, and in the difficulty of doing business with America instead.
Britons have soured on Brexit, but perhaps not enough
Enthusiasm for Brexit was always marginal, and since 2021 the Leave majority has fallen away. Partly this is because about 3.2 million Leave voters have died (as well as 1.8 million Remainers). For almost four years, all but one poll has had Rejoin at an average of around 50 percent. Around 15-19 percent of the population don’t know.
Yet for the past 18 months between a quarter and a third of voters have said they will vote for Reform, which is implacably opposed to EU membership. This is approximately the same percentage who want to stay out of the Union. But because there are now five main parties in British politics and the country uses the first past the post system to elect governments, Reform leads in the polls. It is a paradox: a country that (just about) wants to rejoin stands ready to elect a PM who wants to destroy the EU.
These mixed signals are making Brussels cautious, according to David Henig, the director of the UK Trade Policy Project. The European Commission is taking a “guarded interest” in the UK’s efforts at rapprochement. “They’re certainly prepared to listen… The question they keep asking is how deep is their commitment? How much do you just want some trade privileges? How deep is the consensus across society?” The old problem of Britain wanting to cherry-pick access to the Single Market without allowing freedom of movement or wanting to pay substantial sums into the EU budget remains.
Henig says Britain’s readiness to talk about the importance of defending Europe as a whole has earned it “a certain amount of respect”, “but it’s not widely replicated in other areas. This is still the same old UK that will pick and choose its areas of integration.”
When Britain says it wants to co-operate, what does it mean?
Starmer said he wanted to go further than the current negotiations, but even these are some way off completion. The EU wants its students on any UK-EU youth mobility scheme to pay the same (already high) fees that British citizens do: this would deprive universities of revenue they badly need, because foreign students pay more. The European Commission is also worried it does not have legal competence to negotiate an EU-wide scheme. The talks on food and drink alignment and linking emissions trading schemes are going more smoothly and until mid-April the Eurosceptic press had barely noticed them. There was a brief outcry about the possibility that some jars of marmalade might have to be relabelled, and the prospect of letting ministers tweak regulations to allow for dynamic alignment has appalled Farage. But even diehard Brexiteers realise the world has changed.
But Luigi Scazzieri, a senior policy analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, is cautiously optimistic that more can be done on defence. “There is a willingness on both sides to continue to explore what closer UK participation in EU defence tools looks like.” He says the EU’s Ukraine loan will be a test case. In exchange for allowing Ukraine to buy more British equipment, the EU would ask for a contribution to the loan’s interest costs. On the other hand, Scazzieri says, Britain is unlikely to participate in the SAFE defence fund unless it has guarantees about what it would secure. Negotiations broke down in November after France set an extremely high price for British access. “The politics of this is moving in a more favourable direction, but the key issue is money – on both sides.”
But there is more to EU co-operation than an export opportunity. So what does Starmer have in mind? The UK in a Changing Europe think-tank has tentatively suggested an offer of more co-ordination in resilience, such as “supply chain security, investment screening, and critical infrastructure”, and perhaps UK involvement in the Creative Europe programme.
None of this will upset the Eurosceptics or break any of Labour’s manifesto promises about the EU. But it will not do much for growth either. Occasionally a senior Labour politician makes noises about rejoining the Customs Union, but that would put the deals Britain has negotiated with other countries like India in jeopardy. At some point Starmer, who is heavily criticised on the left for his poor communication skills, may be replaced by a leader willing to campaign to rejoin the EU. Some argue that would founder because the EU is simply not that keen on letting Britain back in. Others say it would demand that the UK joined the euro.
“Not necessarily,” says Henig, although “the UK wouldn’t have many areas where it would be able to diverge from the norm if there was an application for membership.” The bigger problem is that the UK still looks like a country out for what it can get rather than a serious believer in the European project. “A UK government that only seems to be interested in closing current negotiations as fast as possible looks like a transactional one.” Despised by Trump, not quite trusted by its European neighbours: Britain is in a hard place.
The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue.
