Labour’s EU reset is a ‘deeply incoherent mess’

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1:15Tim Shipman: Hello, welcome to Coffeehouse. I'm James Heal. And I'm Tim Shipman. And today we're going to be talking about the government's e-reset. But does Lisa Nandy know all the detail?

1:22James Heale: Well, James, we're both sporting a poppy. Yes. Remembrance Day was this weekend. The main day is this week. Lisa Nandy, what on earth was she doing over the weekend?

1:34Tim Shipman: I mean, not just one, but two gaffes. Quite. And first of all, I think it's a little bit difficult to talk about European reconciliation and the Brotherhood of Man, particularly on Remembrance Sunday, as a way of sort of saying, and making it so explicit in the government's press release, talking that they were going to say, we're going to honour the war memory by going back to Europe, as it were. Yes, by rejoining the Erasmus student exchange scheme. And that's going to prevent us from ever going to conflict again. So it seemed a bit tin-eared. And Lisa Nandy seemed a bit unconvinced by it, didn't she?

2:02Tim Shipman: She very much suggested that, you know, it wasn't a debate she wanted to get started, but they do want to get close to Europe. And I'm not sure how you square that circle.

2:08James Heale: Yeah, and then she also said that, you know, She was sort of praising the Second World War generation, saying we've not been to war since, which would be news to the people.

2:17Tim Shipman: Korea, Falcons, Gulf One, Gulf Two. Yeah, Afghanistan, Iraq, all of that. Libya, you want to talk about the bombing raids? I mean, all sorts, yeah.

2:28James Heale: Yeah, but for a party that at the moment is not willing to talk about exactly how and when it will fund defence spending and wishes to spend a lot of time talking about European reconciliation, this was a sort of really botched effort to put the two together, wasn't it?

2:44Tim Shipman: It was. And Lisa Nandy, I think, has unfortunately attracted a few bric-a-bracs in her time for not always being across the detail. And I don't think she particularly helped herself on this outing, as it were. It seemed slightly odd to put up the culture secretary for this one in a way that wasn't going to be, you know, you'd think a foreign office minister would be more appropriate. The way it was come across, extremely tenured, I thought, overall.

3:08James Heale: Yeah. And then she sort of said, well I'm not sure why the Conservatives are making turning Remembrance Sunday into a political football Kevin Hollenwick said we didn't fight two world wars for a student exchange scheme and he may have a point on that but yeah I mean to use another wartime analogy they started it in the case of Labour Party

3:27Tim Shipman: Well quite and I just don't really understand do they want to have this fight or not and it seems this half in half out approach and you'd imagine Lisa Nandy privately has different views to others perhaps in the cabinet you know her seat is reform facing Wigan, of course. I think reform did extremely well winning. I think there's all the councillors there up for grabs this year in May. And she will very be conscious of those pressures. And I think that's an interesting device in the cabinet about those who are facing more of the reform seats, wary about the memories of 2017 and 19 watching colleagues lose their seats often.

3:56Tim Shipman: And those who are around London and go, oh, yeah, this is the great economic panacea. And I think there is a growth case for Europe, but I think it's a growth case that might take three, four, five, ten years to develop. and you wonder in the interim, is this cabinet prepared to have that fight?

4:10James Heale: Yeah, no, I mean, I don't know, but what we are going to see, I guess, in the next couple of weeks is a lot of focus on Europe. We've got Andy Burnham going off to the European political community meeting later this week and then the end of next week is when we finally get this summit with the EU and we will get some kind of deal tied up with a bow of stuff that's already been negotiated, but the more important stuff will be what is then on the table for this, you know, yet another reset. And it feels to me that what we've seen over the weekend is a little bit indicative of, and as you say, the Cabinet's not united on this.

4:48James Heale: Burnham has been musing a lot about the direction of travel and where he might like to go, but we still don't really know, A, what the Prime Minister actually wants, and B, what the Europeans are then prepared to put on the table themselves. And I mean, that will become clearer, but it feels to me like, unless the British government is absolutely certain what it wants.

