Like a monster from the deep, the question of Europe has returned to haunt British politics. Sir Keir Starmer’s ultra-cautious approach of step-by-step painfully negotiated minor amendments still leaves British citizens and businesses apart from the City’s financial engineering sector where trade is on-line without safety checks on physical goods or health checks on farm products largely isolated from the giant European single market, writes Denis MacShane.

In elections for 4,500 municipal councillors and all members of the parliaments in Scotland and Wales the Green Party which barely existed as a political force 12 months ago won more votes than Starmer’s Labour Party. The Greens’ main domestic political selling point is their enthusiasm for the UK rejoining the European Union. By contrast the Conservatives under their anti-EU leader Kemi Badenoch who has the same policy as Nigel Farage on Europe did poorly losing control of council seats to Reform and being wiped out in Wales.

Starmer has won positive reviews for his handling of foreign policy particularly on standing up the Donald Trump demand that Canada and Greenland should suffer same fate of central European nations in 1940 who were forced to accept an Anschluss into a super-power imperium.

Starmer has worked well with other European leaders like France’s President Macron in building so-called “coalitions of the willing” to support Ukraine or handle Iran without descending into the Netanyahu-Trump attacks from the skies that have killed thousands of innocent Iranians without opening the Strait of Hormuz to global trade.

Indeed Starmer would make a good foreign secretary. British politics has examples of unsuccessful prime ministers and party leaders who were poor at domestic politics but once the pressure of being a prime minister was lifted added value in working on British foreign policy and interventions.

By contrast his uncertain, timid approach to getting back into connecting to Europe to restore growth, investment and exports has been a disappointment.

After all, immediately after the Brexit vote Boris Johnson who together with Nigel Farage led the campaign to leave Europe, said that trade with Europe would not be affected by no longer being an EU member state and that: “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU, to live, to travel, to study, to buy homes and settle down.”

Johnson is a serial liar but Starmer gives the impression that he would just like the European question to go away. It won’t.

At last year’s Labour Party conference, Andy Burnham, who is seeking a return to the Commons via by-election in a Labour seat in Greater Manchester said that he “would like the UK to rejoin the EU in his lifetime”.

On Saturday (23 May) Wes Streeting, 43, one of the stars of the Labour government that took over in 2024 as the first Health Secretary in decades to cut waiting times for doctor and surgeon appointments echoed Burnham. Streeting resigned from Starmer’s government after 1,500 Labour councillors lost their seats last week, many to the far-right Reform party led by Nigel Farage. He urged a “special relationship” with Europe. He said return was possible “one day, one day” some time in the future.

Most Labour MPs agree with Burnham and Streeting that the Farage-Johnson hard Brexit has done serious damage to Britain. The terms of any reconnection to the EU are the subject of debate.

After Streeting made his speech, the anti-EU anti-Labour Daily Telegraph jumped on his commonplace comment about some future putative British membership of the EU partnership into a splash headline about Streeting urging the UK to Rejoin the EU. All his qualifications were swept aside to present Streeting as insisting on an immediate return to the EU on terms set hy Brussels.

Naturally the BBC and broadcasters copied the Daily Telegraph line without any of Streeting’s nuances or qualification. By Monday there was open war on Streeting with senior ministers David Lammy and Lisa Nandy and minor rent-a-quote backbenchers denouncing Streeting in terms they normally reserved for Nigel Farage or Zack Polanski. Andy Burnham wisely did not call attention to his Rejoin call made last autumn.

The Daily Telegraph, which remains as ever the most passionate of the major British papers still obsessed with their proprietors’ hostility to Europe, had done Badenoch and Farage a service by creating a Labour storm of hostility against Streeting and by implication Burnham’s well known views that Brexit has been bad for Britain.

Starmer could have stood back from and above this media storm by accepting the pleas from many Labour supporters that he moves out of Number 10 where his lack of domestic political experience has led to so many poor decisions and instead leads Labour as a force for smart international policy that can unite the democratic world including Europe to develop a joint approach to the adventurism of Trump, Netanyhau and Putting.

Denis MacShane is the the UK’s former minister of Europe.