Although he oddly does not mention the reduction to zero of the rate of VAT on domestic electricity, and I almost dare the Government to put that back up again in April, Brendan Chilton writes:
Britain’s debate about Europe has been trapped between two competing stories. One says Brexit liberated Britain from an inflexible political and economic structure. The other says Brexit inflicted lasting economic damage that can only be repaired through much closer integration. We voted to leave the European Union, and some of the strongest support for leave was in Labour constituencies.
The Prime Minister Andy Burnham has firmly challenged the first account. At the Party conference he argued that Brexit had done “more harm than good” and that Britain needed to determine its long-term relationship with its largest market, however, on many indicators we have performed better than France and Germany, outside the EU. Some within the Labour family are nervous about opening that debate again. Lucy Powell expressed concern that going beyond Keir Starmer’s reset plans was not “possible or desirable” and the Business Secretary has warned that renegotiating would lead to significant uncertainty for businesses.
Those arguments deserve serious consideration. But there is another question Labour should examine equally seriously: What would Britain lose by rejoining?
The freedoms acquired outside the EU are no longer theoretical. Labour is exercising them. Britain now operates an independent trade policy. The government has agreements with 74 countries. We have the best trading relationship with the EU of any non-member state. Britain has joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, while Labour concluded the UK-India agreement negotiated in 2025. The Government estimates the latter could eventually increase trade by £25.5 billion annually and UK GDP by £4.8 billion. These are enormous achievements and have only happened because we are outside the EU.
The CPTPP is particularly significant. It gives British businesses preferential access across an 11-country partnership whose economies, including Britain, were worth almost £13 trillion in 2025 and growing fast. These agreements do not compensate automatically for barriers to Britain’s largest neighbouring market. Geography matters in trade, about 46 percent of UK trade is with the EU. But UK trade with non-EU countries now accounts between 54 percent and 59 percent of our exports. Our trade with non-EU countries is growing. This cannot simply be ignored.
There is similar freedom over industrial policy. EU membership did not prohibit our having an industrial strategy, and several EU countries demonstrate that. Britain nevertheless now operates its own subsidy-control system rather than the EU state-aid regime. It allows public authorities to provide subsidies subject to domestic principles and Britain’s international commitments. The government has established streamlined routes covering areas including local growth, research and development, housing and energy use. That matters as Andy Burnham’s government seeks to reindustrialise Britain. A recent example is the excellent decision to determine that defence contracts will only be awarded to British firms and ports for naval procurement. Security, defence and growing the economy all in one.
The government is changing public procurement. Around £400 billion passes through government contracting annually, and ministers are developing procurement policy to strengthen strategically important industries including steel, shipbuilding, energy infrastructure and AI while improving access for smaller businesses. Leaving the EU does not magically produce good industrial policy. It simply changes where decisions can be made and British governments can determine policy that best suits our needs.
Regulation provides another example. Recent economic growth in the UK has largely been underpinned by huge innovations and investment in tech, AI, and professional services. The UK’s light regulatory framework has resulted in the UK leading in Europe in this field. Meanwhile, the EU has been rigid and top down, compared to the UK’s sector specific guidance. Returning to the EU would result in these crucial areas for future economic growth being constrained and the excessive regulation could deter investment.
Britain also possesses greater autonomy over tariffs. Since leaving the EU, businesses have been able to request UK-specific tariff suspensions on imported inputs, with more than 300 implemented following previous application round. We have also been able to escape some of the tougher sanctions placed on the EU by the US. Our agility in this area is crucial. Businesses have adapted to the new norm and are taking advantage of the best trading relationship with the EU, with customs checks completed online, minimising any border friction.
Sometimes common rules are preferable. A manufacturer selling into European markets may value one regulatory standard more than Britain’s theoretical freedom to devise another. Labour’s developing approach implicitly recognises this: align where alignment brings worthwhile economic benefits, retain autonomy where divergence serves a strategic purpose. This does not require us to rejoin the EU or tear up our trade deals by entering a customs union, or to lose control of our borders by accepting free movement in the Single Market. This third way is a more sophisticated stance than, “diverge from Brussels everywhere” or “follow Brussels everywhere”. Its British pragmatic.
Instead of seeking to re-open the Brexit debate, which was the most divisive and polarising period in British politics lets focus on being the best of allies, in cooperation but without membership. Labour’s 2024 manifesto offered precisely that settlement and provided business with the confidence that we would not return to the uncertainty of Brexit arguments. Our manifesto promised that Britain would stay outside the EU, Single Market and customs union while seeking to reduce unnecessary trade barriers and strengthen European security cooperation.
