So you think Labour is over, dead, finished, cannot recover from 14 per cent?
You think that, even with a new leader, they’ll have no coherent philosophy, no growth plan, no ideas save yet further brain-dead, doom-loop tax-and-spend.
You think they’ll never be able to excuse or escape the disaster that the last 17 months has been for them.
And though both left and right are split, you think that Labour and the Greens (scrap Trident, disengage from Nato, “effectively abolish” private landlords, legalise all drugs) are far further apart than the Tories and Reform.
But what if a new leader – Wes Streeting, say – wins the premiership, then goes to the country in 2029, on a promise to rejoin the EU customs union, maybe even the single market? Doesn’t that give most of the left a cause they can get fired up about? Doesn’t it unite Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems? Doesn’t it give them something that can be presented as a growth plan? Doesn’t it broadly go in the direction of public opinion? And doesn’t it give Labour an excuse for why they haven’t done better in this Parliament?
(To be exact, any new arrangement would almost certainly be a bespoke, bilateral EU-UK customs union, as Brussels has with Turkey. It would be unprecedented for a country of Britain’s size to rejoin the actual European customs union, which consists only of member states and a few tiny other places, essentially Monaco and the British territories on Cyprus.)
The right needs to start planning now for this scenario. It needs to start explaining now why it wouldn’t work.
A customs union alone wouldn’t involve the free movement of people – Turkey’s deal does not – though it could perhaps be presented as a slippery slope to open borders and higher immigration, as would of course be required in any decision to rejoin the single market.
But it would involve becoming a rule-taker, accepting the trade deals the EU negotiated with little, if any, say in them. We would have to accept this, even though we might not be given a right of access to markets that the EU has done trade deals with. Turkey has to take goods tariff-free from countries with which the EU has signed a free trade deal, but does not benefit from reciprocal access to their markets.
The growth argument is that it would reduce friction, rules-of-origin requirements, on UK-EU goods trade, making it easier for companies both large (the automotive industry) and small to sell into the Union. But it would also mean aligning with EU rules on state aid, and probably tearing up the trade deals we have negotiated since Brexit, though these are not of spectacular size. More importantly, it would mean losing the more favourable tariffs given us by the United States (though if a Democrat won in 2028, they might scrap them anyway.)
It’s a clear loss of sovereignty, and it’s arguably fairly humiliating too, an admission of failure, even defeat. That could be enough to win the political argument, but I’m not certain it would be.
A better argument might be that it creates years of new instability and uncertainty, economic and political. As my friends in business say: we can adapt to almost anything. We’ve adapted to Brexit, even if we don’t think it’s a great triumph. But what we can’t live with is endless change in policy, not knowing what’s coming next, never being able to plan.
And as voters, can we really bear the misery of the Brexit wars all over again?
The same goes for the EU, by the way. They’ve got better things to get on with too. The last thing they want is another multi-year negotiation with Britain. They wouldn’t make it easy for us.
Even on things far more in its interest than a customs union with Britain, the EU’s essential smallness of mind often triumphs. A closer military relationship between the EU and UK, still Western Europe’s strongest or joint-strongest military power, would seem vital, even existential, as Russian jets buzz our borders, Kremlin hirelings attack our economies and kill our citizens, and the US retreats from Nato. But no: Britain will not be joining the EU’s common defence fund because of petty demands over money.
Negotiations on all aspects of Sir Keir’s “reset” have been slow: the agri-food agreement, the Erasmus scientific cooperation, the emissions trading system. It’s like it was still 2016, when they needed to punish us to stop the whole house of cards falling. They think Britain needs them more than they need us – and even if that’s in a narrow sense true, it shows the same blinkered conception of self-interest in the face of much wider threats – radical populism and Russian militarism – which could bring their particular political world to an end.
All that makes it easier to argue that dismantling Brexit is no magic answer. But it’s an argument that the right will soon have to make.
