Sir Keir Starmer will indicate on Monday that Labor is ready to fight Boris Johnson for his Brexit legacy in the next election, outlining a five-point plan to tackle the economic pain caused by the UK’s exit from the EU.
In a major tactical shift, Starmer will use a speech to denounce the “mess” created by the British Prime Minister’s 2020 Brexit deal and the breakdown of confidence in the EU caused by the dispute over trade agreements for Ireland. North.
The Labor leader has so far shunned talking about Brexit, fearing it would alienate voters from Leave, but has been encouraged by the emerging evidence of the impact the exit has had on the economy.
He will claim that Labor can “make Brexit work”, arguing that the Johnson Brexit deal had contributed to the feeling of a “stuck” country, with stagnant wages and growth and broken public services.
“They have created a huge ‘fatberg’ of bureaucracy,” he will say in a speech, comparing Brexit to the “wet cleaning island” on the River Thames. “It is hindering the flow of British business: we will break that barrier.”
Brexit had become a sort of taboo subject for Labor leadership: a third of Labor supporters voted for Llevar in 2016 and Starmer partnered with the unfortunate campaign to overturn that result.
But new data has begun to separate the economic effects of Brexit from the Covid pandemic, showing a poor performance by the UK in terms of trade and investment compared to other G7 countries.
An Ipsos UK study found last week that the proportion of Britons who believe Brexit has worsened their daily lives has risen from 30% in June 2021 to 45%; only 17% said their lives had improved.
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Starmer will insist that a Labor government would not try to rejoin the single market or the EU customs union or reintroduce freedom of movement, let alone try to reverse the 2016 surplus vote.
“Nothing about reviewing these ranks will help stimulate growth or reduce food prices or help British companies thrive in the modern world; it would simply be a recipe for further division,” he will say.
Labor would seek a veterinary agreement with the EU to reduce costly agri-food controls, mutual recognition of product standards and a mobility agreement to facilitate short business trips and help artists tour Europe.
Starmer would use the agri-food deal to remove most controls on trade between Britain and Northern Ireland and negotiate a scheme of trusted traders to end the conflict with Brussels over the rules, contained in the part of the Brexit agreement called the Northern Ireland Protocol.
The Labor leader said business leaders wanted to safeguard the protocol, which leaves Northern Ireland in the single market for goods. “The solutions are there, the desire is there; what is missing is trust,” he will say.
German and Irish foreign ministers on Sunday wrote an opinion piece in The Observer accusing Johnson of not relating to Brussels on the “good faith” protocol. They wrote that there was no “legal or political justification” for their decision to introduce legislation to break parts of the agreement.
Starmer will say Labor would negotiate mutual recognition of professional qualifications and keep the UK on EU science programs, including the € 95 billion Horizon program, which is estimated by UK researchers.
The rules for matching the data would be aligned, but Starmer would follow Johnson to take a different course on city regulation, he will say in an address to the Center for European Reform.
The plan would also include more cooperation with the EU on justice and police issues, including a new “security pact”.
Johnson is likely to portray Starmer’s speech as proof that Labor wants to turn off Brexit, a policy that many working-class voters adopted on the old “red wall” in the north of England.
Some Labor figures, including London Mayor Sadiq Khan, want Starmer to go further and pledge to join the EU’s single market, but this has been ruled out by party strategists.
Even the Liberal Democrats, who favor a return to the single market, have set no timetable for the movement, reluctant to re-engage the British public in a debate whose scars remain unhealed.
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