Keir Starmer has little room to move on Brexit as he aims to regain lost ground

Back in government in June 1975, Labour held a retrospective European membership referendum which was carried by 2:1, but several key party figures urged a ‘No’ vote.

There is an assumption among Irish politicians that current Labour leader, Keir Starmer, who visited Dublin yesterday and is due in Belfast today, would deliver a more favourable result on Brexit and end the current damaging deadlock.

It is clear that he would certainly be better than Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but that is setting the bar very low.

   

The reality is that Mr Starmer’s key job is to win back 50 traditionally Labour seats in the English midlands and north — and the voters in those parts are anti-EU blue collar workers who went Tory for the first time ever in the last election.

So his room for manoeuvre here will be limited.

Mr Starmer was a late comer to politics, having served as director of public prosecutions, and was only elected to Parliament in 2015. He became Labour leader in early 2020 after the party suffered its worst election result since 1935.

Prior to that, he had served as shadow Brexit minister in the party under the divisive and inept leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. He led them to historic losses in December 2019 when Boris Johnson’s Tories won an 80-seat majority.

Mr Starmer made no secret of his support for EU membership and campaigned for Remain in the June 2016 referendum, and for a time he toyed with support for a second referendum.

As opposition Brexit spokesman, he later advocated for Britain to stay in the EU single market and customs union at least for a transition period of some years. That would have meant the “softest of soft Brexits” and there would have been no question of special post-Brexit trade status for Northern Ireland or talk of the border returning.

But his party remained too divided on the issue to deliver support for embattled Prime Minister, Theresa May, on this.

As Labour leader, he has more recently ruled out the idea of the UK re-joining the EU on his watch should he win the next general election expected in 2024. He has said the same about the prospect of re-joining the EU single market and/or customs union, and in December 2020 he instructed his MPs to vote in favour of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal which rules these things out.

Granted, he has in recent days spoken strongly about the need for a negotiated compromise deal with the EU through negotiation between London and Brussels based on trust.

He has sharply criticised Mr Johnson’s destructive approach to framing a new EU-UK relationship and safeguarding the Good Friday Agreement and peace in Northern Ireland.

Dublin will be encouraged by his comments at Trinity College, when he castigated Mr Johnson for “taking a wrecking ball to British-Irish relations”.

Regarding government plans to unilaterally scrap parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol, he said his party believed in upholding international law and he urged more meaningful EU-UK talks on the issue.

“There are challenges that need to be overcome but I start, and the Labour Party starts, with the principle that we believe in and will always uphold the Good Friday Agreement, and we believe in and will abide by international law,” he added.

“The single biggest barrier at the moment is a prime minister who doesn’t have those attributes, who is distracted, is divided, he’s doing everything he can to save his own skin rather than focusing on the issue here,” Mr Starmer said.

He is entitled to be taken at face value on his comments about British-Irish relations and peace in Northern Ireland. But the jury is out on what he could achieve on resolving the current Brexit crux — even assuming his party can win back power.

Telling anti-EU citizens in the midlands and north of England that he is compromising with Brussels could be a hard sell.