Sitting on the fence: painful but necessary

President Trump’s muscular trade strategy is already causing waves around the world. It is not just Canada, Mexico and China feeling the impact but closer to home too, where Keir Starmer has been forced to carefully and painfully sit on a fence at a press conference in Brussels, just as he is intending to begin a year-long delicate renegotiation of our relationship with the EU.  

The Prime Minister was in Brussels to speak to both the Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, and attend talks with EU leaders, the first to do so in the five years since Brexit.  

He was forced to deny that the UK would have to choose between the US and the EU after President Trump threatened the EU with tariffs – at $208bn the EU has the second largest goods deficit after China. Instead, the PM had to tread a careful line – sound sympathetic to his EU hosts who are under threat from a trade war, while hoping that the UK’s balanced relationship with the United States prevents a similar threat to these shores.  

There was no realistic prospect that Keir Starmer was going to offer his full and vocal support for the EU, or more surprisingly to our Commonwealth cousins in Canada. However, it would have been noted by diplomats around Europe who have already made clear that the UK is coming as the ‘demandeur’ – a supplicant - to the EU. The refusal to offer support will hardly improve the mood of the negotiations to come.

The elephant in the room is why the UK is in a different position to the EU and being treated differently by President Trump. Whatever your views on Brexit, it has a large part to play in that, meaning that the UK can have an independent trade policy distinct from the EU. This was a point vocally made on the Today programme by Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, who was quick to point out that the prospect of a free trade deal with the United States meant that the EU would become ‘less important each year.’ 

Pressed hard by host Emma Barnett, Mr Farage admitted that the UK would also have to improve its deal with the EU, while failing to go into any detail as to what he would change as part of the renegotiation. Mr Farage also declined to address the challenges that the fishing or cheese industries are having in shipping items to the EU post-Brexit. 

This deliberate ambivalence clearly plays well with the electorate, with a new poll out this week from YouGov putting Reform UK ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives for the first time, with Mr Farage winning voters from both main parties.  

Labour then is left to navigate the consequences of the 2016 referendum result and attempt to renegotiate an imperfect agreement with the EU. As they are now in government, they will have to own the outcomes of the difficult discussions with the EU, who are seeking movement from the UK on issues such as fishing rights and a mobility scheme for young Europeans. The former is hardly likely to go down well with the fishing industry – referenced above – and the latter was ruled out by Yvette Cooper in the last week because it would increase net immigration.  

Faced with a Reform Party on the rise, likely to do well in regional and Mayoral elections, this represents a worst-case scenario for Labour. They have yet to produce a convincing argument that appeals to Brussels, let alone one that appeals to the electorate and minimises the threat of Reform.  

For the Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch, they risk being seen as an irrelevance, and their performance in the polls where they have fallen behind Reform and Labour is deeply worrying. Saddled with the history of the decisions made as part of the last Government, and the blame that goes with it, they are finding it hard to find a distinctive line that gives them the right to criticise the government without admitting the faults of the past. If they cannot carve that out, then Reform will continue their rise. 

The nascent trade war, and Britain’s place in the world, rips off the plaster from the unhealed wounds of Brexit five years on. Its implications for Britain’s political parties will continue to be felt in the weeks and months ahead.