Bonjour Europe. Ici Londres. Can we be friends again?

                  Something is going on. First the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, says en clair, Brexit has damaged, is damaging and will continue to damage the economy. 

                  He used central banker jargon saying Brexit had “weighed” on the economy especially on trade in goods.

                  He avoided pointing out that this is the consequence not of the vote in 2016 to leave the EU Treaty which could have been manageable but of the ultra hard version of Brexit “negotiated” by Boris Johnson without the advice of anyone knowledgeable about trade economics.

                  Most economists including those at the Office for Budget Responsibility reckon that Brexit has cost between 4 and 5 per cent of GDP. A report by Cambridge Econometrics early in 2024 reckoned the UK economy is almost £140 billion smaller because of Brexit. London alone has 290,000 fewer jobs than if Brexit had not taken place. 

                  The Brexit vote was endorsed in two subsequent general elections, 2017 and 2019. However the Brexit era Conservative politicians were repudiated in July 2024 as clearly as Kamala Harris was three months later in America. Nigel Farage who had been turned into a major national figure nearly as famous as Gary Lineker by the BBC’s Today and Question Time programme finally got into the Commons in July 2024. He is now on the fourth anti-European party of his career yet despite having other BBC-promoted Brexiter candidates like Lee Anderson and Richard Tice, Farage’s isolationist Reform Party has only 5 MPs - not even 1 per cent of MPs.

More than 120 of the 411 Labour MPs elected in the Brexit repudiation election this July are members of the Labour Movement for Europe, ably chaired by MP Stella Creasy, who is building an impressive network of allies in the European Parliament and the political classes in EU capitals.

Equally important were the 72 Liberal Democrat MPs, all pro-European, who trounced the Brexit Sunak-Farage believers. Led by Sir Ed Davey, who was unafraid to criticise Brexit at a time when it was a politics that dared not speak its name, the LibDems join with Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalist MPs as well as Green MPs who form the overwhelming majority of the 400+ MPs in the 2024 House of Commons who accept Brexit is hurting their constituents.

The official Labour line enunciated by Sir Keir Starmer at the Irish Embassy in 2022 that he “would make Brexit work” – the identical metaphor was used by Theresa May in her unhappy premiership – has been quietly dropped.

Instead the language is of “reset”. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves has spoken of the “structural challenges which have come from Brexit.” This is the first acknowledgement at a senior Labour government level that cutting links with Europe is now by any objective analysis a major negative for the UK. This Bailey-Reeves double act and the July elections ends the first Act of the unfolding Brexit epic.

To be sure, Labour ministers still parrot the official incantation of the Holy Brexit Trinity – No to the Single Market, No to the Customs Union, No to Freedom of Movement. The latter is superfluous as once you say No to the Single Market it follows automatically that there is no freedom of movement.

But like British ministers still thinking in World War One terms in the 1930s these concepts are out-of-date. Turkey has been in a Customs Union with the EU since 1995 and this has not led Turkey to obtaining free movement or access save in area of some goods.

The EU’s barriers to trade are not via tariffs but through thousands of pages of  regulations to allow free exchange especially in the services sector between 27 sovereign nations. 

In 2016, Boris Johnson promised a Leave vote would not lead to a loss of trade access or any limitations on the rights of British citizens to work, live, study or travel in Europe without submitting to border checks as if coming from a third world nation.

Unfortunately after the 2016 vote Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow Europe Minister, the newly elected lawyer Sir Keir Starmer, who had zero experience of European possibilities, joined with the LibDems and other opponents of Brexit like Alistair Campbell in pouring all their energy into a second referendum.

This was repudiated in the 2019 and 2017 election and Labour and LibDems sensibly dropped the second referendum demand after 2020.

It is the main reason why the simple demand “Rejoin Now!” makes no sense. It would require a new referendum. And while opinion polls certainly show a big majority who see the 2016 vote as a mistake that is not the same as saying that a new Rejoin plebiscite would produce a Yes vote.

Much of the same coalition of off-shore owned media now strengthened by big money behind the GBNews, Unherd, and Musk’s Twitter would launch a non-stop propaganda war of anti-immigrant populism  against rejoining the EU.  

Business has already decided it doesn’t like Labour and every motorway or road going through the countryside would be lined with placards urging a No vote even if Brexit has done more harm to  agriculture than any other economic sector.

So Labour, LibDems, the SNP and businesses who want to get back to normal trading with Europe need to work on low-profile agreements, such as the recent agreement to allow European students to travel for school trips to the UK on collective passports, or the Windsor Agreement on trade between Britain, Ireland and Ulster. No rational citizen should want to punish young Brits by denying them the right to short-term visa-controlled periods of working or study on the continent under the proposed Youth Mobility scheme.

Norway and Switzerland whose citizens said no to joining the EU in referendums 30 years ago have considerable practical experience and expertise in finding solution to the problems that today’s British economic actors, universities or citizens face.

They should be studied to see how with suitable updating and modification they might apply to the UK. It won’t be easy as Brussels has made clear its patience is exhausted in particular with the Swiss having their fondue and eating it as Berne negotiators wriggle to avoid having to submit to the same regulations their neighbours, Germany, France,  and Italy accept.

Most of the 500 plus non-Tory MPs would accept a return to common sense on Europe. At some stage a Tory MP will stand up and say the Johnson-Truss era of crude hostility  to Europe is not working. He or she will get mammoth publicity  and while Nigel Farage now drifting into pension age will rant and rage along with John Redwood and Michael Howard many other Tories will be glad to turn the page on an unsuccessful dead-end ideological project.

