Ten years after: the UK Brexit referendum ushered in the age of self-destruction. Time to call a halt

This week marks 10 years since the then UK prime minister, David Cameron, announced a “very simple in or out” referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. UK politicians and media commentators are still debating what it all means and, like Deng Xiaoping’s famous quip about the significance of the French Revolution, it may be a century or more before we know for sure. In retrospect, it still seems questionable why the UK urgently needed to have the referendum in June 2016. A previous referendum in 1975 during the tenure of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, showed a strong majority wishing to remain in the European Communities (as it then was). Over the years that followed, and as the European Communities evolved into today’s European Union, the UK negotiated a number of opt-outs to various EU treaties and agreements to demonstrate to its public opinion that many of voters’ hesitations vis-à-vis the goal of “an ever closer union” or an EU integrated super-state were being listened to. So, the UK rejected freedom of movement under the Single Market and the Schengen Agreement and maintained border controls. London refused to join the Euro common currency at the turn of the century and opted out of many aspects of social and employment legislation which it felt could hold back the UK’s economic competitiveness.

The UK was also notoriously hesitant about greater defence cooperation within an EU context, particularly the establishment of new EU military structures that it felt would duplicate NATO without many new hard-core capabilities to NATO’s frontline defences. “Re-arranging the deck chairs on board the Titanic”, as one UK diplomat famously described it. The UK opposed the setting up of an EU operational headquarters (after its departure from the EU in 2020). Yet it was more open to cooperation on actual operations undertaken by the EU within the framework of its Common Security and Defence Policy. These took place in areas such as the Western Balkans or the Gulf of Aden to which the UK had also long been committed and were facilitated when, as in the case of Operation Althea in Bosnia, the EU took over in 2004 from a long-standing NATO operation (SFOR) to which London had been a major contributor. Ultimately the UK ended up participating in 25 out of 35 CSDP operations. As these were small, often short and frequently civ-mil operations, not involving combat or large force deployments, it was relatively easy for the UK government to be discreet about British participation and not to start a public spat with the Brexiteers. That said, the UK did step into a more prominent and visible role when it took command of the EU Atalanta maritime operation in the Gulf of Aden after 2008. It provided the operational HQ at Northwood near London and Admiral Philip Jones as the mission commander.

Meanwhile, the UK was not the only EU member to like its opt-outs. Denmark had one also on the Common Security and Defence Policy (revoked by referendum after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2022). But the UK was by far the worst offender, having also negotiated a substantial rebate on its contribution to the EU budget at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Yet if far from ideal from the viewpoint of Brussels, Britain’s one-foot-in,-one-foot-out membership of the EU represented a mutually-beneficial deal for the largely Eurosceptic Britons, still attached to their US partnership in defence, nuclear deterrence and intelligence-sharing and nostalgia for the days of empire and global influence.

The UK was able to reap nearly all the economic benefits from free and uninhibited trade with its European neighbours while staying on the margins of the increasing political and defence cooperation among the other EU states as they sought to make the union a more independent and influential actor on the world stage. Consequently, British voters might grumble about EU red tape and bureaucrats in Brussels and the tabloid press make frequent fun of the European Commission’s attempts to standardise the European sausage or straighten bananas; yet by and large, they were comfortable with the status quo and there were no anti-EU protests seeking to change it, not even tiny ones outside the Houses of Parliament. During these years, hundreds of thousands of Brits, young and old, decamped from the UK to spread all over Europe and (like me) make new careers and lives on the other side of the Channel with no intention of ever going back. Yet even for the majority of Britons who stayed behind, the four decades of the UK’s EU membership witnessed rapid economic growth and rising living standards. As EU workers came to live in the UK, the quality (and price) of plumbing, painting jobs and house renovations as well as coffee and croissants in cafes improved significantly.

If it wasn’t broke, why bother to fix it? In truth, the referendum of June 2016 made little sense. It was not mandated by constitutional change or a binding legal commitment (like the referendum on Scottish independence in September 2014), nor by pressure from public opinion, nor by any new EU treaty that might have put the UK in an impossible position. All the major political parties at Westminster supported continuing EU membership, together with the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In launching the referendum, the Conservative government in London at the time was going against its own policy and the majority of opinion within its own party in parliament. This was the reason why prime minister David Cameron resigned in humiliation the morning after the victory of the Leave vote was announced. Cameron made two fateful errors.

