Dear Sadik
First of all, congratulations on a historic election result. You and your team have invested huge effort in capturing one of the more firmly entrenched Conservative seats and enabled Sir Liam Fox to spend more time with his family.
Winning an election is, of course, just the beginning of the story. Sir Keir Starmer seems to have hit the ground running in appointing an experienced team to get on with the day-to-day business of government. “Expert” was a dirty word to the last government, so it is nice to see that expertise seems to be coming back into fashion.
My main point in writing to you is to talk about the B word – the elephant in the room, which you are not allowed to mention. I think I can understand why the Labour party would have been keen to avoid the subject of Brexit before the election, and I doubt that we will be ready to apply to rejoin the EU for some time. We have a massive amount of reputational damage to repair with our European neighbours and we have a lot of work to make ourselves a credible applicant to join. However, Sir Keir’s comments about not rejoining the EU within his lifetime have caused many of us to grit our teeth increasingly hard before lending you our vote.
Is Labour, perhaps, planning to exhaust all the wrong options before arriving at the right one by elimination? As a former candidate for the European Parliament, I can only hope that you will work for a more realistic way ahead than the vague hope of making Brexit work.
We are faced with the real prospect of an isolationist United States, led by a President with Alzheimer’s. Since he holds the ultimate “get out of jail free” card given to him by the US Supreme Court to cover any “official” actions, and has the illusion that he can “do a deal” with the world’s dictators, we in Europe will need to hang together.
To be credible, any application for a formal relationship with the EU will need to demonstrate that it is supported by a significant majority of the electorate. If one of the major parties continues with an anti-European agenda, so that we end up with a hokey-cokey approach to Europe, then any application will be viewed with the scepticism that it deserves. Under First Past the Post, relatively small changes in the percentages of votes have created huge swings in the number of seats won and we are held hostage to small groups of voters in a small number of swing seats. It is a long time since any government has reflected the views of a majority of the electorate.
We therefore need to get away from the anachronism of First Past the Post and the resulting pendulum politics. This will be a challenge with Labour holding a massive majority in the house, when all the stuff about “a stable majority” will be trotted out. Indeed, Sir Keir seemed to have adopted that line even before the election.
Proportional representation would create a very unpalatable pill to swallow in the shape of 13 per cent of the house (or 80+ seats) going to Reform UK Ltd. Is it better to see that faction out in the open or concealed as closet members of the Conservative party?
Taking it a step further, for public confidence there should be a formal inquiry into how Brexit happened – who funded it, how public opinion was manipulated and who benefited. If corruption and fraud were involved, that should be pursued. It is essential for democracy that we should understand how foreign interests or small, well-funded minorities can manipulate public opinion in the modern age. This would provide a useful basis from which an informed discussion of an application to join the EU might follow.
Labour’s approach to Europe has been the hardest test of any of your policies in my decision how to vote. However, the First Past the Post system and the need to vote tactically, made the choice inevitable. I take comfort that on their first day in office, the Foreign Secretary was in Berlin and the Defence Secretary in Ukraine. This suggests that European relationships and European security are high on the agenda.
Please, just use the next five years to get the UK into shape to make a credible application to join the EU.
Sadik Al-Hassan is the new Labour MP for the North Somerset constituency.