During the eight years since the Brexit referendum in 2016, there has been a remarkable absence of imagination on the British left. Torn between the demands of Remain and Leave voters, the centre left has tended to frame Britain’s departure from the EU as an inherently right-wing project while refusing to commit to rejoining the single market or the customs union. While gradually accepting the reality of the referendum result, especially after 2019, the left has completely failed to develop anything like a meaningful vision for a post-Brexit Britain.
Under Keir Starmer, Labour’s approach to the EU has coalesced around what is essentially a limited and partial reversal of Brexit. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it has followed the Conservative government in seeking to increase security cooperation with the EU – but is willing to go further than the Conservatives to reintegrate the UK into EU structures to do so. This forms part of a wider approach to foreign policy that David Lammy has recently called “progressive realism”. But what he outlines is neither progressive nor realist. If anything, it is more like a repackaging of neoconservatism.
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