First, in being over-confident that having 18 months previously persuaded a majority of Scots to stay within the UK, he could pull off the same feat of political persuasion in convincing the English and the Welsh to stay in the EU (the Scots and Irish were significantly more European in their outlook). Cameron ran a particularly lacklustre and inept referendum campaign centred around the dry economic argument that on balance Britons were slightly better off inside the EU than out. One can hardly be convincing if one is not convinced oneself. This narrow strategy abandoned the emotional and performative domain of politics to Boris Johnson and the Leave campaign.

Second, Cameron wanted to heal a rift in his own Conservative Party over the UK’s EU membership and its role in Europe more broadly. For years, a faction of anti-EU nationalists in the party, obsessed with sovereignty and market deregulation, and peddling a romantic view of a return to past imperial glories, had demonised the EU with the support of right-wing newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. The “Brexiteers” were certainly a thorn in the side of Conservative governments, particularly under the premierships of John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May; but although they could make a lot of noise, their position on the parliamentary back benches meant that they could not hold up the government’s business in Brussels and daily interactions with the EU. It was not a comfortable position for Conservative governments but one that they had been living with for some time already and could have continued to tolerate and manage for some time to come.

The one major difference was the emergence of UKIP, an anti-EU populist party led by the Conservative defector, Nigel Farage. Cameron clearly feared a haemorrhage of Eurosceptic Conservative voters to UKIP. But a referendum on the EU was hardly the solution to the Conservative Party’s divisions. If the Leave camp prevailed, UKIP and the nationalist forces on the right would only be strengthened, claiming the right to be able to impose the terms of the withdrawal settlement. And if the Stay In camp won, the Brexiteers would never accept the result as the democratic choice of British voters but continue their campaign against Brussels and willingness to undermine their own government. Thus, the referendum would make no real difference as the previous 1975 referendum result underlined.

Back in those distant days, there was more cross-party cooperation between Conservatives and Labour on Europe and a willingness to campaign robustly together. Yet in 2016, the pro-Russia and anti-Brussels (as well as anti-US) Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn put party political tactics over the national interest and was almost entirely absent from the referendum campaign. That said, staying in Europe after 1975 did not clarify the question of Britain’s role and place in Europe nor facilitate a more relaxed and rational political debate on the issue. In short, Cameron and the pro-Europeans in British politics should have had sufficient communication skills to take on the phoney arguments and political fantasies of the Brexiteers without needing to take the risk of organising a referendum; one which was bound to be high jacked by the populists to advertise issues (such as immigration numbers or the North-South prosperity divide) over which the UK government rather than the EU had the primary control and over-dramatise the issue as one of absolute sovereignty versus a collectivist EU superstate. The money saved from leaving would apparently fix all of the UK’s public sector deficiencies overnight.

Britain’s political crisis began in 2016 and has only deepened since. The referendum produced a pattern of instability and constant dysfunctionality in government, which has only exacerbated all the problems (from economic stagnation, crumbling infrastructure, North-South divides, cost of living pressures, rapidly growing welfare costs, a rickety and inefficient national health service and mass, uncontrolled migration) that leaving the EU was intended to solve. The UK’s political system and hence capacity to come up with viable long-term strategies to remedy these problems, supported by robust parliamentary majorities, has been compromised. Since Cameron, no UK Prime Minister has served a full term and all have lost their popularity and legitimacy at historically unprecedented speeds. Theresa May called an election to strengthen her mandate to negotiate a sensible Brexit deal consistent with Britain’s economic interests. But she achieved exactly the opposite, leaving the way for right-leaning Boris Johnson to become leader on a platform of a hard, ideological Brexit, reducing London-Brussels links to the bare minimum. His popularity (for a short time at least) was based on his promise to “get Brexit done”, which reflected less a strong desire of the British public to leave the UK rather than their frustration at being stuck in a permanent no man’s land incurred by a lack of planning for Brexit, coupled with politicians’ inability to identify the UK’s objectives and interests and negotiate a smooth exit from the EU. An exit that would be free of the frictions and resentments that would make future pragmatic cooperation difficult due to a breakdown in trust.

