Why Won’t Starmer Ask the European Question Even if He Doesn’t Know How to answer it?

I first stood for the Commons in the then safe seat of Solihull in 1974. My Tory opponent was Percy Grieve, father of Dominic Grieve who battled vainly to make his party see sense on Europe. Percy Grieve’s father was killed in the Battle of Ypres in 1915 in the wars European nationalisms seemed to be condemned to fight every generation.

Percy Grieve came out of the war like so many of his class and generation determined that a new Europe had to be built that would never again go to war.

Churchill stunned the world in 1946 when he called for a “sort of United States of Europe” in a speech in Zürich. It caught the imagination of all the nations who had just fought two wars. It offered the prospect of reconciliation across the Rhine and hope for post fascist Italy to become a European democracy.

In 1950, the French proposed to abolish national control of their giant coal and steel industries which were seen as the key source for the weapons of war and the energy to fight a new one.

Britain was invited to join but the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee turned down the offer. He was backed to his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who had written on blue Foreign Office notepaper in Polish to every Polish soldier and pilot who migrated to Britain in 1940 urging them to return home where many would have suffered the same fate as the 20,000 Polish officers and civil servants executed by Stalin at Katyn in 1940.

Labour could not handle Europe. The party did not know what to say. Attlee’s successor as leader Hugh Gaitskell said that to join Europe on the same basis as France or the Netherland “meant the end of Britain as an independent European state … it means the end of a thousand years of history.”

Not even Nigel Farage or Tony Benn would indulge such hyperbole. Gaitskell was a Winchester and Oxford educated intellectual. He was followed by Harold Wilson who said he “was wading through shit on Europe” to try and keep Labour together after Edward Heath took the plunge and joined the European Economic Community in 1973.

Heath faced opposition from Enoch Powell who like today’s Reformers and Badenoch Tories decided to make open racism and anti-immigrant hate a force to mobilise support against Wilson and Heath.

I was a delegate from Birmingham to the Labour Party special conference on Europe in 1972 which had to decide policy after Labour MPs led by the young Scot, John Smith, voted with Tories and Liberals to enter Europe.

It was a two day festival of hate and demagogy against Europe. I listened spell-bound as the great orators of Labour – Michael Foot, Tony Benn, a newly elected Welsh Labour MP, Neil Kinnock, Barbara Castle, the young Scot, Robin Cook, soon to become an MP, the trade union leaders, Jack Jones, High Scanlon and Rodney Bickerstaffe all joining to condemn partnership in Europe as the worst possible future for Britain.

I recount that history because the idea the Tories or the tenors of the far right – the National Front followed by the BNP followed by Ukip, today Reform are the only anti-Europeans - is wrong.

Labour has never looked into its soul and asked why for the first four decades after the end of the war including the 1983 election when Labour pledged a referendum with a recommendation to leave Europe so many key Labour figures approached Europe much as Nigel Farage or Daniel Hannam do today?

Many complain about Sir Keir Starmer’s refusal to say a negative word about Brexit. In 2022 he even purloined Theresa May’s pledge to “make Brexit work.” It may indeed one day be possible to make Arsenal work but it is a truth now widely acknowledged that the rupture with Europe is a purpose built GDP reduction measure. No-one can make Brexit work.

British exports to the United States will be more expensive for American consumers than under any previous US president. Even Sir Andrew Bailey, the fence-sitting, say-nothing Governor of the Bank of England says he does not take a view on Brexit, but told the BBC that reversing the post-Brexit hit to UK-EU trade would be "beneficial".

This is equivalent of Sir Andrew stripping naked on the steps to the Bank of England and shouting at the government “For God’s sake get a grip. If we don’t reopen trade with Europe we’re sunk.”

It’s welcome that India has reduced tariffs on Scotch whisky as a rising middle class in India now shuns the poisonous liquid called whisky made in India.

We can join trade partnerships in every corner of the world but nothing can replace what the Tories bequeathed Labour in 1997– a comprehensive access to the world’s richest consumer market for every product or professional service or artistic endeavour Brits have to offer.

The European Single Market including the four freedoms of movement of goods, services, capital, and people was pushed through by Margaret Thatcher. It was welcomed by Pope John Paul who said Thatcher’s 1982 Single European Act “will hasten the process of ‑ European integration. A common political structure, the product of the free will of European citizens, far from endangering the identity of the peoples in the Community, will be able to guarantee more equitably the rights, in particular the cultural rights, of all its regions. These united European peoples will not accept the domination of one nation or culture over the others, but they will uphold the equal right of all to enrich others with their difference.”

But maybe Anglican England doesn’t want to take advice from a Pope in Rome. It is a stark truth that most Labour leaders and prime ministers have just applied the brakes to European partnership while it has been Conservatives who have led Britain deeper into Europe. As James Callaghan said after his premiership “I always preferred the Empire to Europe.”

Even Tony Blair was frustrated by the eternal hostility of the Treasury to sharing power, a currency, common fiscal and prudential rules. I kept a daily diary as a FCO Minister in the second Blair government 2001-5 including a long stint as Minister for Europe. Re-reading them what comes through is the lack of enthusiasm for full partnership with Europe from most other cabinet ministers and their advisors.

Sir Keir Starmer has no government experience and entered active politics in his middle age just as Brexit was voted by 37 per cent of all registered voters with the backing of Vladimir Putin who like his admirer Nigel Farage longs for a Europe of the 1920s and 1930s consisting of bickering, divided nation states driven by their internal nation-first demons.

No-one expects him to start wearing a Rejoin t-shirt but his sheer silence and timidity in offering any leadership on Europe is puzzling many in Labour. Activists are worried that the LibDems and Green are hoovering up the votes of the now well over 50-60 per cent of voters as recorded by opinion polls who think Brexit was a mistake and would like a correction. Don’t forget despite the BBC endlessly promoting Reform, the Greens actually have more elected councillors.

Switzerland in 1992 and Norway in 1994 rejected in referendums formally joining the European Economic Area, a kind of soft landing for not-quite EU membership. The Swiss and Norwegians like the English have always clung to their independent sovereign status.

But in the intervening decades since the 1990s both Oslo and Bern have quietly negotiated deals that allow them pretty much full access to all the benefits of EU membership.

Britain could gently go in that direction. But it needs political leadership to open an honest debate. If Sir Keir Starmer is too uncertain other cabinet members should be allowed licence to tell the truth about the damage Brexit has done, is doing, will do.

Labour is not sitting on the fence. Sir Keir is hiding under the duvet burrowing his head under the pillows hoping that if the government sees no Europe, hears no Europe, speaks no Europe, the question of Europe is therefore answered. It won’t be.

If Sir Keir wants to train up British workers instead of relying on immigrants all he has to do is copy good practice in major EU states where apprenticeships linked to firms produce new generations of trained, well-paid workers who are not university graduates.

There are two consequences of Sir Keir’s sealed lips. It is to leave the anti-European ethnonationalist space to be filled by Farage cultists. And the pro-British case for trade and mutual wealth creation with our closest neighbours many wealthier than we are to be made by LibDems, Greens, the SNP and even in time some modern Tories who want to close the door on five of the worst prime ministers in political history.

Once again the question of Europe lies heavy on Labour. Sir Keir can choose not to answer it. But it will cost the party I have been in for more than half a century dear. Very dear.