            The Europe question become more acute as Sir Keir Starmer decides how respond to Trump’s win? The EU has moved fast to put guns before butter. The European Commission has said it is prepared to release about one third of the EU’s common budget for defence, to help fund the war in Ukraine. This will put on hold money earmarked for reducing inequalities between EU member states. Hungary and Slovakia will be hard hit by this switch – both have pro-Putin leaders. 

This reallocation of money is a smart move. Trump can enjoy Poland’s leader Donald Tusk rebuking the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for his Munich surrender call to Vladimir Putin. Trump’s son in turn may enjoy pouring scorn on President Zelensky but it is unclear Washington as a whole, especially its very powerful military, will want to be seen as opting out of the using their military power. Does the Pentagon – and also Trump himself –want to appear to give in to Putin, allowing him a free hand in the destruction of a country in which the US has already invested so many billions. China would also take it as a signal of weakness if Trump caved in to Putin. 

When it comes to trade policy, Trump’s proclamations about imposing tariffs or cutting immigration to net-zero evidently struck a chord with the US electorate. The rises in the cost of living which occurred during the Biden-Harris administration were of huge concern to many voters. Bidenomics may have pushed up GDP, but persistent inflation meant they didn’t feel any benefit.

Yet tariffs of any sort will reduce or stop the arrival of low-cost imports into the US, which will only make that problem worse. So the automatic assumption that Trump will opt for full-on protectionism could prove wide of the mark. 

And as for the UK’s ability to deal with Trump – well, a foreign ambassador gets very little direct face time with a US president. If a British PM turns up then the ambassador, if he’s lucky, may catch some of the usually inconsequential chit-chat. The idea that the right ambassador will prove critical in dealing with Trump is a nonsense.

Trump welcomed the Brexit vote and called Boris Johnson at the time, rather unusually, “Britain Trump”. But that did not stop Trump imposing swingeing tariffs on Scotch whisky late in 2019. 

No other European nation has followed Britain out of Europe and Johnson is now seen internationally as a failed politician forced to resign by his own party, which then went down to a humiliating defeat in the 2024 election.

But Trump did make time to host Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, for a meal and a discussion in his Florida home. Trump will know that Starmer won the last election, and won big. Trump admires winners . 

Ever the opportunist, Nigel Farage was briefing during the summer that he would make a good ambassador to Washington under Trump. Dream on, Nigel. In Trump’s world view the smoking boozing Brexit loudmouth has delivered nothing. Brexit is seen globally as a failure, and Britain’s persistently dismal economic performance is a painful reminder of how damaging that failure has been. Five Reform MPs out of 650 wouldn’t register on the Trump Richter scale of political significance. 

Peter Mandelson would be a better choice though he comes with his past as cheerleader for Bill  Clinton’s Third Way Davos elite political praxis which Trump scorns. Mandeslon is a respected international political networker. He is also close to Starmer’s new National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell who was Blair’s chief of staff at No 10 and who served in the US embassy in the 1990s. 

But not even Lord Mandelson would have any special influence on Trump. The word “special” in the phrase “special relationship” is much loved by the Foreign Office and BBC diplomatic correspondents. I worked in Tony Blair’s Foreign Office as a minister and was often in Washington. I never once heard a US official use the term “special relationship”. It is a British fantasy that we matter. For someone like Trump we barely exist.

So can the UK turn to Europe? Stella Creasy MP, chair of the Labour Movement for Europe, which is the biggest single interest group in the Commons, wrote a powerful argument in the Observer together with Sandro Gozi, the Italian socialist elected as a French MEP who is close to president Macron. The two politicians argued that the Trump win meant Britain should make stronger efforts to unblock the Whitehall rigidities that stop even a modest reset of relations with Europe. There is a logic that can make sense to Conservative MPs here. No Tory MP will vote to shut down Britain farming communities and voters by accepting the arrival of genetically modified beef, or chlorinated chicken on sale in Waitrose and Tescos but that is what Trump wants from any trade deal.

It looked as if Starmer had taken Ms Creasy’s  advice when he went to Paris as the first British PM since Winston Churchill in 1944 to take part in France’s 11^th November Remembrance Day parade on the Champs Elysées. Starmer and Macron discussed their Ukraine policy, which now seems to be aligned. 

Macron is especially keen to make progress with international policy. After calling and losing his summer election for the National Assembly, he has little influence on domestic French politics. Having good relations with Keir Starmer, who is seen as the PM who has won the biggest domestic election victory in recent years in Europe does Macron no harm at all.

However this does not mean Starmer thinks Trump’s win means the UK must turn again to Europe, to offset the US’s populist turn. The EU is looking politically frail. Macron has little domestic political credibility. The social democratic German chancellor Olaf Scholz has just fired his finance minister. The German economy is tanking and Scholz will soon be replaced by a more rightwing Chancellor. 

Other European leaders have crawled to Trump, like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the Mussolini heritage anti-gay Italian prime minister who shares Trump’s views on abortion and immigrants. Meloni, as well as the leaders of Hungary and Slovakia, and several other European populists, are now solidly implanted in parliaments and governments across the continent. So it is not clear that Labour can find natural bedfellows in Europe, even if they wanted to. 

A great deal will be made of the special relationship, and the theatre of diplomacy between the US and UK will go on. But Trump will do Starmer no favours, and Labour is still too nervous to start building stronger relations with Europe. In short, for now, Britain and Sir Keir are both stuck in the middle of the Atlantic unable to make Britain fit for Trump and unwilling to be full friends and partners with European nations.