Johnson indeed “got Brexit done” following a flimsy Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU that allowed for minimal exchanges across the Channel. But his own tenure in office was cut short by the COVID-19 “Partygate” scandal, which allowed him to depart the scene without needing to explain how his Brexit vision of new found “freedoms”, instant surplus cash to invest in the NHS, subsidies to British farmers and a “Global Britain” regaining its former heft on all five continents would be transformed into actual reality. Johnson was succeeded by Liz Truss, the shortest serving Prime Minister in UK history (45 days) but just long enough to blow up the gilt market and cause a run on the pound. Rishi Sunak, her successor, tried to steady the ship but was dragged down by crippling debt incurred to get through the COVID lockdown and rising energy, welfare and benefit costs, leaving little room to restart the economy or launch badly needed planning reforms, housing schemes and new transport infrastructure.

In 2024, Labour under Keir Starmer returned to power with a large 400-seat majority but the smallest share of the popular vote for a governing party since the Second World War (just over 30%). Starmer’s victory was less a sweeping mandate for Labour than a decisive rejection of the Tories after 14 years in power. The Labour manifesto, entitled “Change”, revealed a contradiction between the quest for growth (implying lower taxes, big new infrastructure projects, deregulation and a friendly environment for businesses and investment) and promises to Labour’s traditional supporters in the public sector that lots of extra money would go to the NHS, public sector workers and welfare and benefits. Squaring the magic circle here has always proved difficult for any British government. But within a year of taking office and despite a massive majority, the Labour leader has become enmeshed in constant political speculation about how long he will remain as leader and the government bumbles along from one mini-crisis in Westminster to the next, which repeatedly diverts its attention and energy from its longer-term reformist agenda.

Starmer’s speeches on the cost of living or plans to build thousands of new homes to allow young Britons to get on the property ladder are constantly having to be re-written at the last minute so that the Prime Minister can apologise for appointing Peter Mandelson (caught up in the Epstein files) as Ambassador to Washington or to explain the government’s latest in a series of embarrassing U-turns. Repeated opposition from Labour MPs to their own government’s initiatives has forced Starmer to retreat on issues like the organisation of local elections, spending cuts to benefits or welfare reforms. Paralysis in Westminster only reinforces the sense among the wider public that “nothing works any more” and that “Britain is broken” a theme peddled by populists in the opposition Conservative Party, as it seeks to recover from its worst-ever election drubbing in 2024, and by the Reform Party, way ahead in the polls and enjoying the spectacle of almost weekly defections of senior Tories, including former ministers, from the ranks of the Conservatives.

Since the Brexit referendum, UK Prime Ministers and their cabinets have explained the failure of Britain to rapidly turn into the “Singapore on the Thames” that the Brexiteers promised by referring to outside economic factors over which they have no control. For instance, the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis caused by the collapse of sub-prime lending in the US, the massive extra expenditure to keep businesses afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic (estimated in a report by the House of Lords at £310bn to the Exchequer) and the steep increase in energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Europe’s efforts to diversify its supplies away from cheap Russian gas and oil.

Yet all too often these factors are invoked to disguise the UK’s self-inflicted damage at home. UK politics has become an insular affair dominated by the rise of the career politician. Few MPs have experience in business or serving in the military. The Financial Times has calculated that more of the current crop of Labour MPs worked for the NGO charity, Save The Children, than worked in the City of London prior to a life in politics. Coming from NGOs, trade unions or special interest groups, they remain loyal to those interests once in Parliament and do not develop enough fresh, strategic thinking and ideas on how to tackle the UK’s long-term structural problems, many of which (to be fair) are facing EU and G7 countries as well. The failures of successive governments, rising debt levels and unfunded projects give incoming governments a terrible legacy to deal with before they can set their own course. The media obsesses over the Westminster scandals du jour, forcing ministers to go on the back foot, sack their advisors and put their energy into investigations and administrative reforms (such as vetting procedures) rather than roll out policies.

