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Britain’s newly minted prime minister talks a lot about the importance of place. So give some of your attention to a place that seems to have escaped Andy Burnham’s: Gibraltar.
Two weeks ago, while Burnham was taking the final steps towards No 10, the UK and the EU signed an agreement on how to handle Gibraltar’s relationship with mainland Spain, quietly settling a large piece of unfinished business left over from Brexit. Its terms illustrate the dilemma any British prime minister confronts over EU relations — including Burnham, once he finally turns his mind to it.
According to the UK’s own explanatory memo for the Gibraltar deal, one of its objectives was a “framework for goods and customs co-operation that ensures fluid movement across the border while protecting market integrity”. Another was to “enable the land border between Gibraltar and Spain to operate without routine checks” — an open border for goods and for people, to be blunt.
These are wonderful objectives. They are also similar to those for the arrangements in Northern Ireland, where peace on the island depends on an absence of border checks. Gibraltar’s economy, meanwhile, hinges on the ability to employ a large workforce living in neighbouring Spanish municipalities, and of course on unobstructed trade along the land route.
The solutions are similar too. Conservative governments accepted that Northern Ireland would remain inside the EU’s single market and customs union, with checks between the British mainland and the region. In Gibraltar’s case, a Labour government went one step further, in effect letting Gibraltar join the EU’s Schengen border-free travel area.
Symbolic respect is paid to sovereignty claims: EU immigration booths staffed by Spanish officials will, it seems, be placed in a “Schengen shack” annex to the airport, straddling the demarcation line with the Spanish municipality of La Linea. But the big picture is that Gibraltar, like Northern Ireland, has been left inside the bloc the UK left — behind a border that Brexit made harder.
Boris Johnson’s government argued this type of solution would give Northern Ireland “the best of both worlds”. To which many responded by saying that, if so, wouldn’t it be good for the rest of the UK too? Today, we could reasonably ask: if it’s good for the Gibraltarians, why not for all UK citizens?
Not that the question will be asked any time soon. To date, it is hard to glean much interest in closer EU ties from the incoming cabinet. Burnham has found his populist sweet spot in talking up the tension between the local and the national and ignoring the tension between the national and the international.
That can only be temporary. Sooner or later, decisions will have to be made regarding Britain’s place in the world as a trading nation and a military power, if only because of events in Ukraine or in the White House. Burnham’s arrival disrupted the EU-UK reset process, with Brussels postponing a summit until there is clarity about the new government’s intentions, but it cannot remain on hold forever.
When Burnham does turn his mind to the EU, he would be wise to absorb immediately the key lesson of the Gibraltar deal: EU law and economic attraction are a more immovable object than successive UK governments’ promises to the population.
In Northern Ireland and Gibraltar, successive UK governments have eventually opted to align in major ways with EU laws — including its customs union, its VAT system, its regulations on goods standards, data, aviation and subsidies, and — for Gibraltar only — immigration rules. From Theresa May to Keir Starmer, both of whom proposed even more UK-wide alignment on a single market for goods to reduce frictions, seeking closer ties to Europe is where UK governments often end up. Burnham will too. The politically astute move is to realise this from the start and find a way to manage a process towards it.
The new prime minister stumbled on day one by ditching the digital ID programme that could have been a foundation for a reformed stance on the single market. The reason to oppose free movement, a Labour prime minister could argue, was to prevent unscrupulous employers using EU labour to force down standards for British workers. With the sort of labour rights enforcement national ID makes possible, this need no longer be a threat.
Burnham can find other ways to sell a softening of Brexit. What he cannot do is pretend there is a better alternative.
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