What can the LibDems do to encourage the new Government to move towards the EU?
The purpose of this memo
We congratulate you on your election as our new MP and wish you well.
We welcome your oft-repeated support for a pro-EU position, and the commitment of your party to fix the UK’s broken relationship with Europe. We endorse the LibDems wish to rejoin the Single Market, and of course the longer-term objective of achieving EU membership once again.
However, it is an unpalatable reality that the Labour Party has set its face against a much closer relationship with the EU for the foreseeable future. While they “will reset the relationship and seek to deepen ties with our European friends, neighbours and allies.…. there will be no return to the single market, the customs union, or freedom of movement” (from the Labour Manifesto of 2024).
On the positive side, Labour says it will work to improve the UK’s trade and investment relationship with the EU, try to negotiate a veterinary agreement, make it easier for touring artists, and seek mutual recognition of professional qualifications. It’s also committed to working for increased defence and security co-operation.But while we are encouraged by the early signs that the new government will give these aims priority, their ambitions remain disappointingly modest.
We have prepared this short paper to set out what we think is a realistic stance that you and your LibDem colleagues could adopt to encourage the new Government to be more ambitious, without requiring it to renege on the position set out in the Labour Party manifesto.
Setting the scene
We believe that the Government will soon come under a lot of pressure to revisit its arm’s length relationship to Europe. Certainly, it cannot be sustained beyond this parliament because it will become ever more apparent that the Labour party’s timid approach will undermine the first of its five missions – to Kickstart economic growth – upon which most of its other aims depend. The new Government will soon be desperate to encourage the kind of public and private investment that will create jobs and improve productivity. Commentators of all kinds keep saying if you want to kickstart the economy and draw in investment from outside the UK, and stimulate it from within, the UK will need to rejoin the Customs Union (CU) and Single Market (SM) at least. Else we will have a drag anchor on our economy for years. Moreover, the pressure to move closer to Europe will be all the greater should Trump be elected in November, since he seems certain to turn his economic and security back on Europe (the UK included).
The problem Labour has is that it has done nothing to prepare the country for that inevitability, so scared has it been in the run up the general election to expose itself to the charge of betraying the Brexit vote of 2016. Indeed, in order to reassure what used to be called ‘red wall voters’, it has had to indulge in the fiction that it can ‘fix Brexit” by a few relatively uncontroversial and modest adjustments in our relationship with the EU.
That’s not sustainable for very long: business groups from the CBI to the Chambers of Commerce, the farming and fishing industries, musicians, and above all young people will all demand a new and much closer relationship to the EU than is currently on offer from the new Government.
How can the LibDems and other pro-Europeans help Labour to shift its ground without totally abandoning its manifesto promises?
We do not think we will get very far by just telling the new Government how dreadful Brexit is and therefore that their plans are wrong and that they need to be much more ambitious about getting closer to the EU. While we might hope that he will abandon his excessively modest ambitions in this area, Keir Starmer will surely feel he must stick to his manifesto promises as part of his sensible and honourable commitment to rebuilding trust in politics.
Which is why we believe we should campaign not so much for a closer relationship with the EU at this stage as for a process that enables Labour to get off the pro-Brexit hook that they have impaled themselves on in order to get elected.
This process should be built around two unavoidable forthcoming events:
- The 2026 review of the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), and
- The drafting of manifestos for the 2029 General Election.
Preparing for both these events requires that the Government plan ahead. We hope that you and your colleagues in Parliament will urge them to adopt a two-part plan along the following lines.
The TCA review
The TCA was signed on 30 December 2020. It was provisionally applied from 1 January 2021, when the Brexit transition period ended, and formally entered into force on 1 May 2021 after the ratification processes on both sides were completed. Article 776 of the TCA says: ‘The Parties shall jointly review the implementation of this Agreement and supplementing agreements and any matters related thereto five years after the entry into force of this Agreement and every five years thereafter.’ So, the first review of the TCA is scheduled for May 2026.
We hope you will encourage the Government to make that 2026 review an inclusive and transparent exercise. Ministers should reach out, later this year and next, to business, trade unions, farmers, the teaching profession, the hospitality industry, artists’ interests, NGOs and others to help formulate a practical wish list for the negotiations with the EU. Of course, civil servants will have to do the detailed spade work in preparing the ground for the negotiations with the EU, but what we believe is needed is an approach in which a range of civil society interests are drawn in so as to begin to build a national consensus on what we can realistically hope to achieve through the review of the TCA. “Realistic” in this context means recognising that the review provides limited options for improving the status quo, because Article 776 talks only about a review “of the implementation” of the TCA, not of the TCA itself[1].
The limitations that are inherent in the review process and the challenge that this will present to the UK Government are well described in a study for the UK in a Changing Europe by Joël Reland and Jannike Wachowiak on the potential paths for the Trade and Cooperation Agreement review[2].
They neatly summarise the three strategic options that the UK might aim to secure through the negotiations as being:
- To examine the TCA, where the EU and UK would “treat the review simply as a light-touch stock-take as part of their existing annual/biennial implementation reports”. This approach, with no ambition to change the agreement, is – the authors say – broadly in line with the EU’s current interpretation of the review.
- To exploit the TCA by seeking to improve the TCA’s governance framework and act on as-yet unfulfilled commitments in the treaty. Reland and Wachowiak explain how such an approach could range from a fairly limited exercise “to a quite wide-ranging review involving, for instance, improvements to the efficiency of energy trading and the linking of emissions trading schemes. They could also discuss upcoming deadlines in the TCA like the changing rules of origin for electric vehicles in 2027”.