Instability leads to the postponement of investment decisions and to worries that the government will not be able to provide the stable regulatory environment, modern infrastructure or tax incentives necessary to make long-term investments worthwhile. Instability also means that governments are not trusted to take on vested interests or work their way coherently through competing interests as the ministerial churn, systematic opposition politics, and competition between ministers and special advisers make the climate perpetually uncertain. Productivity has been in consistent decline over the past decade, including among white-collar workers and vis-à-vis the UK’s European competitors as well as the US. Perhaps the most significant failing of the British political class has been its inability to make public expectations of increased prosperity and better public services come into line with economic realities and the need for reforms.

That said, the UK still retains advantages. London attracts more direct investment than any other European capital, and the UK’s reputation in universities, life sciences and technology and innovation is well established. Interest rates and inflation are coming down. Moreover, the Labour government still has a comfortable majority in parliament for the next three and a half years before the next general election – if it get its act together. Yet a prevailing sense of a lost decade since the referendum, the failure of successive governments to produce the growth that could solve many of the UK’s economic woes and the colder geopolitical winds blowing in from the US and China have now turned attention to the UK’s largest market and biggest trading partner by far just across the Channel. Why try to establish new links when restoring old ones can be faster and far more beneficial?

After 10 years of trying to leave Europe, the anniversary of the referendum marks ironically the moment when the UK is seeking to jump over or work around all the many obstacles that Brexit put in the way of UK-EU relations, and to re-engage with the EU and Europe more generally. The UK is not about to submit a new membership application. That would be too complicated and too long (given the 10 existing candidate countries) to produce any immediate benefits. Moreover, the EU, after the painful divorce, is as hesitant about a second marriage as the UK. The political and public consensus to do that is currently too fragile and needs more time, even if public opinion polls show that British voters are gradually moving in that direction. The UK is acknowledging that Brexit is a form of political separation and that a future for the UK of going it alone on the world stage has failed. It is time for a much more ambitious reset. All said, public opinion is now more favourable, as are the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which, since Brexit, have all been campaigning for independence. The Brexiteers have also fallen silent as they fade from the political scene. They once made a half-hearted effort to claim advantages for the UK outside the EU (for instance, a slightly faster rollout of the COVID vaccine); but since illegal migration into the UK has continued to rise and the EU has struck more or less the same trade deals with India, Latin America and the Asian democracies as the UK has been seeking. Finally, the government has more to gain than to lose by being seen as bolder and more strategic in its dialogue with the EU. Foreign policy has brought Starmer more recognition and respect than his turpitudes in domestic policy, and Europe is the place where he can appear statesmanlike and re-burnish his tarnished reputation for competence and leadership.

The engagement message came across clearly in Prime Minister Starmer’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last week. The timing was perfect because, as security and defence have risen to the top of the EU agenda, so too has the UK’s stock as a partner to Europe increased. Ironic, as the Boris Johnson government rejected a Security and Defence Agreement with the EU, reasoning that it was too constraining, and focused instead on a limited trade regime.

Yet since Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and worries on the continent about a progressive US disengagement from NATO during the second Trump administration, the UK has stepped up its operations in Europe. It leads the multinational NATO battalion in Estonia and has formed a Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) with the Scandinavian and Baltic allies that has land, air and naval components. The JEF will be deployed on exercises in the North Atlantic and Greenland in September as part of NATO’s Arctic Sentry mission to demonstrate the alliance’s commitment to defend the High North. Starmer also announced in Munich that the UK will deploy a carrier task force to the North Atlantic in late 2026 based around the new Prince of Wales aircraft carrier and including ships from the US, Norway and Denmark. To reinforce its central role in the defence of NATO’s western seaboard, Britain has agreed to take over NATO’s Atlantic joint forces command at Norfolk, Virginia from the US. It has also deployed forces in northern Norway for training and exercises in cold weather conditions, and is building Type 26 frigates with Norway to have greater maritime capabilities, including for anti-submarine warfare, in the High North. But it is probably vis-à-vis Ukraine that London is making its presence felt most prominently.