Brexit did not guarantee prosperity and progress. Nor does EU membership. Across Europe, the far right is on the march and economies are struggling. The AfD in Germany, Le Pen in France, Wilders in Holland and the populist parties of Eastern and Central Europe. If we were to rejoin, we would not be joining a progressive trading bloc, but one dominated by the hard right.
We have been outside the EU formally just six years. Before reopening the enormous constitutional question of membership, this Labour government should at least establish whether we can make a success of it as a serious nation, rather than create uncertainty, division and polarisation by re-opening a debate largely settled in the country.
As a secondary school pupil in 1994, I took part in protests against a reform that would have allowed French employers to pay young people below the minimum wage. Our campaign was successful, but if we had had to face the terrifying police response unleashed on student protesters in France over recent weeks, I would have stayed at home.
A 14-year-old boy, Eden, suffered a fractured jaw and had teeth knocked out after a police tear gas grenade struck him in the face. Sixteen-year-old Maël lost the sight in one eye allegedly after being struck by a shot from an LBD, a form of rubber-bullet launcher. Evan, 15, had his hand blown off in an explosion involving a police stun grenade. And in Dunkirk, a police SUV is alleged to have driven repeatedly at groups of secondary school pupils, as an officer could be heard saying: “Come closer, we’ll smash their fucking faces in.” Accounts from children left terrified by brutal treatment in police custody describe traumatic experiences with severe psychological and physical consequences.
France, the self-styled home of human rights, is now attracting the kind of international legal scrutiny you would expect if this were an authoritarian regime gone mad. The human rights organisation Ligue des droits de l’Homme has condemned the alarming “brutalisation of young people”, and the threat to their freedom of expression.
A UN special rapporteur has called on the French authorities to respect the physical safety of protesters. The UN human rights office says it is following incidents surrounding the protests in France “with concern”. Amnesty International has called for the suspension of rubber-bullet launchers at school protests, condemned the disproportionate use of force and reminded the authorities of their duty to protect children. The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, whose activism increasingly encompasses struggles against oppression and state violence, travelled to France this week to support school pupils.
It is often argued that France is broke, and that crippling debt levels make the student demand for €10bn of investment to improve their learning conditions a non-starter. But even in our difficult fiscal position, public spending is a political choice: to reduce debt you can cut public spending or you can raise revenue.
Economists Élise Huillery and Romane Paris have come up with a credible proposal for investing an additional €11.8bn a year in education, funded through tax reform targeting large inheritances, raising €12.7bn in 2026 and increasing taxes only for the wealthiest 1% of heirs. This would make money available to raise teachers’ pay, improve support for pupils, student grants and housing, and expand university places.
But the debate about public spending does not invalidate the legitimate grievances of pupils, teachers and parents, which are not new. Nor does it justify a vicious law and order response. Learning conditions in some of the most disadvantaged schools have been deteriorating to shockingly poor levels for a long time. I highlighted school conditions in France in the Guardian three years ago, arguing then that the state education system was among the most unequal in the developed world. The lack of resources assigned to such basic things as teaching vacancies has been glaringly apparent for years, with jobs in some districts sometimes left unfilled for months.
More than 20m teaching hours were lost in state secondary schools in 2024-25, equivalent to almost one in 10 lessons. More than 15m of those hours were lost because no replacement teachers were provided. Schools in designated priority education areas, which serve disadvantaged communities, have been particularly affected, according to France’s National Audit Office.
In Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest part of mainland France, two-thirds of school doctor posts were vacant in 2023. As early as 2022, the Créteil education authority reported a shortfall of 60 school nurses and 20 social workers, with 90% of the unfilled posts in Seine-Saint-Denis. In 2025, 49 suicides were recorded among staff in the national education system. While these deaths cannot all be attributed to work, it is hard to avoid thinking of the severe deterioration in working conditions across the sector.
Then there are the schools that are physically falling apart: water that is unsafe to drink because of bacterial contamination, pupils reporting rats and cockroaches, filthy toilets, and in one case, a septic tank that overflows when it rains. There are power cuts, missing furniture and some classrooms are so poorly insulated that temperatures fall below 14C in winter and hit 40C during heatwaves.
In Mayotte, where protests began, a secondary school built for 900 pupils is accommodating 2,300. The protests then spread to mainland France through a school in Créteil that began the academic year short of 13 teachers and other staff, as well as a deputy headteacher.
Another issue at the core of pupils’ anger is Parcoursup, the system through which school leavers apply for higher education. Seen as discriminatory, it has left 126,000 applicants – many from disadvantaged backgrounds – without a place this year.
