Britain’s new prime minister promised to “fire the starting gun” on establishing closer relations with the EU—selling out the UK by stealth and accepting Brussels’ rules by the back door.
Sir Keir Starmer is welcoming nearly 50 officials to Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, for the fourth meeting of the European Political Community (EPC)—a forum broadly for European leaders and the brainchild of Emmanuel Macron. It meets twice a year to “address issues of common interest,”with Starmer hosting the July 18th edition and getting closer to the Brussels bloc’s heads of state.
Starmer has been open about his intention to use this meeting to launch the UK’s “reset with Europe,” focussing—for now, at least—on working together on illegal migration and support for Ukraine.
He has yet to go public on the extent to which this would mean accepting rules set by Brussels and Strasbourg—especially on migration and regulation.
In contrast to the electorate, such a shift would go down well with the Labour Party, which has been champing at the bit to strengthen UK-EU ties since the 2016 Brexit vote, which the vast majority of its membership deeply opposed, and which Starmer—who, lest we forget, campaigned for a second referendum on EU membership—and the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, who described Tory Brexiteers as worse than Nazis, actually tried to overturn. During Starmer’s stint as Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit spokesman, his hostility to leaving the EU helped to get his party wiped out in its traditional ‘Red Wall’ seats.
Just days after this month’s general election saw Labour win a large parliamentary majority without popular support, EU sources revealed that Brussels would require Britain to relax its borders with the bloc as a quid pro quo for a renegotiated Brexit deal.
In what reads as a plea to EU leaders still frustrated about the UK’s departure from the bloc, Starmer said ahead of today’s meeting:
We cannot let the challenges of the recent past define our relationships of the future.
He added that his government is “focused on seizing this moment to renew our relationship with Europe.” Labour’s commitment to “reset[ting] the relationship with European partners” and working to “improve the United Kingdom’s trade and investment relationship with the European Union” was also laid out in yesterday’s King’s Speech. As PM Starmer to date has been sketchy on immigration issues, they would be central—including migrant quotas—to any rapprochement with Brussels.
Britons fearful of Labour’s plan to strengthen UK-EU ties might, however, be heartened by the comments of one EU diplomat who told The Daily Telegraph that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s absence from the EPC meeting “limits the scope of what can be discussed” on migration and closer trade ties. The source added:
I don’t think it’s the summit where we’ll be looking at any form of reset in the relationship.
Starmer will be holding bilateral meetings with European leaders through the day, including with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. He will close the event by hosting a private dinner with Macron.