The UK co-chairs with Germany the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, which meets on the sidelines of NATO defence minister meetings with the Ukrainian defence minister and coordinates the supply of weapons and ammunition to Kyiv in accordance with Ukraine’s priority needs. Together with President Macron of France, Starmer has led the Coalition of the Willing to plan and generate European troops for a future reassurance force on the ground in Ukraine once a ceasefire and peace have been reached. London and Paris will not only provide the bulk of the troops for this force but also many of the headquarters and logistics elements.

Britain has also been in the forefront of weapons transfers to Ukraine, and the first country to supply tanks and cruise missiles. It is now working on joint drone and air defence missile production with Ukrainian defence companies, although the UK weapons packages have become smaller as the country has run out of stocks and money has become tighter. At last week’s NATO defence ministers meeting, the UK announced a relatively modest £150mn contribution to the alliance’s Prioritised List of Requirements (PURL) fund to purchase weapons for Ukraine, whereas the NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, is seeking €15bn for the PURL fund in 2026. In addition, London has also actively pursued bilateral cooperation with key European partners. At the first UK-France Summit in five years, the Lancaster House agreement was updated to deepen Anglo-French nuclear cooperation with coordinated submarine patrols and the sharing of nuclear technology. Italy is the partner (along with Japan) for the UK in developing a 6^th-generation fighter jet. A bilateral security and defence agreement has also been concluded between the UK and Germany which includes among other things the co-development of a new medium-range missile.

Indeed, with all its commitments in the North Atlantic, the Baltics and Ukraine, the UK armed forces are beginning to feel the stretch. Like France, Britain likes to talk about the need to be prepared for war and to be willing and able to fight, as well as the urgency of greater European self-reliance (all themes that Starmer stressed to the Munich Security Conference). Yet the UK has been falling down the European defence spending league and coming late to many NATO projects and programmes. Last year, it carried out a thorough and realistic Strategic Defence Review, led by the former NATO Secretary General, Lord George Robertson, and the government committed to the new alliance spending target of 5% of GDP by 2035. Yet the Defence Investment Plan to explain where all this extra money will come from, when and how it will be spent, and on which priority capability programmes spread across the different armed services, has still not been published by the government, despite having been promised last autumn. Up to now, the government has committed to increasing the defence budget to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 and to 3% in the lifetime of the next parliament. Currently, defence spending is roughly 2.3% of GDP. But the problem here is that much of this extra funding (above the previous NATO target of 2% of GDP) has gone to filling the funding gap on existing procurement and modernisation contracts, such as upgrading the dilapidated housing for military personnel. It has also been eaten up by high inflation in defence equipment and raw materials, such as the chemical components needed for explosives. Recently, Germany has announced that it will spend €152bn on defence annually by 2029, the date when German intelligence chiefs believe Russia would be ready to attack a NATO member state. It has also told its population to stock up on food for a three- to ten-day supply. Germany has lifted its debt brake so it has no ceiling on what it can now spend on defence. The German defence budget will soon be double what France and the UK are planning, and the German foreign minister recently criticised France for lagging behind with its defence spending.

Starmer realises that he must match his strong rhetoric on defence with concrete actions or Britain will lose credibility in the alliance. Now, he proposes to bring forward the achievement of the 3% target to this parliament (that is to say, by 2029 at the latest). The Institute of Fiscal Studies in London calculates that this will require £14bn to be added to the defence budget every year. UK trade union bosses, like Sharon Graham of UNITE, have called on the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, to relax her fiscal rules for borrowing to facilitate more defence investment and support the 220,000 employees already working in the UK defence sector. But the UK is already borrowing heavily, business and personal taxes are at an all-time high and growth is too anaemic to provide the resources for higher defence spending. The UK government must now do something that UK governments have not been good at doing since the onset of the Brexit debate over a decade ago: abandon magical thinking and have a serious discussion with British public opinion about the social contract.

