“Our special relationship is with neighbours 21 miles away”

On June 18, a special election in northwest England will determine whether Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister since 2024, will face an immediate challenge to his premiership led by the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, and former health secretary Wes Streeting.Following a referendum in 2016, the UK left the European Union in January 2020 and Starmer became Labour Party leader three months later, swiftly imposing a Brexit omertà on the centre-left. Instead of endless debate, he said his government would “Make Brexit Work” outside the 30-nation single market (the European Economic Area, EEA). Even supposedly ardent Remainer ministers fell silent for five years.That’s now over as a Labour Party leadership election looms and polling reveals widespread Bregret across every region and demographic group except the over-65s. But what does it mean in practical terms? To reunite a fracturing left-wing vote, should Labour offer a multi-year programme to rejoin the EU? Or, instead of pursuing something so ambitious, should it plan to return to the EEA, or seek sector-by-sector agreements like Switzerland? To discuss the options, host Tim Jones brought together Peter Foster, the Financial Times’s world trade editor and author of What Went Wrong With Brexit And What We Can Do About It, and Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party’s leader from 1983-92 and European Commissioner for transport and administrative reform from 1995-2004. “We’ve got to really assert, because it’s backed by all reality, that our special relationship is with neighbours 21 miles away,” says Kinnock. “And all the mythology – and a lot of it is mythology – of our special relationship with the United States of America has to be displaced and replaced by a recognition of unavoidable realities”. “The British public are as ‘cakeist’ about Europe as their politicians are because the politicians have never explained to them what the trade-offs are. They’ve never made the arguments, and Keir Starmer is the worst in some ways for that,” says Foster. “I think it is a genuinely difficult and bleak prospect. In some ways, maybe the thing that has to happen is something really bad, where it becomes really obvious that economically and strategically our position lies with Europe”.Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com