THE general election in July was the first since 2010 at which Britain’s relationship with the European Union was not central to the debates.

That being said, the issue is far from put to bed. From regular lobbying in the Financial Times and other liberal media outlets, through to the review of the Trade and Co-operation Agreement scheduled for 2025, and the establishment of the European Political Community in 2022, Britain’s ruling class is and will be pushing for greater integration.

Given the architect of Labour’s calamitous Brexit policy from the 2019 general election is now the prime minister, this slide towards increased alignment will only increase in speed.

Why? Because Britain’s capitalists never in their majority wanted to leave; indeed, quite the opposite. A principal reason that it took over three years to secure a deal is that there was never a better deal for the majority of monopoly capital than the one it already had.

Funded again by the most pro-Remain elements of the ruling class, in particular Lord Sainsbury, Labour’s role as the second party of capital has been secured under Sir Keir Starmer’s watch.

To return to the recent general election campaign, none of the major parties made any kind of case for what can be achieved outside of the EU.

This has the potential to create a double difficulty for socialists and communists: on one hand, we have a thoroughly Establishment Labour Party and soft left looking for greater co-operation in economic and military terms, and on the other, a Conservative Party that was moving towards greater co-operation in military and economic terms, while pretending it wasn’t. It’s increasingly likely that a rightward-moving Tory Party will attempt to latch onto the topic; certainly, a buoyant Nigel Farage will, aided by Reform’s successful showing on July 4.

What’s been going on in terms of Britain and the EU prior to the election is not that well known.

Liz Truss signed Britain up to the European Political Community in September 2022. The group was proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Nominally, it promotes greater co-operation over military, energy, climate and migration. It’s also a way for the EU to bolster its security in the wake of Brexit and with the possibility of a more isolationist Trump around the corner. Britain hosted the organisation’s fourth forum on the 18th.

Of course, Gaza has seen greater co-operation in terms of military support, with EU member states getting more involved in funding and aiding Israel’s military.

Since Labour returned to power, there have been a number of voices calling for Starmer to “reset” Britain’s relationship with the EU, from the current foreign secretary to former leader, Neil Kinnock, who has been telling pro-European Labour MPs that “fortune favours the brave  —  especially in the wake of a triumphant victory in the election.” Starmer himself has intimated that he can get a better deal than Boris Johnson’s.

The next opportunity for that is the 2025 review of the Trade and Co-operation Agreement, which could see the government making the case for entering the European Economic Area (EEA), which would make Britain part of the single market again, allowing for the four freedoms of persons, goods, services and capital to be reestablished. The EEA is the worst of all possible worlds, as it commits its members to all the rules, while not even giving them a seat at the decision-making table.

This is unlikely at this stage. It would of course be a very dangerous move for Starmer. Indeed, he has been at pains to distance himself from any calls for rejoin, saying that Britain would not re-enter the customs union, single market or EU itself in his lifetime.

But given the size of his majority, a bespoke deal which provides something like these “benefits” is not completely out of the question. It’s worth remembering that the vast majority of Britain’s political class thought the Leave vote was primarily about immigration, rather than sovereignty and control over the country’s direction. If he can find a way to at least give the impression of being tough on immigration while inching back towards alignment, he might consider it worth taking the chance.

Labour is promising the highest growth in the G7. It won’t be looking to achieve that via a command economy and socialist planning. It is fully committed to free trade.

Furthermore, if Starmer wants a better deal, he’ll have to put something on the table. While the assumption is that it might be economic, it may well be military, given Britain’s importance to European security. The Tory benches are already talking about “trade-offs” in any security and defence pact.

Looming in the background is the ongoing issue of Northern Ireland. While last year’s Windsor Framework is an attempt to ease the concerns of unionists, it also signals a thawing of relations between the British government and the European Commission.

So, what do we need to do in the coming period?

It’s clear that we will need to revisit and renew the arguments we made in 2016, even within the anti-capitalist left that supported withdrawal from the EU. There are younger and newer comrades who won’t necessarily be aware of the absolute centrality of remaining outside of the EU to the creation of socialism in Britain.

The EU, with its single market’s strictures upon state aid and its enshrining of the rights of capital via freedom of establishment, is anathema to economic planning and control.

More broadly, there is a battle for hearts and minds in the British labour movement that still needs to be won. While the Jacques Delors-led EU committed itself to a “social Europe” following his speech to the TUC in 1988, this was not a politics born in victory.

Delors had been Francois Mitterand’s finance minister in the early 1980s when its attempts to implement expansionary Keynesian policies were curtailed by the banks. Delors then concluded that the future of leftish social democracy lay in the EEC, which he saw as a bulwark against the new right.

For the labour movement in Britain, it followed the defeats of the miners, printers and other sections of organised labour, and came on the back of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives being returned to government a third time. Further afield, the USSR was declining and the defeat of socialism in Europe was around the corner.

In this context, Delors’ speech cemented the EU’s place via a framework of “rights” as a saviour and safety net for a significant section of the labour movement and bete noire for the global free trade right.

But the direction of travel for the EU since the 1990s has been towards using legislation to ensure that capital and labour can move and be moved freely within the largest trading bloc in the world, with the interests of the former paramount, and the latter used as so many moveable pawns. You only need to look at the Viking and Laval cases to see which side it is on.

Furthermore, despite their increasingly tokenistic Euroscepticism, it has managed to keep governments of the populist right  —  such as Hungary’s, Italy’s and Poland’s  —  dry under its umbrella much more than it has governments and movements of the left.

One example is its exerting of political leverage by making the release of substantial so-called NextGenerationEU recovery funds conditional on  total government subordination to European Commission diktats, along with the reinforcement of “Fortress Europe,” with its inhumane measures against non-EU migrants.

There is also the misreading of the result in 2016. Seeing Brexit as emblematic of a culture war predicated upon divisions of age, race, and social attitudes is a strategy that is a substitute for the real divide in society, which is class, and the terrain on which the right wishes to fight. The labour movement needs to do better, and socialists and communists must be in the vanguard of this.

We need to emphasise the importance of a socialist, materialist analysis of the EU in political education work at every level of the party and our movement.

As a first step, the Europe Area Group of the International Commission of the Communist Party, which I convene, will produce a pamphlet that will arm comrades for the fight ahead.

And there will be a fight, comrades. We couldn’t get ourselves to the centre of it last time, instead remaining on the periphery. Let’s get ourselves well-positioned this time around.