Walking the Talk

Munich 2026. Gavin Newsome, attending, said that Trump is a glitch and the US will be back to normal when he is gone. Marco Rubio, on the Munich airport tarmac, said the world has irrevocably changed. Very sadly, he is the more right of the two, even if Newsome makes it to the White House in 29.

The big moment for Brits was Starmer, holed below the water-line at home and sinking, yet waxing eloquent about how Europe is a big power and must assert itself as such, uniting its efforts to be what it can be. He is right. But the irony – oh, heck, irony is stone dead and its corpse has been stabbed so many times over, daily, in the last year, mainly by butcher-in-chief Trump, but here comes Starmer to add a few more thrusts: Europe must unite, he said; but he won’t reverse Brexit.

Repetition is a bore but a necessary one when the stakes are so high. So I repeat: if the UK rejoined at very least the Single Market it would repair a £100 billion hole in its finances, be party to the EU’s massive trade deals abroad, resume an influx of the skills of Europe’s workers while providing opportunities for UK workers across the continent, and end the stupid and wasteful border controls hampering Brits in their own region – all self-regarding benefits to add to the moral rightness of strengthening the EU economy and boosting European defence, providing a further buffer to the rise of the Right in Europe, thereby enlarging the Big Power status of Europe in an increasingly multipolar world where regional strength and solidarity is now at a premium. As Starmer himself point out.

So the demand to Starmer is to walk the big talk in Munich. Mean what you say and do what you mean, Sir Keir. To date it is party political self-interest which has baulked the Labour government in undertaking the rational self-repair that the UK desperately needs. It is win-win: good for the UK and good for Europe. And good for that majority of Brits who want to be back in Europe, citizens of Europe, at home in Europe.

There are plenty of ‘reasons’ why rejoining will be ‘difficult’ and ‘tricky’ and ‘complicated’ and all the rest of it. There are plenty of people with plausible caveats about EU institutions and how it runs itself. The EU is a work in progress, national politics in its member states makes for stumbling blocks, the news media and expert podcasters have plenty of grist for their mills every day. But vision is capable of rising above all the ‘buts’ and teeth-sucking; no one thinks anything worthwhile is achievable without effort, large-mindedness, will. Will is all. Where there’s a will there are plenty of ways.

‘The EU is a work in progress’ – but in its very DNA the progress is aimed at a community of peoples with a shared (and too often internecinely harmful) history and culture seeking to overcome is past and build something internally peaceful, prosperous and progressive, on the basis of respect for human rights and law. The majority of Brits very much want to be part of that. And we should be.

I hope – since hope is the stuff of life – that Starmer’s ‘international statesman’ effort at Munich might have a domestic intention, as preparing the ground for a more significant ‘reset’ move towards Europe than the marginal fiddling so far seen. All reason is in favour of it happening. Let’s see the talk walked.