The leader of the Labor opposition, Keir Starmer, has promised to “rewrite the Brexit agreement” as he passes through Canada and a day before his meeting in Paris with President Emmanuel Macron. Starmer raised his international profile during the center-left party conference in Montreal, where he was received by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Everyone recognizes that the agreement reached with the European Union by Boris Johnson is not good and falls too short,” Starmer told the Financial Times while passing through Canada. “In 2025 we will try to negotiate a much better agreement.”
Keir Starmer’s Labor Party currently leads the Conservative Party of “premier” Rishi Sunak by 18 points (44% to 26%) in the average of Politico polls. General elections are scheduled for the end of 2024, and unless Starmer shoots himself in the foot, the vast majority of Britons assume a change in power, after 14 years and five successive Tory prime ministers in the midst of the whirlwind caused by Brexit.
Starmer, once a supporter of permanence, however reiterated that he has no intention of asking for re-entry into the EU and reopening the thunder box… “The question is not to return. We have to try to make the agreement work. “I refuse to accept that we can’t make it work. And I’m thinking of future generations when I say that.”
“I say this as the father of a 15-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl,” stressed the 61-year-old Labor leader. “I’m not going to let them grow up in a world where all I can tell them is that they’re going to have a worse future than they could have had otherwise. I’m absolutely determined to make this work.”
Starmer, who has also denied the possibility of a return to the single market or the customs union, specified that his plan is to thoroughly review the agreement five years from its entry into force in 2020, although he did not specify what points are the that he plans to touch up. The Labor leader however expressed his willingness to have “a closer commercial relationship” with the EU.
Last week, during his participation in a Europol meeting in The Hague, Starmer already anticipated his interest in reaching a migration agreement with the EU. “But we will not become part of the EU quota system, precisely because we are not a member country,” he clarified in response to criticism from the “Tories”, alleging that his plans may involve the entry into the country of more than 100,000 immigrants pending asylum.
Supported by his background as a former attorney general, the Labor leader assured that his plan would include greater collaboration with Brussels on security matters and the possible repatriation to continental soil of a portion of the immigrants who arrive on British shores in boats through the Channel. de la Mancha (more than 45,000 last year).
Immigration will be precisely one of the priority topics in his meeting on Tuesday with Emmanuel Macron, which occurs symbolically one day before the arrival in France on an official visit of King Charles and Queen Camilla (six months after the first attempt, postponed by social unrest against the decision to raise the retirement age).
Starmer will arrive in France with the entire team, including his new Chief of Staff Sue Gray, the same one who was in charge of the internal “Partygate” investigation that led to the fall of Boris Johnson. Alongside the Labor leader will also be David Lammy, “shadow” Foreign Secretary, and Rachel Reeves, the strongest candidate to become Treasury Secretary in a hypothetical Labor Government.
The “premier” Rishi Sunak, for his part, responded to Starmer’s promise to “rewrite” the Brexit agreement (something that Sunak himself already did in his own way with the Windsor Framework Agreement signed in February 2023 and which ended the Irish Protocol conflict). “We are not prepared to reopen the fights of the past in any way,” said a Downing Street spokesman. “We are focused on maximizing the opportunities presented to us (with the current agreement).”