Rather than deal with this crisis as justified social protest based on legitimate demands, the government has invoked a doctrine set out in its Operational Guide to Urban Violence. It has treated school pupils as internal enemies to be neutralised. This sets up a coercive response, disregarding the possibility of resolving the conflict through constructive measures.
By 8 October, 6,877 people had been taken into police custody, about 80% of them children. On 1 October alone, police made 1,949 arrests, exceeding the highest single-day total recorded since 1961, says the historian Éric Anceau. According to the Syndicat de la magistrature, a French judges’ leftwing union, the numbers reflect a clear determination to crush the movement. So overwhelming has the police deployment been that teachers and parents have had to form human chains to protect children.
The police operations are also driven by a focus on arrests, which encourages forceful confrontations and fuels the escalation. This in turn draws more people into rioting. About 700 police officers and a number of teachers have been injured since the start of the unrest.
The sociologist Olivier Fillieule points out that policing protests requires an assessment of risk. If the swift break-up a blockade exposes teenagers to serious injury, you have to consider alternatives. Temporarily accepting a degree of disorder when immediate intervention risks creating more of it should remain a guiding principle of policing protests, Filleule says, noting that the French authorities know how to apply restraint when farmers stage blockades.
Yet while the police have opened internal investigations into 36 allegations of officer violence, the interior minister Laurent Nuñez said he had given the forces “no instructions to exercise restraint”. This is a shameful and contemptuous way to respond to young people’s healthy expression of dissent. Such violence towards citizens has no place in a democracy.
While the great Thomas Fazi provides the bigger picture:
It started with diesel. In late September, truck drivers in Calabria and Sicily began blocking motorway junctions with their lorries. Fuel prices had been climbing since the US and Israel attacked Iran in February, disrupting oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. By late September, diesel cost more than €2.30 a litre. When the government’s latest fuel tax cut expired on 5 October, prices rose further. For truckers, filling a tank that once cost €1,500 could now cost closer to €2,500.
Within weeks, the protests had spread across southern Italy, with thousands of farmers, fishermen and lorry drivers blockading roads. Street vendors, small shopkeepers and ordinary families, squeezed by the cost of living, soon joined them. A national demonstration has been called in Rome for 27 October. “We are not at war with anyone,” said one Calabrian farmer. “They are waging war against us.”
So far, the government’s response has ranged from indifference to paralysis. It allowed the fuel tax cut to expire and never issued the decree that would have returned the state’s additional VAT revenues to motorists. Requests for meetings with Matteo Salvini’s transport ministry went unanswered.
Italy is not an isolated case. In France, students at hundreds of high schools have taken to the streets to demand better funding, infrastructure repairs, and educational reforms. In Spain, rising rents and speculative investment funds have set off mass protests over housing. And in Belgium, anti-austerity protests have swept through the country. The triggers, the people involved, and the demands all differ: students, tenants, small haulage firms, farmers. But they are all reacting to the same thing, which is the steady increase in the cost of living.
Both of those come from the geopolitical choices of Europe’s governments. First they cut themselves off from cheap Russian energy. Then they went along with a US-made war in the Middle East that has driven oil prices up again — issuing performative denunciations but, in fact, allowing Washington free use of its bases in Europe in support of military operations against Iran, as Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte acknowledged.
On top of that, they have committed to huge increases in military spending, all while complying with the EU’s notoriously rigid fiscal rules. The mechanism is straightforward: money for the warfare state has to come from the welfare state.
Giorgia Meloni’s recent address to parliament was revealing. She restated her firm support for Kyiv and blamed the fuel spike mainly on the war in Iran, without saying a word against the government that started it.
It is hard to think of a better illustration of the self-defeating Atlanticism of Europe’s leaders. At Washington’s urging, Europe now uses more expensive American LNG, and bankrolls a war in Ukraine that has done enormous damage to Europe’s own economies. Now they are so committed to that course that they are doubling down on it, even as Washington relaxes the pressure on Moscow and starts buying its diesel.
That position will become harder to hold, in Italy and across Europe. Of all the regions locked into the West’s confrontations with Russia and Iran, Europe pays the highest price: it imports its energy, it is losing industry, and its budgets are tightly constrained. For decades, aligning with Washington was sold to Europeans as the price of prosperity. Now the prosperity is gone, and the bill remains.
The tractors on the Autostrada 14 and the boats stuck in Calabrian harbours show that this bargain is coming apart. Governments that keep supporting a forever war in Ukraine, and deferring to Washington in the Middle East, should expect many more of them.
