Labour’s ‘crabwise’ approach to closer EU ties must address damage of Brexit | Heather Stewart

The damage to the economy dwarfs the upsides from the various non-EU trade deals the UK has struck since 2016 Rachel Reeves joined EU finance ministers for dinner in Washington last week, on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund spring meetings – the first time a chancellor had done so since Brexit. It was the latest symbolic step in Labour’s marked shift towards prioritising closer EU relations. That makes perfect sense against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s reckless Middle East conflict. But domestic politics and economics have increasingly aligned in favour of a lean towards the EU, too – or, rather, Labour has increasingly opened its eyes to them. As political scientists such as Rob Ford and Ben Ansell have been all but screaming for some time, Labour is losing many more voters to the left wing, pro-EU Greens and Liberal Democrats than to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. That is only likely to become more evident when the results of May’s elections come in. Since the departure of Morgan McSweeney, the government appears to have become markedly more willing to try to win some of these lost lefties back, instead of hankering after Reform-curious “hero voters”