5:07Tim Shipman: This could become a very messy process very fast. And as you'll know better than me, Tim, I mean, Whitehall takes its lead from the prime minister. Now, in the one sense, this is a relatively popular prime minister. I think Labour looked over the abyss a few months ago, put all its chips on the Burnham card, and it seems to have played off. But on the other hand, Burnham was elected, promising one thing in Makefield, and the government has done another. And again, is he across the intricacies of these things? Does he have his own red lines? or is he putting it on a bit of a punt and thinking, oh, Europe seems like a jolly good thing.

5:36Tim Shipman: Don't lie those American chaps, those midterms. This is the better of the two options I've been placed.

5:40James Heale: Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, it seems to me there's two things here, one of which is a punt that if you start talking about this, you will split the right. They'll all have an argument about it as well. It will unite the left. And, you know, a lot of Green Party voters and Lib Dems are very broadly supportive of closer relations with the EU, if not reversing Brexit altogether. It seems that in the polls that is working for Labour. But there does seem to then be a more specific argument about we need this for growth reasons. And that's where they're extraordinarily vague, because, you know, all the focus of the deal that's going to be announced next week will be at this summit will be on, you know, stuff to do with sales of food and animal products, which are a tiny, tiny fraction of our exports.

6:26James Heale: the fact that we're exporting services we're exporting tech stuff you know all that you know the whole debate it seems to be about some supermarkets will be able to get cheaper food and that might you know there's obviously a cost of living implication for that which i guess burnham thinks might make a significant difference to some people's lives but until you're precise about where you want you know to realign with the eu we can't really measure whether it's likely to have a growth benefit because frankly, a lot of the, you know, I think anyone watching this, including hardcore Brexiteers, of whom I'm sure there are quite a number of you out there, even most Brexiteers would say Brexit hasn't really been done properly.

7:08James Heale: We haven't really got the advantages of Brexit. It seems to me the most obvious one looking in the sort of forward medium term is AI and we're not shackled to EU regulation or AI. What happens, you know, when we reopen these conversations with Brussels. And at the moment, there isn't sort of some great gain from having not been aligned with the EU, but it seems to me those are the potential sort of gains over the next 10 to 20 years. They could be absolutely astronomical. And are we about to throw all that away for slightly cheaper food? Burnham wants a conversation.

7:44Tim Shipman: Is he going to be honest about all those things? Oh, quite. And obviously, we know the EU, there are winners and losers. And everyone loves to talk about the winners. But what are the losers? Famously, EEC membership went in. We sacrificed Australian and New Zealand goods. That's the price of that. Similarly, we'd probably have to maybe sign up with these elite demands, which the EU accidentally had out the last week. We're about the new digital partnership. What does that mean for AI? And also, I think, Tim, the biggest potential election next year could be the French one, the French presidential election.

8:09Tim Shipman: Latest poll out today suggests that Marie Le Pen has increased her lead over the likely alternative frontrunner. And so I think at that point, Europe, which currently might seem like this great cuddly liberal panacea compared to Trump, could look potentially a bit different.

8:24James Heale: Yeah, it could. And I mean, you know, it's a bit of an aside, but it's quite striking the, you know, just to refer to France briefly. I mean, Melenchon, who is the sort of hard left candidate who is sort of expected to get into the final round, may not, but is expected to. I mean, if we think things are bad in Britain in terms of getting a grip on the sort of fundamental problems, you now have someone who's doing very well in the polls saying, let's take the retirement age down to 60 and, you know, spend vastly more sums of money on this, that and the other. And that appears detached from reality, but who knows?

