If Brexit had never happened, the Labour Party might be running the EU

BRUSSELS — In an alternate universe, Keir Starmer’s U.K. Labour Party could be about to play a huge role in the EU.

(Now, we are fully aware that the U.K. did vote to leave the EU. But as a thought experiment, this one has got people thinking about what could have been on both sides of the Channel.)

If (and it’s a massive if) the U.K. hadn’t left the EU — and if all the polls suggesting that Labour will cruise to victory in next week’s U.K. election are correct — then Labour MEPs could have dominated the Parliament’s socialist group, British politicians would have been among those in line for high-level EU jobs, and this would have scrambled the bloc’s top jobs race. 

“The narrative during the election campaign would have not just been about the surge of the far right,” said Richard Corbett, a former Labour MEP, currently campaigning for his party in Yorkshire. “It would have been about who would be the largest group.” 

In June’s European election, the first without the U.K. since the first-ever election to the Parliament in 1979,  the center-left Socialists & Democrats managed to retain its position as the Parliament’s second-largest pan-European grouping, with 136 seats. It’s some way behind the center-right European People’s Party at 188 seats in the 720-seat European Parliament. That gap would have been a lot smaller if the S&D ranks were swelled by Labour MEPs.

Corbett reckons that over half of all U.K. MEPs in this situation — which he made clear was “very hypothetical” — would be Labour.

The number of MEPs has changed so let’s assume the number of U.K. MEPs would increase too. France will have 81 MEPs in the new Parliament. If the U.K. got the same number, and half of them were Labour, the S&D would have 176 seats and a massively strengthened position.

That could have meant a British MEP laying claim to the presidency of the European Parliament or leading the socialists’ grouping, said Corbett.

“There had been talk prior to Brexit that it was coming round to Labour’s [turn] to having one of these big jobs,” said Corbett. 

A stronger showing for the Socialists, boosted by the Brits, could also have influenced the broader discussion on handing out the three most powerful EU jobs — the presidencies of the European Commission and European Council, along with the EU’s foreign affairs chief. Currently, those three roles are likely to be distributed between the center-right, socialists and liberals.

With the liberal Renew group getting smaller, wondered Imogen Tyreman, chair of the U.K. Labour Party’s Brussels branch: “Would they be taking any of the top jobs or would we have the pick?”

Starmer the socialist king

Starmer as prime minister — again, assuming that he gets a massive majority next week  — would immediately have assumed the mantle of the EU’s strongest head of government (in terms of parliamentary seats won).

In the real world, the EU’s socialist leaders are few in number and relatively weak. Olaf Scholz is an unpopular leader of a rickety coalition in Germany. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez is just about keeping a coalition with the far left alive. The other socialist-run EU countries are also governing in uncomfortable coalitions, as in Romania and Denmark, or are tiny, like Malta. 

Keir Starmer as prime minister would immediately have assumed the mantle of the EU’s strongest head of government. | Pool Photo by Stefan Rousseau via Getty Images

“I think if you had a well-mandated social democrat leader from a larger member state it would strengthen the role of the S&D in the [European] Council,” said Tom Fillis, the secretary of the Brussels Labour branch.

However, other experts were doubtful that this parallel universe would pan out as imagined.

Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, questioned whether Labour would do so well in an EU election, in which people often vote for parties that they don’t back in a national vote.

“My hunch is it [the EU election] would display the fragility of the Labour vote rather than its strength. Because it would be a chance to vote for the party you really wanted because it’s a second-order election,” he said. For that reason, Nigel Farage’s Reform and the Greens and the Liberal Democrats would all do “pretty well” in an imaginary EU election, Menon said.

Comparing EU and national elections is already firmly in the realm of speculation, not political science. In the 2019 EU election, the U.K. voted “totally differently” to how it voted in its own general election in the same year,said Julia Hipkiss, spokesperson for polling company YouGov.

In reality, the Labour Party is strenuously avoiding any mention of rejoining the EU or even the single market, and instead only talking about preferential tweaks to the post-Brexit status quo on trade and phytosanitary standards.

How do pro-European Laborites feel about this counterfactual version of history? 

“I find it quite bittersweet,” Tyreman said.