Labour’s European conundrum Charles Grant
If and when the Labour Party takes office, it will come under pressure to negotiate a much better Brexit deal than that bequeathed by Boris Johnson. But the political situation in both the UK and the EU will make that task very difficult. The agreement on the ‘Windsor Framework’ in February 2023, which sorted out some of the difficulties of the Northern Ireland protocol, softened the antagonism between London and Brussels. But the governing Conservatives remain profoundly Eurosceptic and a real reset of UK-EU relations must await the arrival of a Labour government.
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here are at least three reasons to revisit the relationship. First, public opinion in the UK has shifted markedly. According to polling by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 18 per cent of those who voted Leave now regret leaving the EU. More strikingly, 78 per cent of Britons want the UK to have a closer relationship with the EU than it has now (including 71 per cent of Leave voters).1
Second, the economic damage inflicted by Johnson’s Brexit deal is becoming ever-more apparent: friction at borders, labour shortages, regulatory uncertainty and upward pressure on prices. The Centre for European Reform’s calculations suggest that the British economy is 5.5 per cent smaller than that of a constructed 39