The core of Jeffrey Sachs’s warning to the European Parliament fits on a postcard, which is presumably why so few people in power will repeat it. You do not corner a nuclear state. Sachs reaches back to the Cuban Missile Crisis and to John F. Kennedy, who had looked over the edge and come back from it. In his American University address of June 1963, Kennedy warned that nuclear powers must avoid confrontations that force an adversary to choose between humiliating retreat and nuclear war. He put the words “above all” in front of that sentence. He had earned the right to. Russia has roughly 1,600 strategic warheads deployed today. Europe’s political class discusses humiliating it the way other people discuss a football result. Sachs names the people doing it, which is more than most commentators will risk, and then makes the point that ought to end the argument: the pundits assuring us the nuclear threats are a bluff will not be available for comment afterwards if they are wrong.
The War Economy Comes at an Economic Price
Then comes the section that should trouble anyone who pays a gas bill. Sachs is a development economist by trade, and what he sees in Europe is not a strategy at all. He sees a continent that cut itself off from its nearest supplier of cheap energy, watched its industrial base buckle under the price of American liquefied natural gas, and then announced that the answer to all of it is rearmament. Hundreds of billions for weapons. Keynesian militarism, as he calls it, with the quality of life it was supposed to deliver nowhere in sight. He is blunt about what that buys. Britain cannot keep its health service open. Schools across the continent are failing the children sitting in them. We propose to run a war economy on top of public services we have already proved we cannot fund.
Strip away the flags and it is a transfer, and not a complicated one. The arms manufacturers take the contracts. The politicians take the applause. The working class takes the bill, in taxes now and potentially in blood later, should anyone be reckless enough to finish what the rhetoric starts. You do not build prosperity by building missiles. You build it with a productive economy, secure work, affordable energy and the unglamorous business of investing in people. Europe needs an industrial strategy. What it is being handed is a procurement programme with a grievance attached.
Keynesian Militarism and the Decay of European Public Services
This is the most damning charge in the hour, and Sachs lands it almost in passing. Europe’s leaders no longer have an economic vision. There is no answer to the closing factories, no answer to energy costs strangling the firms still standing, no plan for what this continent makes or sells or builds in twenty years. Into that vacuum has gone rearmament, and rearmament is now spoken of as though it were a strategy rather than an admission that nobody has one.
Sachs is careful to say he is no enemy of Europe. He thinks its quality of life is the highest in the world and that this is an achievement worth defending and exporting. He simply cannot understand why the people running it have decided the thing to do with it is spend it on missiles. Nor does he accept the public asked for any of this. He points to the young people on the streets of France. He is right, and the detail is worse than he had time to say.
France has been in revolt since September, over the state of its schools. Students walked out, and the protests pulled in parents, teachers, student unions and universities behind them. By 5 October, between 400 and 500 schools across France were partly or entirely closed. More than 6,500 people have been arrested since it began, most of them minors. The Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has told his ministers to come back with proposals by the end of October. The same anger over crumbling classrooms and rising costs has since surfaced in Belgium, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Germany and Austria.
That is not a tantrum. It is a verdict. These are children telling a government that it has no future to offer them, and the government’s only answer is to promise them one with a uniform in it. Because in Germany, the young have gone straight to the point. On 25 September, organisers of the School Strike against Conscription put around 45,000 pupils onto the streets of some 100 towns and cities, against a government whose Military Service Modernisation Act now requires eighteen-year-old men to complete a questionnaire on their willingness and suitability for military service. Broadcaster DW headlined its report with the pupils’ own answer: they are not cannon fodder. They have called the next national strike for 20 November.
Two countries, two grievances, one budget behind both. French teenagers are in the street because the money is not in their schools. German teenagers are in the street because they can see where it went instead, and they have worked out who is expected to carry it. Neither set was consulted. One of them is being asked to fight. So let us hear less about apathetic youth. They are not apathetic. They are doing the only thing available to people whose opinion has no route onto a ballot paper, because on rearmament there is no serious disagreement between the parties permitted to win. The consensus was assembled above their heads and handed down as inevitability. Then we are invited to tut at the turnout figures. Voter apathy is not a disease of the public; it is a rational response to a political class that offers different coloured ties for the exact same set of economic outcomes.
OCEANIA HAD ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA
And here is where Orwell walks into the room, because the most effective weapon deployed in this war has not been a missile. It has been the memory hole. Before February 2022, Ukraine had a different history and a different seat in the world. It was not a shining democratic martyr awaiting rescue. Transparency International ranked it among the most corrupt states in Europe. It had a documented record as a source country for human trafficking, and a banking and political system that made it a byword for laundered money. None of that was controversial to say in 2019. All of it has been quietly deleted.
