This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Admirers of the statecraft of Sir Keir Starmer may from time to time find reading the political content in The Critic a challenging and perhaps puzzling undertaking. But persistence has its rewards. For it should be acknowledged that he grasped one hard reality that the wolves encircling him do not.
Starmer’s wisdom was a rare fruit born from a bitter harvest. As Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow secretary of state for existing the European Union, he masterminded a policy of rejecting the referendum result. This put the Labour party on the wrong side of much of its “red wall” support.
At the same time, his Westminster game-playing wrecked the prospect of keeping a nominally independent Britain within the regulatory orbit of the European Union.
When Theresa May tried to enact this nonsensical version of Brexit whereby the country would remain “dynamically aligned” (still bound to enact Brussels rules that Britain could no longer influence), Starmer marshalled more than 200 Labour MPs to block it.
He wanted a second referendum to reverse the result of the first one. Believing this goal obtainable, Labour voted alongside the very differently minded Eurosceptic Tory “Spartans” of the European Research Group to prevent passage of Theresa May’s proposals. In doing so, Starmer unintentionally saved Brexit from its intended emasculation by Whitehall and Conservative Remainers.
Whatever Sir Keir learned from working with Jeremy Corbyn, no caning could have been more bruising than the verdict of the electorate on 12 December 2019. Succeeding as leader of the party, he reset Labour policy to seek diplomatic rapprochement with Brussels and unpick Brexit in specific areas but accept that rejoining the single market and customs union involved more political trouble than they were worth.
It was with this realisation that Starmer, guided by Morgan McSweeney, demonstrated a grasp of reality. In the four-and-a-half years between the referendum result and formally leaving the EU, the Brexit wrangle paralysed government. It distorted, tainted and sometimes blocked out the illumination of other problems. Despite his Europeanism, Starmer was not in a rush to revisit this experience.
And for good reason. Reversing Theresa May’s efforts to deliver an enervated apparition of Brexit, David Frost had negotiated free trade with the EU whilst liberating mainland Britain to make its own laws and regulate its own internal market. Trading with Europe without being run by it was the promise that appealed to Leave voters. Remainers dismissed it as “Project Fantasy”.
That derision was always an odd response, since it was the form of relations that most free trading nations have with their neighbours and trading partners. For this there was a trade-off: losing frictionless trade at the border was the price for regaining the freedom to do everything else.
The Labour government will not support the hard decisions to turn the economy around
In this issue of The Critic, Lord Frost re-examines his experience of negotiating Brexit and the politics behind it and outlines future courses of action.
Sadly, it is necessary to revisit such recent history. Buoyed by popular disillusion at the performance of post-Brexit Britain, the campaign to rejoin the EU has been revived. A preliminary step is to excavate Theresa May’s dynamic alignment with the single market.
The status of being yoked to EU regulation without EU representation is so obviously detrimental to British interests that it prepares the way for rejoining the Union as a way of becoming a rule-maker, rather than a rule-taker.
Given that Brexit Britain enjoys free trade with the EU whilst still being overwhelmingly governed by the vast corpus of EU laws and regulations it has not repealed (except in specific areas where the positive results are already apparent), what is the reality of departure?
Foremost it is surely the stability and not the discontinuity between pre- and post-Brexit Britain. Indeed, for much of the service sector — which provides over 80 per cent of total UK economic output — there was scarcely an integrated EU single market to leave.
Per capita, the British economy has atrophied since 2008 — eight years before the referendum and over 12 years before Brexit. But for those with short memories and fixed ideas, blaming Brexit serves a rhetorical purpose.
The Labour government (and it must be said, many voters) will not support the hard decisions to turn the economy around. Doing so would involve addressing the burdens of tax and regulation on hiring, innovation and investment as well as the cult of Net Zero and the seeming impossibility of welfare reform.
None of these initiatives are Labour priorities. Thus, how much easier for the party’s coming leaders to pretend rejoining the EU is the quick fix.
It will prove very far from that. With Lord Mandelson indisposed, who in Labour’s ranks has the guile and chutzpah to drive a hard bargain with Brussels’s experienced and self-confident diplomatic machine? The premise on which the appeal is made, one of abject supplication, throws the cards away before the process begins.
The consequences will unfold painfully: the reinstatement of the annual multi-billion-pound membership bill (rebate no longer applicable); the unpicking of post-Brexit trade agreements; open borders; the loss of regained fishing rights; compliance with the new innovation-crushing regulations Brussels has introduced since our departure.
Here is a prophecy. Nothing will dent the popularity of rejoining the EU more than the prospect of it happening.
