Labour’s small wins fail to ease tight fiscal spot

Good morning. Some brief thoughts on Labour’s EU-UK “reset” and the question of whether Labour should have gone further.

Agri-fed up

In recent weeks, the British government has removed barriers to trade with India and the EU, and ameliorated some of the barriers erected by Donald Trump. So, a good week at the office for Keir Starmer when it comes to trade. (Do check out George Parker and Andy Bounds’s indispensable breakdown of how the deal was reached here.)

That the agreement has been greeted with howls of betrayal from the Eurosceptic press (“Kiss goodbye to Brexit” is the Telegraph’s splash today — “if only” is my reaction) means some Labour MPs think the government should have gone further, because if they are going to be attacked for bringing back slices of the loaf they might as well have brought back the whole loaf.

Are they right? It depends on what you think drives discontent with immigration, really. The single biggest red line that Labour could remove to gain a deeper relationship is on the free movement of people between the UK and EU, and all the evidence we have is that most people do not see a youth mobility scheme and free movement as comparable. (Rightly so, because they aren’t, in fact, comparable: brilliantly angry piece by Sam Lowe over on his Substack on that and more besides.)

So I think that if Labour was more courageous on free movement, it would be in a far trickier spot politically. The flipside, of course, is that it would also be in a better place on growth — it would have annoyed more people, but it would also be better placed to win them back. One problem for the government is that it has lots of small policy wins, but they aren’t adding up to enough to get the government out of the very tight spot on tax-and-spend envisaged in its own spending plans.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Daft Punk’s Discovery while writing my column.

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