Labour’s scheming to edge us back into the EU’s sclerotic embrace — while loudly insisting it’s doing anything but

DOES the Labour Party secretly want to sneak this country back into the European Union without having the courage to admit it? There are good reasons for thinking so.

The official line, of course, is that no such intention exists. Sir Keir Starmer recently said there is ‘no case for going back to the EU or going back into the single market’. But the Labour leader also argued for ‘a closer economic relationship with the EU’ — without specifying what form it might take.

Yesterday morning, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy repeated this line on BBC Radio 4’ s Today programme. He emphatically denied that Labour has any plans to join the single market, let alone seek readmission to the EU. Good God, no!

Yet without spelling out what he meant — Mr Lammy is a past master at waffle — he declared that Labour wants Britain to ‘reconnect to our allies’ and engage in a ‘structured dialogue with the European Union’, whatever that might entail.

Suspicions

Mr Lammy did make one concrete proposal — which is that Britain should enter a new ‘security pact’ with Brussels. This is telling, for as a general rule those who favour enhanced European defence arrangements also long for closer integration. Look at the President of France Emmanuel Macron, champion both of an EU defence force and a united Europe.

In fact, most EU countries are members of Nato, as is Britain, and it is a revivified Nato that has taken the lead (with one or two weak brethren, such as Germany) in standing up to Russia over Ukraine. It’s hard to see how a European security pact would help — other than as a backdoor route to enable us to snuggle up to the EU. Mr Lammy’s enthusiasm for such a pact should fan our suspicions.

Why is Labour privately edging back into the EU’s embrace while loudly insisting that it’s not doing so? The answer, surely, is that it fears alarming Red Wall voters who supported Brexit and defected to the Tories in the 2019 election. Sir Keir Starmer can’t triumph in 2024 unless he wins them back.

Occasionally, though, the cat slips out of the bag. Only last month, an unidentified member of the Shadow Cabinet was reported to have said: ‘Over the long run, I can see Britain being a member of the EU again.’ But in Sir Keir’s party — much more disciplined than under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership — such sentiments are not supposed to be uttered in public.

Meanwhile, London Mayor Sadiq Khan recently veered off script in a major speech. Like Sir Keir, he insisted that ‘Brexit isn’t working’, but he went further by advocating ‘a pragmatic debate about the benefits of being a part of the customs union and the single market’. That means we should join them as soon as practicable.

Are we seriously supposed to believe that Mr Khan was shooting his mouth off as an unrepresentative loose cannon? No, he was repeating party orthodoxy, which is intended, this side of an election, to be kept under wraps. He put himself at odds with Sir Keir — not over Labour’s true policy on the EU, but over being honest about that policy.

If I’m correct, the question is what the Tories should do to counter a trick on the electorate. For polls suggest that more and more voters would like the UK to rejoin the EU. According to the latest one, 47 per cent of respondents want us to return, while 31 per cent would prefer us to stay out.

The Tories may be tempted to argue among themselves that there’s no point in drawing attention to Labour’s secret plan to finagle us back into the EU, or at least the single market and customs union, because that is what most people want. There is therefore no electoral advantage in highlighting Sir Keir’s skulduggery.

This would be a very foolish response. Labour’s trickery should be exposed — and not only in order to enlighten Red Wall voters how it is intending to deceive them. To smuggle us back into the EU or its institutions would be a profound offence against democracy, which should concern us all.

Didn’t a majority vote in favour of withdrawal in June 2016? Labour has previously shown that it didn’t respect the outcome of the referendum by pushing for a second vote. Sir Keir was an enthusiastic supporter of that policy. So he has plenty of form in not respecting democracy.

Many people may be disenchanted with the hitherto slim — some would say nonexistent — benefits of leaving the EU. But I believe that Leavers and many Remainers would be appalled if Labour’s cynical ploy were successfully revealed by the Tories.

Heartache

Not only that. Whatever our opinion of the European Union, very few of us want a re-run of the squabbles that convulsed the nation for years after the referendum, causing so much division and heartache. Labour’s plan must necessarily be covert for now, but it would quickly become visible if the party formed a government, and terrific arguments would ensue.

Moreover, whatever arrangement with the EU Sir Keir cooked up, Britain would inevitably be given a less advantageous deal than that which we enjoyed previously. Re-embracing the EU would lead not only to further pointless disputes at home. We would almost certainly be offered humiliating terms by our erstwhile partners.

There was much wisdom in remarks on Tuesday by CBI boss Tony Danker, a former Remainer. He argued that the pro-Brexit vote was ‘never about the economy, it was about sovereignty’. He added: ‘This was a choice made by the British people to say we want to be sovereign, even if that means an economic price . . . What we now need to do, post that decision, is make the British economy grow again, thrive again.’

In other words, in a sane country that respects the outcome of a once-in-a-generation democratic vote, there’s no going back. But that is what Labour wants to do. It can’t accept the outcome. In unspecified ways, it yearns to get close to the EU. That is not only undemocratic. It is also deeply foolish.

Foolish

The Tories are also much at fault. For they have largely failed to capitalise on Brexit. Thousands of EU laws remain on the statute book, and are only being painfully and slowly removed. Far from being Singapore-on-Thames, freed from the burden of European regulation, Britain increasingly resembles Brussels-on-Thames.

Look at what Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt are proposing to do with corporation tax — raising it from 19 per cent to 25 per cent, and thereby so reducing our international competitiveness that we will fall from near the top of the league to languish close to the bottom. Are these the promised fruits of Brexit?

Brexit, in truth, was not only about sovereignty, though that was always the strongest argument. It was also about escaping the economic straitjacket of the EU. And in this the Government — so lacking in vision, though pardonably distracted by the pandemic and its damaging aftermath — has signally failed.

Labour’s shenanigans over Brexit must be exposed, and there is electoral advantage for the Tories in doing so. But the best defence the Government can make for the historic path we have taken is to show the British people at last that Brexit can really work.