8:58James Heale: It may be quite popular in France. But, you know, you see another, you know, big Western country wrestling with the same kind of fundamental problems of productivity and lack of growth and all of this. And yet a quite hardcore kind of socialist sort of prospectus looking quite popular, which I guess it did when Jeremy Corbyn ran here. And we have seen sort of suggestions that the same thing could happen here,

9:20Tim Shipman: you think the green surge earlier this year. But equally, I do think Britain is a parliamentary system with two parties with deep roots. And there's going to be a reassertion at the end of this year. The other thing, interestingly, of course, as well as while it might be politically difficult in some ways for Andy Burnham, I think given the suggestion that Le Pen's party would veto the UK trying to rejoin the EU, but economically it might help because if the French seem to have a sort of worsening economic situation, the bond markets might exact revenge on them. That's right.

9:46James Heale: I mean, the bomb markets tend to pick, all my bomb market mates in the city say, you know, it's like a sort of lion looking at the steaming pack of wildebeests. And if one's a bit lame at the back, you know, the bomb market guys don't go after the fast sprinting antelope. If they find a lame zebra at the back, that's what they go for and they punish it. And that's what they eat alive. And that's what they did to us in 2022. and now France looks like the sort of lame antelope at the back of the pack.

10:16Tim Shipman: Wearing a sort of beret and onions. Exactly.

10:19James Heale: I don't know how the lions like onions as well.

10:22Tim Shipman: But I just think you sum it, I mean it just comes at a time when Wanderlein will be one, her last, her last. Is there going to be much in the way of a kind of great sense of European fraternity, given any great concessions? I've had no sense of that from any of the conversations I've had in Whitehall.

10:37James Heale: No, I mean, look, I think, and this I would say to people on the right and the Brexit fraternity, I think constantly going on about how we'll be forced to join the euro and forced to join Schengen I think is a mistake because I don't think they'll force us to do that. But I do think they will charge us a very, very large sum of money and I do think that freedom of movement is an absolute given. So I think people who want to oppose this should focus on those two things because I think when they turn around and say, well, we'd like a sort of indication one day that you might join the Europe, but we're not expecting you to join.

11:12James Heale: It'd be sometime maybe never at the very worst. Now, that would still give the right something to charge at in a campaign. But I think it's a mistake to hang too much opposition to what Burnham's doing on something I don't think the Europeans would sort of die in a ditch over because they would want us back. I mean, you know, bluntly, one of the European leaders was asked quite recently, you know, do you want Britain back? And he said, yes, of course, we need their money. And that's, you know, what would the sum be? 25 billion a year, 45 billion a year. You know, these are very large sums of money.

11:41Tim Shipman: And Veradka's saying over the weekend that Britain wouldn't get its old rebate back from the Thatcher era. No, of course not. As you say, I mean, that's their right. But then I suppose the debate, doesn't it, about sort of if you're going to give 10 billion or 15 billion, whatever it may be, what does that mean in terms of cuts to public services? Oh, exactly. Given the left say we can't cut anything.

11:57James Heale: Yeah, no, exactly. I think the whole thing is, I think the more you look at it, the more this whole thing seems deeply incoherent, even in Andy Burnham's own terms. But I'm also having... like hot flushes and flashbacks, because how will we know what Andy Burnham wants? Well, obviously, he's going to the EPC meeting, which I think will be more about Ukraine and security than it will be about this, but doubtless there'll be conversations in the margins. Then we go to the summit, which again, is the end of a bit of the process, but is mostly a kind of laying out more process about process, I suspect.

12:30James Heale: How will we know what he wants? He's going to make a speech, James, which is what Theresa May used to do. She didn't know what she thought about any of this either until she sat down to try and make a speech. And then she would make announcements that boxed herself in to various forms of future relationship. And at which point, the Europeans went, aha, oh, that's what you want. Right. So we will now focus our efforts on making sure we get this, this, this and this in return and making it as hard as possible for you to do all the things you want. It's almost like they've not been paying attention.

13:01But I mean, I await that

13:03James Heale: speech with great eagerness. I wonder what the iterative process in Downing Street is.

13:08Tim Shipman: Well, quite particularly with people like Jonathan Powell, very senior government advisor of national security, might be on his way out as well. Yeah. I mean, it's all in flux.

