How many positions can a politician have on a single issue? For Keir Starmer the answer is: many.
The UK Labour leader has gone from vigorously opposing Brexit (position number one) to being neutral on the issue and not wanting to talk about it (position number two).
Then in the lead-up to the 2024 general election and in a bid to win back the so-called red wall (former Labour seats that voted for Brexit), he championed the country’s EU divorce, insisting “Britain’s future is outside the EU” (position number three).
Position number four, hatched in recent weeks in response to a resurgent Nigel Farage, whose Reform UK party is riding high in the polls, is to say it has been a disaster and to blame his political opponents.
Downing Street insiders say Labour’s front bench have been primed to blame Farage and Brexit for Britain’s downturn in productivity and the resulting hole in the exchequer at the next month’s budget.
“There is no doubting that the impact of Brexit is severe and long-lasting,” chancellor Rachel Reeves told Sky News recently.
Her comments have been echoed by others in the party, after a period when the topic was almost banned from public discourse.
“I’m glad that Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak,” health secretary Wes Streeting said, welcoming the shift in political messaging.
The change of tack is also being driven by recent polling data that put support for Brexit at an all-time low.
A July poll by More in Common found just 29 per cent would vote to leave while 52 per cent would vote to remain if the 2016 referendum were held again.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said earlier this month that without new tax increases or spending cuts, UK borrowing in 2029-2030 could be about £22 billion higher than previous estimates.
According to one estimate, being outside the EU’s trading orbit costs UK business £37 billion a year as a result of a 5 per cent drag on trade with the EU
Starmer and Reeves are reportedly planning to argue that his downgrade would not have happened were it not for Brexit and former prime minister Boris Johnson’s bad divorce deal.
Labour’s new Brexit blame game is subtle if not risky. It seeks to blame Britain’s current economic lethargy on the politicians who drove Brexit – Johnson, Farage et al – while absolving the people who voted for it.
It’s not a far cry from Farage’s own position.
He continues to deflect criticism of Brexit by claiming politicians failed to implement it correctly and to exploit the opportunity it presents rather than conceding it might have been an intrinsically bad option in the first place.
According to one estimate, being outside the EU’s trading orbit costs UK business £37 billion a year as a result of a 5 per cent drag on trade with the EU. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that Britain’s long-term productivity is 4 per cent lower than it would have been if the country had stayed inside.
Low productivity means low growth, which means low tax revenue, which means more borrowing, a merry-go-round that the UK has been on since the financial crash and a problem that has been amplified, rather than caused, by Brexit.
Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey told last week’s International Monetary Fund gathering in Washington that while he takes “no position per se” on Brexit, the impact on growth will be negative “for the foreseeable future”.
He also said it served as a warning to the wider world of the damage caused by erecting trade barriers.
“Make an economy less open and it will restrict growth,” Bailey said, while noting that Brexit also showed that businesses could adapt to tougher trade conditions, but that it took time and came at the expense of growth.
While the UK government has partially remedied the drag on trade, signing a fresh co-operation agreement with the bloc earlier this year, the measures put in place don’t offset the totality of the challenge of being outside the EU.
[ Keir Starmer delivers perhaps his best speech so far as UK prime ministerOpens in new window ]
As a counterpoint, Brexit has been a boon for Brussels in public relations terms. Euroscepticism had mushroomed in the wake of the EU’s botched handling of the financial crisis and amid a surge in migration. Brexit triggered, as one pundit put it, a further “secessionist contagion”.
But years of wrangling, political turmoil, trade barriers and passport controls, and a UK economic outlook that is on a par with warmongering Russia’s, has all but killed off the Frexit, Italeave and Nexit movements in other countries.
Brussels and London now have perhaps bigger fish to fry in terms of the surge of populist politics in their respective jurisdictions and the security threat from Russia, which should put any lingering bad blood over Brexit into some sort of perspective.
UK politics is becoming increasingly polarised, and fudging the Brexit issue – as Starmer has done – is becoming less tenable.
He used the recent Labour conference in Liverpool to claim that his party was in “a fight for the soul of the country” against Reform UK, hitting back against the “lies and division” of the right-wing party’s populism.
It seems he now intends to enlist Brexit in that fight.
