It was only an aside. Keir Starmer wasn’t planning to talk about Brexit, but a subject almost as perilous for his party: migration. Still, Good Morning Britain wanted to know if his plan to strike a deal with the European Union in order to stop the small boats crossing the Channel meant he was weakening his stance on EU withdrawal. “There’s no case for going back to the EU,” he said, “no case for going into the single market or customs union, and no freedom of movement.”
Those words were hardly a shock. Starmer has said similar things before, though sometimes adding the gentle qualification that he could see “no political case” for rejoining the EU, a formulation that hints that while restored membership might be desirable, it’s not feasible. The balder declaration he deployed on Thursday insists that there’s not even an argument to be made in principle for British re-entry.
The calculation behind the remark is clear enough. It’s the same logic that propelled Starmer to wrap his new migration policy in muscular language and to launch it in the Sun, in an article that used the word “tough” four times in two sentences. He needs to win back those former Labour supporters in so-called red wall seats who voted for Brexit on the promise that, outside the EU, Britain could “take back control” of its borders. He needs to appear tough on both Brexit and immigration – the two go together.
Even so, the comment was striking, in part because of the context in which the Labour leader was making it. For Starmer was saying there was no point reversing Brexit, just as he was proposing a solution to a problem caused or aggravated by Brexit and its aftermath.
The connection is spelled out in a report on the small boat phenomenon by Prof Thom Brooks of Durham University, published in February. Can you guess what it concluded was “the primary factor behind the current problem”? The government’s post-Brexit deal, and specifically its failure to reach a “returns agreement with the EU”, whereby unauthorised migrants to the UK could be returned to the first safe EU country they had entered.
Before Brexit, there was just such an arrangement. But it expired once Britain left – and the government put nothing in its place. People traffickers spotted the opportunity almost immediately, offering to take people to a country, Britain, from where they could no longer be sent back. Staggeringly, Brooks found “no records of any individuals travelling by small boat to claim asylum in 2017 or before” – not one case. But as “the UK prepared to leave its returns agreement, small boat journeys started”. And the people making those journeys grew in number, from the low hundreds in 2018 to tens of thousands in 2023.
No wonder those Brexit-backers who voted to leave the EU because they did not want Britain to be a refuge for desperate people seeking asylum are disappointed: when Britain was in the EU, covered by a returns deal, there was no opening for the traffickers to exploit. Now there is.
This is what Starmer is trying to fix, striking a new bargain with the EU that would destroy the trafficking gangs’ business model. In return, Britain would take its share of people approved for asylum in the EU. Those on the right always so keen to insist they welcome “genuine” refugees and loathe only the criminal gangs profiting from their misfortune should be delighted by Starmer’s proposal. Naturally, they have condemned it. In characteristically dehumanising language, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, said it would make the UK a “dumping ground” for Europe’s migrants.
The point, though, is that Starmer’s plan would not be needed, had we stuck with the pre-Brexit setup. What he proposes is a solution that attempts to get us closer to what we had – without admitting that we’ve lost anything.
It’s becoming a habit, with the Conservatives the most frequent offender. In one area after another, the government has sought to patch up holes left by Brexit. Last week, UK scientists celebrated rejoining the Horizon Europe research programme. It was hailed as a big breakthrough – even though it simply restores something we once took for granted.
Last month, the government announced it was indefinitely delaying – scrapping – its once-promised plan to introduce a UK-only product safety mark, choosing instead to retain the familiar CE mark of the EU. It was bowing to pressure from manufacturers – and to reality. Why ask industry to spend a fortune jumping through hoops to get a mark that only brings access to the UK market? Obviously it’s better to stick with the CE mark we already had.
It’s a similar picture with checks on imports of EU food, another supposed bonus of Brexit that has been serially “delayed” in order to save costs. Whether it’s delays or side deals, the purpose is the same: to devise workarounds that address the damage caused by Brexit by seeking to remove the Brexit element, quietly undoing the bit where we move away from the EU.
Hilariously, the government sometimes spins these moves as exercises of our newly won sovereignty, in which we choose, as an independent nation, to be closer to the continent we left behind. As Prof Chris Grey, sage writer on these matters, put it to me, capturing the paradox: “Brexit works best when it’s not implemented.”
All the same, there will be some who look at these patch-and-mend solutions and think, well, they might be perverse, but if they get the job done, why would we ever need to rejoin the EU? The answer is that all these fixes are worse than what we had before. To be in Horizon without freedom of movement is to be denied the ability to mobilise project teams across Europe. Delayed import controls might allow EU food to come in smoothly, but now the UK is shut out of the EU databases that track animal health, leaving the country vulnerable to disease. UK manufacturers can still use the CE mark, but now they have to pay an EU “notified body” to formally prove they’re worthy of it – and all without a UK seat at the table where the big decisions on regulations affecting products are taken. As Grey says, “being outside the EU means less, not more, control”.
So yes, we can stick on a patch here or bolt on a bit of pipework there, hoping to make it look like the machine we had before Brexit – but it will never run quite as smoothly. The lunacy of Brexit is we won a right not worth having – the right to diverge from our nearest neighbours in ways that make it harder and costlier for us to trade with, or even just to live alongside, them.
Starmer is a good lawyer, and there was reasoning behind his words this week. But “no case” to rejoin the EU? On the contrary: the case only gets stronger.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist. He will host a Guardian Live event with Gordon Brown on Tuesday 26 September at 7pm BST. The event will be live in London and livestreamed - book tickets here