13:16James Heale: And, you know, good profile of Ed Miliband in the Sunday Times at the weekend showed that he's very keen on all this Europe reset stuff and is desperately, you know there's a committee of the ministers chaired by Andy Burnham but he almost never turns up and the deputy chairman is Ed Miliband so once again we're all living

13:36Tim Shipman: in Ed Miliband's world to a degree and of course the other thing that was done on the show the weekend was remember Sunday Tim and you know the obvious sort of slightly banal point at this point is how many ex-prime ministers there are quite astonishing at the SELSAF

13:49James Heale: I mean dear old Lisa Nandy was there looking like the black widow in a kind of proper jet black outfit you know having put her foot in it. But yes, this vast array of people.

14:01Tim Shipman: Is it nine now? I think it's nine. Wow, gosh. And obviously Liz Truss has now spent 10 % almost of her time she was in number 10 at the Cenotaph.

14:11James Heale: That's a very good anecdote. A very good statistic. It reminds me of that old German joke, you know, sort of looking at them and going, you know, were any of them any good? Nein!

14:21Tim Shipman: And of course, playing Aretha the first time was Nigel Farage. and over the years there's been a big debate around who should be allowed one. I remember I think when the SDP launched in the 80s there was a ramp of what would be the threshold for this point. They obviously decided I think it would be eight. He's obviously reached that point so he's now laid a wreath for the first time.

14:39James Heale: Was that something he was lobbying for? I mean he cares about this stuff, doesn't he? It's part of his sort of concept of Britain. He does.

14:45Tim Shipman: I seem to recall an article in the Mail about this last year and that sense of what we deserve to, you know, we're on 20 % of the poll. But then of course it then gets down to, you know, should it be recognised formally in a constitutional sense, election results, or is it polling, etc. I think he would have, I haven't spoken to him or anyone close to him about this, but I think it would have meant a lot to him being there on Sunday. And to mark the occasion, on Thursday night, they invited some journalists, about, I'd say, a dozen or so journalists and a number of party officials, donors to a screening in London, and to show this documentary they'd done, 43 minutes long, to our Rembrandt Sunday.

15:17Tim Shipman: And I thought it was fairly well done. The risk for something like this was that it would come across as crass, partisan. Farage trying to wrap himself in the flag. Overall, I thought it was broadly respectful. And how much of it was about him and reform and how much of it about the sort of the meaning of remembrance? So I'd say 10 % was about his personal connection to war, which I can understand in the sense of he spoke a great deal about the war memorial at Dalish College, which had 900 names up for boys, five years, I think that means killed. And I went to Plymouth with Farage last month and Danny Kruger.

15:50Tim Shipman: the two of them were sort of comparing because Eastlands Memorial, I believe, has a thousand dead boys. And they were sort of talking about that, I remember. So it's certainly something Farage cares very much about. Long-standing member of the Western Front Association. Hasn't done a battlefield turf for almost 10 years. But he was there and he was almost at his most nerdish, not an accurately nerdish figure, but he was there sort of with a clipboard, like a school trip, fussing around. I went on a school trip to Ypres, I'm sure. Maybe he did as well. And it was respectfully done. He clearly meant a lot to him about the war memorials, talking about the trenches, is talk about interesting elements of the war, such as the extraordinary moral dimension of whether we should have shot deserters.

16:25Tim Shipman: We had less rebellions than the French, lots of mutinies there. The death pennies, which every dead man's family got. The youngest, the oldest, I think the oldest chap killed was 63 in certain combat. And the youngest, I believe, was 13, I think. So it was well worth watching. And of course, the reason why they've done this is two reasons, I suppose. One of which is, I think, to show people what he's about, as it were. And I think second of all is to show a slightly different side about Farage as well after a difficult six months or so. I think we can expect more of this kind of content in the future.

16:57James Heale: Well, at the time as well, when he's finally got himself a defence spokesman, I mean, that was obviously not unconnected that they announced that in the week prior to Remembrance Sunday. Just tell us a little bit about this chap. I mean, he's only just quit the RAF.