And there was a war. From April 2014 until the full invasion, the Donbas burned. United Nations monitors put the dead at around 14,000. Eight years of shelling, of ceasefire lines, of OSCE monitors counting violations, of civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk living in cellars. That war is now very nearly unmentionable, because to mention it is to concede the thing the official narrative cannot concede: that something was happening before 2022 which the word “unprovoked” was designed to erase.
OSCE Special Monitoring Mission
Whether it should be called a civil war is a fair fight, and I will not pretend otherwise. Russian equipment, Russian money and at times Russian regular units were in the Donbas from 2014, which is more than a domestic quarrel. But the question of what to call it is not the scandal. The scandal is that we have agreed to behave as though it never happened at all. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. The same erasure covers what came before it. On 21 February 2014, the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland brokered a deal between Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition: a unity government and early elections. Within a day it was dead, Yanukovych had fled, and Washington recognised what followed without a murmur about constitutional process. Sachs calls that a coup. Others call it a revolution of dignity. What is not in dispute is that a signed European agreement was overtaken within twenty-four hours and the European powers who witnessed it said nothing.
Jeffrey Sachs Europe Warning: How to Avoid Nuclear War
Sachs says Victoria Nuland handed out five billion dollars to bring it about, and here he overstates his case, which does his argument no favours. The five billion was a figure Nuland herself used in a December 2013 speech for cumulative American assistance to Ukraine since 1991, not a fund for regime change. But the evidence that did not need exaggerating was already on the record. Weeks before Yanukovych fell, a leaked telephone call between Nuland and the US ambassador in Kyiv, Geoffrey Pyatt, caught the two of them allocating posts in a government Ukraine had not yet got, and disposing of the European Union’s objections in two words. That call is real, it was never denied, and it tells you precisely who believed they were choosing Ukraine’s next administration.
Then Minsk. Sachs is right that Minsk II was not a Russian land grab. It required Ukraine to devolve power to the eastern regions, and the Security Council endorsed it unanimously in Resolution 2202. It was never implemented. And we no longer have to speculate about why, because the architects told us. Angela Merkel told Die Zeit on 7 December 2022 that Minsk was an attempt to give Ukraine time, and that Ukraine had used the time to become stronger. François Hollande, asked by the Kyiv Independent whether Merkel was right, said that she was, and that the merit of the agreements was the opportunity they gave the Ukrainian army.
Read that again. The two European leaders who guaranteed the peace deal later described it in public as a device for buying time to prepare for war. They were not quoted by Russian state media. They said it in Die Zeit and to a Ukrainian newspaper, under their own names, and nobody in Brussels has explained it since. If you want to know why Moscow treats European security guarantees as worthless, you do not need a theory about Russian paranoia. You need only their own signatures and their own interviews.
Foreign Policy Double Standards and the Vetoed State
Sachs saves his bluntest language for Gaza, and he is not careering off topic when he does. He is making the same point about the same institution. He calls it genocide. He is in considerable company: the United Nations Commission of Inquiry reached that finding in September 2025, as did the International Association of Genocide Scholars, while the case brought by South Africa remains before the International Court of Justice. One year into the American-brokered ceasefire, the UN’s acting Special Coordinator told the Security Council this month that for Palestinians living along the Yellow Line the ceasefire exists in name only, and that Israeli operations since it took effect have killed some 1,500 Palestinians, including more than 320 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Washington remains opposed to Palestinian statehood.
And Sachs offers one detail that ought to be taught in every politics department in Britain. The slogan that gets students suspended and arrested here, the one about the river and the sea, was Likud’s formulation first. It is in the party’s 1977 platform, declaring that between the sea and the Jordan there would be only Israeli sovereignty. The words are policed when Palestinians use them and ignored when the governing party of Israel wrote them down. That is not a debating point. It is the whole machine on display: who is permitted to speak, whose history is retained, whose dead are counted.
The Price of a Phone Call: Why Europe Refuses Diplomacy
Which brings us back to the detail from this talk that has stayed with me. Asked what Europe should actually do, Sachs did not call for a summit, a framework, a facility or a process. He said a European leader should pick up the telephone to Moscow. He then offered his own Zoom account, and said he would pay the bill himself. Four and a half years into this war, with the Americans announcing ceasefires that neither belligerent confirms, that remains the most serious proposal anyone has made. They have found hundreds of billions for the shells. They cannot find the price of a phone call. So ask yourself who in all of this is actually speaking for peace. Then ask who decided you were not allowed to.
