Is Sir Keir Starmer’s cautious ‘reset’ with Europe enough to undo the damage done by Brexit?

Every prime minister has their verbal tell-tales. “Reset” is a favourite Starmerism. When he visited Berlin last week to pave the way to a bilateral co-operation treaty, the prime minister told us he was there as part of a “wider reset” in Britain’s relations with Europe. There was the same message when he journeyed on to Paris for a grip, grin and chat at the Élysée Palace with Emmanuel Macron. I see why he’s fond of the word. “Reset” conveys new thinking, a fresh start and altered priorities, while being conveniently vague about the precise direction of travel or the intended ultimate destination.
Downing Street was largely pleased with the positive optics of those forays across the Channel. The encounters with the chancellor of Germany and president of France generated a more upbeat vibe than the rest of a summer punctuated by violent disorder on the streets of Britain, controversies about importing Labour cronies into Whitehall, turbulence within the party about restricting winter fuel payments and Sir Keir’s “winter is coming” speech in the rose garden of Number 10 warning that “things will get worse before they get better”. That overdid the gloom even for those in sympathy with the Tory-blaming, expectations-managing strategy behind such depressive talk.
It makes sense, at the level of basic diplomacy, in the pursuit of common geostrategic interests and to please many of his own party’s supporters, for Sir Keir to strive to improve relations between the UK and its neighbours. There are signs for thinking that the effort is being reciprocated. At a joint news conference, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, another man of the centre-left, expressed dismay that links between his country and Britain had decayed since Brexit while declaring: “We want to grasp this outstretched hand.” From being a byword for unreliablity and unpredictability under the revolving door of Tory prime ministerships, the UK now looks like a fixed point in a churning world. Sir Keir is a fit man in his early sixties in possession of a huge parliamentary majority. He looks extremely likely to be around for a while.
That gives his European peer group much more of an incentive to invest in developing a rapport with him than they had with here-today, gone-tomorrow Conservative predecessors, who were distrusted anyway. He wants to “turn a corner on Brexit”, and so should the EU. There’s no need to carry on rubbing it in that Britain made a terrible choice eight years ago because that is now so obvious and a chunky majority of British voters express feelings of Bregret. Both Downing Street and the Foreign Office are trying to rebuild the personal and institutional links that withered under the glowering hostility to anything European in the post-referendum Conservative years. We now have a government populated with people who understand the scale of the injuries inflicted on the UK by the rupture with the world’s largest trading bloc. The Office for Budget Responsibility reckons the long-term penalty is a 15% fall in trade and 4% lopped off the size of the economy. There is a fresh team of ministers involved in international negotiations. In the words of one of them, they grasp that “geography matters” in trade.
Russian aggression is a threat to the values and interests of both the UK and the EU. London, Berlin and Paris will all shiver if Donald Trump is returned to the White House when Americans choose their next president at an election that is less than 70 days away. When I talked to Sir Tony Blair for the interview with the former prime minister that we publish today, he surprised me by sounding unfazed about a second Trump term. “I’m not worried about that,” he says of the threat that the US could abandon Nato and leave Europe to fend for itself. “I don’t think that will happen.” While Sir Keir shares his predecessor’s view that a British prime minister has to try to work with whoever the Americans put in the Oval Office, Sir Tony’s sanguinity about Trump 2.0 is very much not shared by people still in positions of leadership in Europe. Sir Keir, Monsieur Macron and Herr Scholz have a mutual enemy in the far right and the “snake oil” of populism and nationalism, as the Labour leader put it.
The tone of the dialogue with our neighbours has definitely waxed warmer since Sir Keir moved into Number 10, but seasoned observers warn not to read too much into this yet. “People in the UK don’t realise just how bad our reputation is in the EU,” remarks Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. “There’s a lot of work to do to rebuild trust and confidence, and convince them that Starmer isn’t just a nicer version of Rishi Sunak.”
Handshakes for the cameras are easy. The real test is signatures on substantive agreements. Sir Keir has been much more definite about what he doesn’t want than about what he aspires to achieve. Though polling suggests that a majority of voters now think it was a mistake to leave the EU, he’s said he can’t see the UK rejoining “in my lifetime”. The Labour manifesto promised to reduce friction by “tearing down unnecessary barriers to trade”. But he flatly rules out any attempt to go for the big move, which would be to negotiate the UK back into the EU customs union and/or the single market. Some ministers suggest that’s “something for the second term” – assuming they get one. But colleagues have heard the prime minister being very dismissive of what he derides as the “warm bath” argument that getting back into the EU’s free trade area would be the most sure-fire way to improve our prosperity and help achieve his goal of turning the UK into the fastest growing economy in the G7.
Any substantive improvement in the economic relationship will have to be negotiated with the European Commission. The botched Brexit deal agreed by Boris Johnson is up for review in 2025-26. It would require a massive effort and a lot of trust to break down the resistance in Brussels to a fundamental recasting. The prime minister and those around him seem especially neuralgic about joining any collaborative arrangements or schemes that would involve making a contribution to the EU budget. Her portrait may have been removed from one of the Number 10 studies, but the ghost of Margaret Thatcher still haunts the building.
In terms of what Sir Keir would like to gain on commerce, the publicly stated ambitions are modest: a veterinary agreement to reduce barriers to trade in food products, the removal of the impediments to touring musicians and other artists, and mutual recognition of professional qualifications. “This is, to put it mildly, quite a strange choice of objectives,” says Anand Menon, the director of UK in a Changing Europe. “Rather than picking low-hanging fruit, the government seems to have opted for targets that are neither low, nor particularly juicy.”
Even these relatively small steps will be difficult to secure. The EU has rebuffed previous UK attempts to secure better terms for touring musicians on the grounds that unrestricted access for a non-member would cut across the single market and the customs union. For all of Sir Keir’s friendly exchanges with continental counterparts, the UK has yet to display much willingness to generate goodwill by embracing EU goals. Britain is sounding standoffish about an agreement, which is especially desired by Germany, on youth mobility that would allow under-30s from the UK to live and work in the EU for a fixed period and vice versa. Even if the government can achieve its limited objectives, the impact on the UK’s overall economic performance will be slight.
Trying to make incremental, practical improvements to the relationship is in keeping with the methodological temperament of this prime minister. It may bear some fruit, but there are downsides to trying to advance in nursery steps rather than attempt more ambitious strides. Negotiation will mean compromise. Getting things from the EU will entail giving things in return. That will be met with bellows about “betrayal” from the Brextremists. It is not good for Downing Street’s nerves that Nigel Farage’s Reform party squats in second place in 89 Labour-held seats. Timidity and lack of imagination will be the charge against Sir Keir for disappointing those who want him to be bolder in addressing the damage inflicted by our rupture with the EU. The risk of being cautious is that he will leave both Europhiles and Europhobes fuming while seeing scant dividend in terms of more growth. The time may come when his current approach will need – what’s the word? – a reset.