17:11Tim Shipman: Yeah, so he's a long-standing wing commander, I think 40 years in the military, a guy called Angus McIntyre. seems to have a perfectly respectable career in the military service. He's given that up to stand for reform, gave a well-received press conference at the beginning of last week, different to the scenes we saw the previous week when it was talking about a very empty room for the budget statement. Because it felt like then people were sort of losing interest

17:34James Heale: in reform a little bit, but this was well attended and it's what a lot of people have been waiting for, frankly, in what ought to be a key area where they need to have a foothold, don't they?

17:46Tim Shipman: Absolutely. And of course, I do think Farage has a longstanding interest in defence and a genuine critique of the Tories. I mean, you and I both remember him criticising the Tory defence cuts back in 2011, the Strategic Defence Review, all the old historic regiments that went. This is a weakness of both the two parties. It's an area, I think, where the uniparty argument has most merit, which is you've governed for the last 35 years, you've wasted the Cold War piece. Why not criticise that?

18:07James Heale: And there is something of the sort of regimental tie about Farage sort of at base, isn't there?

18:12Tim Shipman: Well, he loves talking about the bomber command of the 90s, all the UKIPA said bomber command tie on. And what, I mean, this film, it will go out on their YouTube channels or is it going to be anywhere else? It's been out on their YouTube channels. I think they were hoping to get sort of a Leicester Square premiere as it were, but I think it went for a slightly smaller scale, probably appropriate given your remembrance. And it's just going to be, I think, the start of what we can see with this Reform YouTube channel. So last summer, for instance, Reform took out a bunch of lobby journalists fishing in the channel.

18:38Tim Shipman: I think, for I've mocked Jason Grove's angling technique, I believe, and this is the summer of 25. So you can imagine Farage fishing as a sort of thing, you know, bitch of the small boat, that's a kind of angle of presenting him slightly differently. I think it's to show him enjoying himself, the old cheeky chap in Nigel, which we've seen a bit less of recently. And I think it was something he wanted to do. And I think his team will be pleased with the results.

18:59James Heale: Yeah. And in terms of just where they go from here, how quickly do we expect any kind of result on the Standards Commissioners investigation and all of that? Do we expect that before Christmas?

19:09Tim Shipman: I believe so. Yeah, I think that it was interesting. So Laura Coonsby did the interview with him yesterday, just before the cenotaph. And he said in that he confirmed he had been interviewed. When I interviewed him last month, he said he couldn't get into details because that would mean sort of reaching the process. But he's been interviewed now. That normally comes at the end of an investigation and they are expecting something before Christmas. So the coming weeks are what they talked about. But you can see what they're trying to do with Ankers McIntyre. They can see they're trying to go back to the old playbook, which they had last year of experts like Vanessa Freight, Connorson, which you've written about.

19:37Tim Shipman: and I think after the Tories this year they'll be trying to go back to what worked for them. The question is, I would say, is what's taken so long? You know, obviously Angus Macastain obviously had to finish out his service. I can understand that. We're expecting to have a welfare spokesman, sorry, a health spokesman and an agriculture spokesman as well.

19:52James Heale: And they've given every impression with both of those, I think, that he'll be someone who's got experience in the field. I mean, there's been a lot of talk of people who used to run hospitals and all that sort of thing coming over. Yes, rather than MPs types. Yeah, exactly. So look, I mean, 2027 is looking like a big year for reform and there is no better way to prep yourselves for that, people of the spectator readership, than by reading Mr Hill's new book, which is coming very soon. I have had the great privilege of reading it early and it is a belter. Pre-order now.

20:18Tim Shipman: Thank you very much. Thank you, Tim. And thank you for watching Coffee House.

21:04Tim Shipman: That's time you will never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Get$20 in free postage when you sign up for the pro plan at Stamps.com slash Black Friday 2026. Terms and conditions apply.