It was not long after Labour swept into power earlier this month that David Lammy, the new British foreign secretary, announced a "reset” of UK-EU relations. That tone carried into Monday, when Nick Thomas-Symonds visited Brussels for the first time as the UK's EU relations minister.
Afterwards on X, he said the two sides discussed strengthening security and economic cooperation as “allies, sharing both values and challenges.”
Under the leadership of Keir Starmer, the new UK prime minister, Labour put an end to 14-years of Conservative rule, when British voters handed the party 412 seats in a snap election on 4 July. It is the biggest majority in 25 years.
Despite the party's mixed stance on Brexit, Labour is widely viewed as friendlier to the European Union than the Conservatives, which set up the 2016 referendum to leave the bloc.
Brexit hot potato
Any warming of relations will begin with setting a new tone, Luigi Scazzieri, a senior research fellow at the think tank, Centre for European Reform, said, telling The Parliament that “a lot of it is about mood, and just having good relations and trying to build on that.”
The Brexit ordeal created bad blood in the relationship that he said still needs to be worked out.
Polls show that a majority of British voters regret Brexit, yet it did not play a big role in the election campaign, partly because it did not register high on their list of concerns. More crucially, Labour had to win back seats in the "red wall"—a traditional Labour stronghold in the north of England, which voted 55% to leave the EU.
“It’s a political wound that is still so fresh,” Scazzieri said. “They really didn’t want to touch it.”
Starmer already ruled out rejoining the customs union or the single market, the underpinnings of the EU.
“Labour's policy was very clearly to say, 'We will maintain the deal Boris Johnson negotiated. However, we will try to improve that deal,’” Joël Reland, a research fellow at UK in a Changing Europe, an academic think tank, told The Parliament.
Winning over the EU
There are limits to how much Labour can make good on improving the Brexit deal, known formally as the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), which the two sides agreed to in fraught negotitations. It came into force in January 2021.
“If you want to negotiate additions to the TCA, then you need to build trust into the relationship. Brussels still doesn't really trust the UK very much,” Reland said.
The TCA and the Withdrawal Agreement serve as the foundation of post-Brexit EU-UK relations. Labour, as Reland sees it, will struggle to convince the EU to make changes because the next European Commission has other priorities, such as the war in Ukraine and the green energy transition.
“There's not much appetite for renegotiating or even reviewing the TCA because most of the negative economic effects land on the UK,” he added.
Brexit has already trimmed as much as 3% off the UK's GDP so far, according to research by UK in a Changing Europe. A January report by economists at Cambridge Econometrics on behalf of London City Hall, whose Mayor Sadiq Khan is critical of Brexit, concluded that Brexit will have cost the UK economy three million jobs by 2035.
“We have a framework for cooperation with the United Kingdom, which was negotiated over a significant period,” Eric Mamer, a Commission spokesperson said shortly after the UK election. “Our priority first and foremost is to work within that framework.”
One carrot that could entice the Commission is the youth mobility agreement, which would allow young people to more easily work and study in both the UK and the EU. The Commission put it forward in April, but the previous UK government rejected it, preferring its own bilateral agreements with EU members.
Britain pushes for UK-EU security pact
There may be additional agreement when it comes to joint efforts on security, an idea the new Labour government put forward in its manifesto. Both sides share an interest in containing Russia and supporting Ukraine. Within NATO, which most EU members are part of, the UK is the only European nuclear power other than France.
“Europe is at the forefront of some of the greatest challenges of our time,” Starmer said in a statement on Sunday. “We cannot be spectators in this chapter of history. We must do more and go further, not just for the courageous Ukrainians on the frontlines, or those being trafficked from country-to-country, but so our future generations look back with pride at what our continent achieved together.”
A UK-EU security pact could serve as a “relationship builder,” Reland said, adding that “it’s all about engagement with the EU, having meetings and using it as a way to improve the warmth of relations through increasing political contact.”
Security extends beyond military issues, and any deal could also cover foreign policy, climate and migration, for which Scazzeri said the EU-US Trade and Technology Council could serve as a model for cooperation.
“They want to try to set up a parallel structure of consultation outside of the UK-EU trade and cooperation agreements to talk about these issues in a less constrained manner, because the TCA is very much about the economic relationship,” he said. “It's very structured and the EU is dominant in it.”
Whether the EU is keen on that is a different question. Despite EU fears of the UK "trying to cherry pick” issues, Scazzieri can see a future where progress has been made.
“If I were to look ahead six months, what we will have in security is a structure of dialogues between the UK and the EU to discuss certain issues,” he said, including allowing the UK to participate in EU military missions, such as in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
A better climate?
The two sides also share climate goals, which Reland said wouldn’t require lengthy negotiations and technical agreements as is the case for trade. They have stated they are committed to COP, the series of United Nations climate change conferences, with the potential for joint strategies on critical minerals and carbon pricing. Attending COP28 in Dubai last year as Labour party leader, Starmer said the UK would play a leading role in climate action.
He will soon have a chance to make progress on these kinds of aspirations. On Thursday, Starmer will host 45 European leaders at Blenheim Palace, in England, for a summit of the European Political Community. The EPC was founded in 2022 with the goal of bringing together a broader range of European policymakers.
That's the same day that European Parliament votes on whether Ursula von der Leyen gets a second term as European Commission president. The scheduling overlap gives her a reason not to attend the EPC.
Still, Starmer is hoping for a strong turnout, as he looks to “change the way the UK engages with our European partners,” the prime minister said in a statement.