Because of the primacy of national security in a rapidly changing geopolitical environment and the refusal of the US to continue to bankroll Europe’s welfare programmes by funding the bulk of NATO’s capabilities, the UK (along with other European allies) is going to have to make painful cuts to benefits, pensions, health and education to shift money towards military modernisation. How to roll the pitch and carry British public opinion along with the government will be a monumental challenge. The UK’s Scandinavian and Baltic partners (together with Poland and now Germany) have been making this public engagement effort, but arguably, they are closer to the Russian threat and have a history of foreign occupation that the island inhabitants of Britain have not had. Eurobarometer polling last February shows that 68% of Europeans feel directly threatened and 73% look to the EU to protect them. British public opinion is no different, especially as Moscow has sent agents to carry out assassinations inside the UK and Russian ships and aircraft are operating ever closer to the British coastline. Moreover, Labour voters have deserted the party in droves whenever it has chosen leaders, like Michael Foot in the 1980s or Jeremy Corbyn more recently, who opposed Britain’s nuclear deterrent and were seen as soft on defence. But understanding that the world is today a more dangerous place doesn’t mean that electorates fully grasp what preparing will mean in terms of rewriting the social contract. All the more so when political messaging turns into hard financial decisions hitting social categories already worried about the cost of living. The UK and France are particularly vulnerable here.

Yet closer cooperation with the EU at least provides part of the answer for the UK. It was no irony that Starmer shared the platform in Munich with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Their messages were remarkably similar and complementary. Both understood that there is a before and after Trump, and that the after will not resemble the before, no matter who wins the White House in 2028. As Von der Leyen expressed it: “Some lines have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed anymore”. The speech of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was deceptive because despite its more friendly tone towards Europe, he made clear that the US alliance with our continent is now conditional: not only on higher European defence spending and greater burden sharing, but also on Europe changing its values to be more nationalistic, more white and Christian, less committed to the international rules based order and turning its back on migrants. Although neither Von der Leyen nor Starmer want to see the end of NATO and appreciate that it will take time for Europe to replace key US military capabilities (like command and control and missile defence), they cannot achieve true European self-reliance unless the EU and UK work much more closely together.

Over the past 10 years, this has been difficult because the UK had a European security policy which tried to bypass the EU institutions. London preferred to demonstrate its European credentials through its NATO roles, its regional groupings, like the E3, Northern Group and enlarged Weimar forum, industrial cooperation consortia and strong bilateral relationships. Re-engaging with the EU would have been criticised as a betrayal of Brexit and the UK coming back under EU law and regulations. Fearing the diversion of another divisive EU debate during the election campaign, Labour laid down a number of non-negotiable red lines to pre-empt any discussion: no return to the Single Market, Customs Union or the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Until a year ago, and the Windsor Agreement between London and Brussels, regulating the situation of Northern Ireland vis-à-vis the EU, the UK had a lack of ambition for its future relationship with Brussels, mainly focused on the review of the implementation of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement over the course of 2026. But the UK’s quest for growth and to give its citizens and businesses greater opportunities in the EU has pushed the Labour government to negotiate new access arrangements. For instance, rejoining the EU Horizon science and research programme, the Erasmus student exchange programme, agreements on food safety standards and joining the EU energy market through the joint development of offshore wind farms and EU-UK inter-connectors. British ministers are once more being invited to meet with their EU counterparts in Brussels and 2025 witnessed the first full-fledged EU-UK Summit in London since Brexit, where the two sides agreed on a new Security and Defence pact.

