LONDON: Prime Minister Keir Starmer is treading a fine line on UK-EU relations as hard-right populists make gains at a time when Brexit and immigration remain toxic issues in Britain.
\nThe Labour leader will host European Union chiefs in London on Monday for a major summit designed to progress a deeper relationship between the UK and the bloc than the one negotiated by the previous Conservative government.
\nBut Starmer will be wary of giving ammunition to arch-Euroskeptic Nigel Farage\u2019s Reform UK party, while also conscious that US President Donald Trump views the EU negatively.
\n\u201cHe\u2019s walking two tightropes at the same time,\u201d said British foreign policy expert Richard Whitman, describing immigration as a \u201csalient\u201d issue in the UK and Trump\u2019s attitude to the EU as \u201chostile.\u201d
\n\u201cStarmer is balancing this big international issue and also the domestic politics one, and that\u2019s what makes it so tricky for the prime minister,\u201d the politics professor told AFP.
\nThe anti-immigration Reform was founded in 2018 \u2014 two years after Britons voted to leave the EU \u2014 as the Brexit Party, with the aim of advocating for Britain to depart the bloc without a withdrawal agreement.
\nRenamed the Reform UK Party in 2021, it has gained significant ground.
\nLast month, it won more than 670 local council seats, its first two mayoral posts, and gained an additional parliamentary MP in local English elections.
\nFarage\u2019s upstarts are also leading national opinion polls as they tap into concerns about net migration, which stood at 728,000 in the 12 months to last June, and the struggling economy.
\nStarmer hopes closer relations with the bloc can spur his main ambition of economic growth but he has vowed to honor the Brexit result, not rejoin the single market, customs union or return to free movement of people.
\nHe has been publicly reticent about an EU-proposed youth mobility scheme that would allow British and European 18- to 30-year-olds to study and work in the UK and vice versa, although the UK government has made warmer noises in recent weeks about a possible controlled program.
\nAn announcement seems unlikely on Monday given that it comes just a week after Starmer said he wanted to \u201csignificantly\u201d reduce immigration in a speech intended to appeal to potential Reform voters.
\n\u201cTo announce something like that would be a bit perilous politically,\u201d said Whitman, deputy director of the Global Europe Center at the University of Kent.
\nStarmer and EU bosses Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa are instead expected to seal a defense pact at the summit \u2014 a deal seen as the lowest hanging fruit for negotiators.
\n\u201cThere\u2019s nothing in his proposals that is a dial-shifter in terms of economic growth,\u201d said Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank.
\nWhile Starmer is squeezed on the right, he is also under pressure from pro-European lawmakers within Labour who want him to get closer to the EU.
\n\u201cWe must not let Brexit hold us back from our national interest,\u201d Stella Creasy, chair of the Labour Movement for Europe group, told AFP.
\n\u201cBoth sides must move on from the disagreements and red lines to seeking to reduce the paperwork and red tape we face as a result.\u201d
\nA poll for the internationalist think-tank Best for Britain last month found that 53 percent of voters believe a closer relationship with the EU would be positive for the UK economy.
\nBritain\u2019s traditional third party, the Liberal Democrats, wants to rejoin the single market and is also surging in popularity, as are the left-wing Greens as UK politics fractures.
\n\u201cI think Labour are underplaying the danger of losing votes to their left,\u201d said Menon.
\nHe thinks Starmer \u2014 who voted to remain at the 2016 referendum \u2014 can afford to be bolder considering his 156-majority in parliament and the fact that Reform only has five out of 650 MPs.
\n\u201cEverything is done in a sort of defensive crouch,\u201d Menon said of the prime minister\u2019s approach.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s kind of apologetic, rather than, \u2018This is what I think is good for the country, this is why I\u2019m doing it\u2019.
\n\u201cI would advise him to start winning the argument.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON: Prime Minister Keir Starmer is treading a fine line on UK-EU relations as hard-right populists make gains at a time when Brexit and immigration remain toxic issues in Britain. The Labour leader will host European Union chiefs in London on Monday for a major summit designed to progress a deeper relationship between the UK …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":81031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81036,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81008\/revisions\/81036"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}