Keir Starmer is deluding himself about the EU

‘We cannot let the challenges of the recent past define our relationships of the future,’ declared the Prime Minister ahead of today’s meeting of the European Political Union at Blenheim Palace. The meeting, he added, ‘will fire the starting gun on this government’s new approach to Europe’. The subtext to this is: the grown-ups are back in charge, and from now on we are going to have a far more constructive relationship with the EU. Keir Starmer has even promised a renegotiation of Britain’s trading relationship with the EU, which is supposedly going to make life easier for our exporters.

He can dream on. If he really thinks that the EU is going to treat him in a fundamentally different way than it treated David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, he is in for a rude awakening. The EU will carry on behaving as it did throughout the Brexit process: do all it can to try to ensure that Britain gets as bad a deal as possible, even to the point of cutting off its own nose to spite its face and making life difficult for EU companies which want to do business in Britain.