Yet, all this said, Starmer’s Munich speech clearly showed that London wants to take things up a gear. Although London still rules out joining the Single Market or Customs Union, it wants more sectoral agreements for cross-Channel trade and cooperation where these are in the mutual UK-EU interest. Pharmaceuticals are an obvious choice. Illegal migration and organised crime are others. In security and defence, the UK would like to have access to the EU investment funds for armaments production and capability development. Not so much to be able to receive EU loans itself but more to enable UK defence companies to participate in multinational consortia and contracts, and supply technology and services. After all, UK defence companies represent one quarter of the European defence technology and industrial base and have been involved for decades in European multinational defence projects like the Eurofighter and Tornado jet aircraft or Storm Shadow/Scalp cruise missiles. Altogether, the EU has posited a total of €800bn for its ReARM EUrope initiative and the first loans under one aspect of this initiative, the Security Action for Europe (SAFE fund), with €150bn, are already beginning to flow. In Munich, Starmer called for much greater UK involvement in the EU’s defence investment and capability development programmes to avoid duplication in R&D and production costs. This will not always be easy. The UK application to join SAFE was not successful as London judged the price tag as punitively high, although it has also said that the UK would be interested in joining a second iteration of SAFE if the EU decides to launch this later. France has been hesitant, wanting to protect its defence industries from cross-Channel competition and mindful of the close industrial ties that the UK defence sector has with EU member states like Italy, Germany, Sweden and Poland. Paris is also tempted to put pressure on London to make concessions in other EU areas, such as fishing rights for French trawlermen in UK coastal waters, by linking these issues to greater flexibility on defence cooperation. This tactic might be excusable in more normal times, but we are unfortunately not living in normal times, and EU members need to cut through bureaucracy and petty politics on their side, just as they will be asking the UK to do the same on its side if a truly strategic partnership is to be formed. Time is not unlimited. Labour will be around in government for three more years as will the current UK-friendly leadership of the EU institutions in Brussels. With Nigel Farage and his populist Reform Party possibly forming the next UK government, and the equally populist and anti-military Green Party surging ahead on the left, the time to enmesh the UK firmly in the EU’s defence cooperation is now to make it hard, if not impossible, for the anti-EU Farage to be able to reverse course.

What could London offer to reboot this relationship?

One idea is for the UK (with Italy) to take over responsibility for developing Europe’s 6^th-generation fighter aircraft. The rival Franco-German SCAF programme is fighting for its life, given persistent industrial disputes between Paris and Berlin and loud calls in Germany to abandon the programme. Germany could subsequently join the UK-Italy effort with perhaps Spain (the other SCAF partner) doing the same. In view of the drone threat and the EU’s recently published Counter Drone Action Plan, cooperation on defensive technologies and trials and testing would be another priority, as the UK is also putting considerable resources into this area. The EU should urgently conclude an association agreement with the UK to enable it to contribute to the work of the European Defence Agency, similar to the status enjoyed by Norway.

Another idea is for London to join Paris in initiating a debate over how their independent nuclear deterrents could cover European security more broadly. Unlike France, the UK’s nuclear forces are committed to European defence via NATO and the UK’s long experience in this area would add substance and seriousness to the French initiative. The UK could also discuss with EU military staffs how its forces could contribute to the Defence Readiness Road Map to 2030, approved last year. Meanwhile, Britain’s membership of the European Space Agency (ESA) ensures that London is able to build space capabilities together with the EU as ESA has obtained a significant budget increase and the authority to begin work on military space assets and services.

For its part, the EU should review how its expanding toolbox of instruments for security and defence and resilience building against hybrid warfare on the home front would benefit from the type of capability that the UK has. Intelligence, digital security and cyber operations are areas where Britain retains significant advantages. Finally, as the EU embarks on its next Global Strategy to take account of a more aggressive Russia and less engaged America, it would be courteous to allow London to comment and make a suggestion or two. In Munich, Von der Leyen proposed that Article 42.7 of the Lisbon Treaty on EU mutual defence clause should be turned into a NATO-style collective defence clause. Given the ramifications of such a move, and the countries that would be called upon to implement it, London should certainly be consulted if this proposal moves forward. EU officials like Commissioner Kubilius for Defence and Space have said that the EU needs a US-style National Security Council. If this idea were ever implemented, the UK should be invited to sit on it.

“What is done is done and cannot be undone”, says Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Britain will not get back its lost decade following the Brexit referendum. It lost influence on the global stage, its economy stagnated, the union of the four UK nations became weaker. British politics fragmented to the right and the left as the UK lurched from one ineffective government to the next. But damage done can be repaired, and new relationships and inter-dependencies can be built. Mistakes do not need to prove fatal if there is the political courage to correct them. In the final analysis, a calm and cooperative relationship between two divorcees working pragmatically together in their common interest is better than a stormy and unhappy marriage.

Trump and Putin have not achieved many positive things, but they have given the UK and the EU the opportunity for a new start and a reset. “We are not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore”, proclaimed Starmer in his speech in Munich to loud applause. London and Brussels now need to put this assertion to the test and determine in this case exactly which Britain and British role in Europe we are now dealing with. On the answers they come up with together, the fate of Europe’s future security will depend.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.