Pick a side, and lead it

Labour's post-Brexit fence-sitting is leading it to extinction

In March 1983, after struggling for two years to balance a super-expansionary programme with currency stability, France’s left-wing government suffered a devastating local-election defeat.

Victory for the right in more than 30 cities caused internal arguments that had plagued François Mitterrand’s first administration to crescendo. Should they continue socialism in one country despite haemorrhaging support from voters and investors, or make a decisive tournant to economic orthodoxy? While influential figures argued for tariffs and devaluations to sustain the dream, Mitterrand’s prime and finance ministers – Pierre Mauroy and Jacques Delors – wanted to tighten the budget and curb inflation. Within days of the local-election drubbing, Mitterrand picked a side – lifting taxes and cutting spending as part of a new strategy that eventually readied France for German reunification and the euro.

Forty-three years on, Mitterrand’s British sister party faces an equivalent moment. For five years under Keir Starmer, Labour’s leadership claimed it could “Make Brexit Work”. But it couldn’t - not outside the European Economic Area (EEA), the 30-nation single market that encompasses the EU, Norway and Iceland. In thrall to Blue Labour Brexiters and Remainiac-turned-Trumper Peter Mandelson, Starmer thought economic “alignment” with the EU and the “special relationship” with the US would do. Within those parameters, he and chancellor Rachel Reeves could solve the UK’s post-2008 productivity puzzle and enact “Moonshot” economics¹. This didn’t even survive first contact with their first budget but Starmer, Reeves and the Downing Street operation made things far worse with their abysmal expectations management, perpetual policy reversals and their inability to quit Mandelson. Above all, they took pride in a “punch a hippy”² strategy of alienating their young, city-dwelling, europhile and socially liberal base in unrequited pursuit of older, small-town conservatives³. The predictable result was this week’s extinction-level event in England’s local elections and nationals in Wales and Scotland. In coalition with the Conservatives, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is on course to win the general election due by mid-2029.

Worse than a crime

That sounds terminal until you recall that Mitterrand and his socialists were re-elected in 1988. Starmer and his inevitable replacement could interpret this week’s results as yet another vote against the metropolitan, latte-sipping, Guardian-reading elite. They could stick with their European “red lines”, try to outdo Reform and the Greens on “change”, talk about nothing but Gaza and “small boats”, and find unlimited public spending from “waste” and wealth taxes. They could do this, but it would be bad politics as well as bad policy. To cite another Frenchman: It would be worse than a crime; it would be an error.

Reform won a quarter of the national vote on turnout well below 50%, performing especially well in areas that voted heavily for Brexit in 2016 and badly everywhere else. Ten years on, Brexit is unpopular. A YouGov poll conducted in late-February found that 55% of respondents believed 2016 voters were “wrong to vote to leave” while 32% regretted nothing. Today, net Bregret is felt across every demographic segment but one - men (56/36%), women (55/27%), 18-24 year olds (76/10%), 25-29s (63/21%), higher-income households (64/27%), lower-middle (49/38%) and working-class voters (47/35%), as well as people in the North (51/35%) and Midlands (49/34%). The last holdouts are over-65s. They may not be working themselves but they’re still making Brexit work by 52/39%.

This is a gift to post-election Labour, whose revised core offer should be a return to Europe’s single market. Too slow for Labour’s political needs, Stella Creasy’s incrementalism via a Swiss model is no longer an option. Labour’s new leadership must offer a return to a (reformed) EEA together with proportional representation to protect the settlement from minority landslides. Labour shouldn’t hold 63% of House of Commons seats with 34% of the 2024 national vote but neither should the Tories have taken 56% of the chamber with 44%. On taking office, the new Labour premier should initiate negotiations with the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), working together with Norway and Iceland to democratise the EEA. While they are free to lobby in their interest during the EU lawmaking process, the EEA’s non-EU members have no vote when it comes to adopting single-market legislation. The EU itself knows this rule-taking is unsustainable. In a 2016 paper for the Fondation Robert Schuman, Thierry Chopin and Jean-François Jamet proposed amending Article 7 of the 1994 treaty to make the 30-minister EEA Council the competent legislative body for single-market legislation that applies to all area members.

The market is the prize

Why settle for the EEA – even a democratised version? After all, full-fat Rejoin is all the rage after persuasive editorials from Ben Judah, Ian Dunt, Simon Nixon, Tom Baldwin all the way to Neil Kinnock, a much-loved Labour leader, and Philip Rycroft, a lead negotiator for withdrawal in 2016-19. I take Dunt’s point that Rejoin “is the cleanest political argument … [that] provides a chance to bring the progressive voting bloc under Labour leadership”. The YouGov survey survey found only 49/23% support for single-market membership versus 55/34% for Rejoin. A Survation poll of Labour Party members, who will after all elect the new leader, conducted on 17-22 April, found a whopping 87% in favour of full re-accession.

However, while some are sure to say that the EFTA and EEA renegotiations will be fraught, they will be as nothing compared to re-accession to the union. For those who don’t know, let me tell you what EEA membership includes and what it leaves out. It means free movement of goods, services, and capital, allowing firms to operate across the 30 economies without subsidiaries and compete equally for public contracts. Crucially, it also means a restoration of Britons’ free movement throughout the EU, an end to the 90-day rule, and the ability to work anywhere - a freedom the young want more than any of the union’s extras. Inside the EEA but outside the EU, we would not be part of the unloved common agricultural or fisheries policies. We would have no overpaid and underworked MEPs or elections that do nothing but benefit extremists, and no European commissioner (a prize to anyone who can name two out of Britain’s 15, excluding Mandelson). There will be a membership fee in the form of grants to channel into the union’s poorest regions but no direct contribution to the “Brussels budget”. This isn’t politically risk-free but the UK has already got away with paying to play in the Erasmus+ and Horizon education and research programmes.