To expand the TCA, this being the most ambitious approach that might be taken, where “the parties could widen or deepen the scope of the TCA into new areas for cooperation. This is what the Labour Party proposes, and it could include trade easements such as a veterinary agreement or mutual recognition of conformity assessments and professional qualifications. It could also cover areas like youth mobility or foreign and security policy”.
While we would surely hope the Government would want to pursue this last, most ambitious approach with determination, success would depend on political buy-in from both sides. Even if the UK Government was up for this, the messages coming out of Brussels are not too encouraging. Relationships with the UK are not the EU’s top pre-occupation at present: the war in Ukraine, immigration, the rise of the populist right in Europe and the possibility of Trump 2 are taking up most of the diplomatic bandwidth. Moreover, an agreement to expand the TCA will take time to negotiate. If the new “government wants to use the review to expand the TCA, they will soon have to start thinking about how that works in practice and how to get the EU to agree to it”. As many have commented, the UK cannot just ask for things of the EU: it will also have to decide what it wants to offer.
Which brings us back to the kind of preparations we should be pressing for. By arguing for an inclusive and transparent approach, we would be making the case for a wide range of interests to have a say in shaping the UK’s position vis à vis the EU in the TCA review. This should give the Government confidence that it has wide public support in seeking the most ambitious outcome that is allowed through the review exercise. As the dialogue with the various interests develops, we might expect our government to become bolder in its ambitions in the knowledge that a growing army of influential stakeholders would support it in its efforts. With that in mind, we hope your party will encourage them to go further and faster.
But it is important to be realistic. The TCA review cannot be used to achieve a fundamental change in our relationship to the EU. The only way in which the Labour Government will be ready to seek that – and the only way in which the EU would be ready to enter into a new round of far-reaching negotiations with the UK – would be through a mandate provided from a General Election in five years’ time. This would require that the manifesto drawn up by the Government seeking re-election would commit to entering into negotiations on UK membership of the SM and the CU, as steps towards full EU membership – the very position advocated by your party in its manifesto for 2024. But we can’t hope to get such ideas into the 2029 Labour manifesto unless we can first establish broad, general agreement on Brexit: why it happened and what its effect has been.
A Brexit inquiry
So, we ask that the LibDems should call for an independent inquiry into the causes and consequences of Brexit. This inquiry should report by the middle of 2028, say, so that the results can be fed into the political debate running up to the 2029 General Election. Many may feel that this inquiry should be used to hold to account some of those responsible for the most egregious actions that led up to our rupture with the EU. But we are not sure that is wise: it would make the exercise feel and look partisan and divisive, whereas its success depends on its search for the objective truth – or the nearest we can get to it – and building a degree of consensus around its conclusions. It ought to be possible to achieve a broad level of agreement about the facts of Brexit, and especially the economic facts. It ought to be possible, too, to draw up a balance sheet of the pros and cons. Such a broadly agreed, well researched account of how Brexit happened and what its impact has been – a gold standard explanation if you like – might enable us to get some “closure”, not on the debate about our relationship to Europe but on the events of 2016-2020. It sounds a tall order but there is a precedent for securing broad consensus around a deeply divisive issue: the Iraq Inquiry. Not everyone agreed with its conclusions, but it helped heal the wounds and enabled the country to “move on”.
Such a searching inquiry would help all parties prepare their manifestos for the 2029 General Election. If the report can demonstrate to all but the most closed minds why the UK stumbled into this terrible mistake, and the true consequences, then it would surely provide a better-informed basis for public debate in the run up to the next election than the reiteration of old lies and arguments.
Of course, there are lots of important second order questions to be answered before such an inquiry can begin work. Who should chair it? What should be its precise term of reference? Should it hear evidence in public? Should witnesses be required to speak under oath? Should it deliver interim reports? Alternatively, would it be better done as a parliamentary inquiry? Whatever the answers to these questions, the exercise must report during 2028 if it is to make the desired contribution in time for the election in the following year.
Some will argue that so deep are the divisions exposed by Brexit and so interactable are the positions held by its supporters (and its opponents) that an inquiry of this kind will only reopen old wounds – and in any case who would believe that the Daily Mail would accept its findings? But the truth is that this debate is never going to go away: our relationship with the rest of Europe has been a pervasive and permanent factor in British politics in the whole of our history, and geography alone means that it will continue to be so indefinitely into the future. What such an inquiry might achieve though is a proper reckoning: and as two thirds of the population now feel that Brexit was a mistake, an inquiry that sought to expose the facts in a dispassionate and truthful way could be widely welcomed.
Conclusion
Pro-Europeans will have rejoiced in the humiliating defeat of the Conservative Government, and we salute the part played by the LibDems in bringing this about. No doubt part of the reason for the Tories cataclysmic failure was the disaster of Brexit. Its advertised promise was a fraud. The sunny uplands were a mirage. Our national problems have been compounded by what has happened since 2016. But we have to recognise there is no quick way back into the EU and that the new Government was elected on a very modest mandate in respect of our future relationship. So, rather than endlessly complaining about Brexit, let us look at how we can use the new political reality to support a process that helps the Government down a route that should – eventually – achieve our common purpose.
We hope this line of reasoning will accord with your own thinking and that of your new colleagues in Parliament. If the LibDems adopt such a position, they will have wide support from pro-European bodies; and if you yourself are an advocate for this, you will certainly have our support.
Cheltenham for Europe
13 July 2024
[1] For a fuller account of the scope for review, see What might the review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement actually be like? by Dr David Moloney and Prof. Simon Underwood https://ukandeu.ac.uk/what-might-the-review-of-the-trade-and-cooperation-agreement-actually-be-like/
[2] See What might the review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement actually be like? https://ukandeu.ac.uk/will-the-2026-tca-review-reshape-uk-eu-relations/
Cheltenham for Europe 
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