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Starmer sending deliberate and meaningful message in updatepublished at 11:48 BST
Henry Zeffman
Chief political correspondent
Media caption,
Starmer: ‘I do have to level with people on this, this will not be easy’
The prime minister was adamant that he would not be choosing
between the US and the EU.
But Sir Keir Starmer decided to use today’s press
conference, which was called in the context of a spiralling conflict about
which the UK and the US profoundly disagree, to advertise his determination to
get closer to the EU.
That was a deliberate and meaningful political decision,
even if Starmer has been moving in that direction for a few months now.
We already knew that there was going to be a second annual
UK-EU summit in a month or two’s time, and we already knew that the UK
government hoped to use it not only to complete existing negotiations on areas
of cooperation but also to seek deeper ties in other areas.
Still, it was interesting to see how much emphasis Starmer
placed on this summit as a moment of economic significance. That said, the PM
said that Labour’s 2024 election manifesto still stood, which is to say the
commitments that the UK would neither rejoin the EU’s customs union or its
single market.
But it feels increasingly like the government wants to get
as close as possible to single market membership as it can from outside the
bloc. Of course, Theresa May wanted that once too, but the EU resisted
“cherrypicking” — the idea that the UK could have what it saw as the
benefits of the single market (economic cooperation through shared regulations)
without what it saw as the drawbacks (the free movement of people).
Those old debates are coming right back to the heart of
British politics.