Compare this to the politics of full re-accession. In his post, Ben Judah describes the claim that this would take “years of painful wrangling” as “another myth”. “[W]e have not meaningfully diverged, meaning it can be done relatively fast”. That’s true of single-market law, as the latest UK In A Changing Europe divergence tracker confirms, but that’s not what joining the union would be about. On top of making the entirely makeable case for free movement that comes with the EEA, the government would have to explain why €20 billion a year has to go to the EU budget without Margaret Thatcher’s hard-won rebate. It means renegotiating farm subsidies, fish quotas, personnel allocations, and - whether Rejoiners want to admit it or not - a Danish-style formal opt-out from the euro. Personally, I’d be happy to swap the e-pound for the e-euro but I’m atypical. The Survation poll of Labour members (not even the general public) found support for Rejoin dropping by more than 30 points if this meant adopting the euro. Yes, Sweden has a quarter-century workaround to show how this can be avoided but, as the 2016 campaign over budgetary contributions and Turkish accession showed, when you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Then there’s the small questions of timescale and ratification. Negotiating full accession will take years, at least one and probably two referendums, and the EU side will need to feel confident that Brexit II won’t quickly follow. Since a return to the single market still keeps us outside the union, no referendum is needed. As Theresa May said more than once, “Brexit means Brexit”. The 2029 general election can ratify the results of the negotiations (and their PR insurance policy). And, by making this central to the election campaign, this has the added political benefit of forcing defectors to the Greens and Liberal Democrats back into the camp.

Leader of the outs

A final but essential element to this plan is to make it not all about us. One of Dunt’s arguments for full Rejoin is that the EU is not the organisation we left in 2020. Hungarian vetoes and the need for speed over Covid and Ukraine led to the bending of normal EU procedures and the formation of ad hoc policy clubs. This is true but is, in my view, a stronger argument for the market-only strategy. Let’s restore our European economic bedrock and maintain the flexibility to build from there. By the way, this isn’t English shopkeepery - prioritising ease of business over values. Those values aren’t expressed through common agricultural and fisheries policies, painful and lowest-common-denominator statement drafting and electing Farage to an 11-year term in the European Parliament. Especially today - this very day as Péter Magyar is sworn in as Hungarian prime minister - Europe’s core values are expressed through free movement, respect for liberal-democratic norms and the rule of law, and willingness to defend these against autocratic invaders.

We don’t need to be inside the EU to do that. As the leader of Europe’s vanguard military and diplomatic power⁴ pointed out, NATO will soon need to be replaced by a new military alliance encompassing the EU’s martial states, Britain, Turkey and Norway. Building this alliance will be the job of nation states, not the EU. But, at the same time, London cannot afford to repeat decades of pitting states and alternative alliances against the union. Throughout their career in the European communities and the union, British governments were notorious – not least with their own frustrated diplomats – for failing to build and sustain alliances. The Ukrainians, above all, understand that memberships and alliances are complementary. By starting a concerted process this year to move back into the EEA’s halfway house, the new British government could lead Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkans into a new post-2022, post-Trump European economic and security architecture.

Today, opportunity knocks for Starmer and his successor. Boxed in fiscally, they have a unique chance to design a cost-free governing programme that would energise their collapsing base, re-attract defectors, force Farage back onto Brexit terrain he’d vacated, and restore Britain as a continental diplomatic player. This is Labour’s last chance but, if Rejoiners shoot too high and miss, it could also be the country’s last chance to repair the self-inflicted damage of this lowest and most dishonest decade.

1. After she published The Entrepreneurial State in 2013, economist Mariana Mazzucato became the go-to guru for centre-left parties looking for an intellectual varnish for their kneejerk dirigisme. The 2020-21 pandemic and enforced public-private cooperation proved inspirational to Mazzucato and her acolytes, so she published Mission Economy, which advocated “Moonshot”-style missions state intervention.

2. A term used frequently by Blairite strategist John McTernan, who argued in February that the party’s by-election defeat in Gorton and Denton was a “resounding judgment on the futility of Labour’s strategy of pursuing Reform voters rather than progressive ones ... It’s time for Labour to acknowledge that its core voters are urban graduates, white-collar professionals, and black and brown voters. And also to admit that it has systematically driven too many of them away”.

3. Obviously, that’s a caricature of Reform voters. Focaldata carried out a 11,000-strong sample survey of Reform voters in mid-2025 and found they broke down into the “working right” (26%) who are older, pre-retirement voters in poorer towns with traditional left-wing views on workers’ rights and hostile to immigration; “hardline conservatives” (18%) who are older, more affluent, southern and Thatcherite on workers’ rights and public spending; “squeezed stewards” (29%) who are middle-income voters hostile to immigration, culturally conservative but environmentally minded; “reluctant reformers (19%) who only support Reform out of frustration with Labour and the Tories but value competence and the NHS; and “contrarian youth (9%) who are prone to cynicism, conspiracy theories and conservative gender views but racially tolerant. Of the entire cohort, half are 55+, only 20% have degrees, and a third report pre-tax household income below £25,000 while 13% are in upper-income brackets.

4. In an interview with The Rest Is Politics podcast in April 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “If the United States really thinks about how to withdraw from the NATO ... all the security in Europe will be based only on EU ... I think that, for today, the EU is in such a situation when they need some countries: UK, Ukraine, Turkey, Norway. There are different questions to each of these countries, according to the laws, internal questions etc. But there are four strong countries, which are part of Europe, and these countries ... this is the army which will be stronger than the army of Russia. That is the answer. Without Ukraine and Turkey, Europe will not have similar army of that Russia has. With Ukraine, Turkey, Norway and UK, you will control security on the seas, not one sea”.