russia – derby4europe

Happy New Year to everyone. I guess this is a time to look back in order to look forward. So what were the ups and downs of 2025 for rejoiners? First, and most important, the relationship between UK and the EU stands in a very different place today from the beginning of 2025. And, on the whole, its a much better place. As is often the case, a common adversary brought the parties closer together. To add to our longtime nemesis, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, we now have a the threat of MAGA, embodied by Trump and Vance, whose attitude to Europe is increasingly defined by hostility and contempt. Vance unleashed his bile at a meeting of European leaders in February and subsequently reiterated his views in various places. Trump has followed this up at the end of the year with further denunciations, and with the publication of his ‘National Security Strategy’, which effectively threatens to intervene in Europe’s politics in favour of far-right parties.

This continuous drumbeat of hostility no doubt helped to push the EU and UK toward a closer relationship. We had the UK/EU summit in May, which followed on from the 2024 Windsor Framework in mapping out areas of closer co-operation. That meeting seems to have been productive, and common interests were agreed relating to key areas such as health standards for food imports, and youth mobility.

Starmer followed this up in July with bilateral meetings, first with Macron, then with Mertz. Again in each case they were clearly working for a closer relationship. The Macron meeting produced the ‘one in one out’ agreement for the movement of asylum seekers. So far this has yielded very modest results. The Mertz meeting produced the grandly-named Kensington Treaty which, to quote the Deutsch-Britische gesellshcaft……

‘…. includes agreements on topics such as security and defence, the economy, energy and climate protection, migration, science, digitalisation, state modernisation and exchanges between citizens. With regard to the mobility of young people, it was agreed, among other things, to reintroduce visa-free travel for school classes and thus facilitate school trips.’

So, pretty wide-ranging. This, (unlike the Macron/Starmer takeaway) is inevitably going to be a slow-burn process, but if the governments keep up their commitment, it could yield important results. There was a good deal of media talk at the time about the revival of a ‘core’ alliance of UK, France and Germany as a fulcrum for wider European security co-operation. It remains to be seen whether that grows legs.

But not everything went swimmingly. As our relationship to the EU gets closer, so that closeness triggered negatives like mutual suspicion, competition and incomprehension. These showed themselves in the current state of our common defence investment negotiations with the EU, which are at something of an impasse, evidently a result of the old chestnut, Anglo-French rivalry. This will not be easy to resolve, but it will have to be resolved, and soon. There are also tensions over the shape and extent of the Youth Mobility arrangements under discussion, and over its relationship to the agreement of common veterinary standards for food and livestock. The path is not a smooth one.

On the other hand, the great positive of the year is our return to the Erasmus+ programme, which opens the Higher Education Institutions of Europe to UK students (and vice versa). This is scheduled for 2027. In the long term this is a crucial cultural achievement. It ensures that a new generation of young Britons will experience Europe as part of their natural home territory. Its an exciting development, but, paradoxically, its best outcome will be for study in the EU to become unexciting, routine and ordinary for the younger generation. When that happens, we are getting somewhere.

And throughout the year there has been a steady drizzle of evidence of the economic damage that Brexit is doing to the UK; evidence provided by the BBC (trying hard to be neutral), the Bank of England, the Office of Budget Responsibility, the Centre for Business Prosperity and many others.

On the local front, Derby branch members leafletted in Derby and Belper during 2025. On this website branch members also admonished Starmer for ignoring the petition to hold a referendum on EU membership, and warned him of the dangers of a hasty trade deal with the US. Subsequent events have certainly vindicated that.

So maybe the path ahead into 2026 is a little clearer, but it remains steep and treacherous.

US Vice President Vance’s speech to the Munich security conference last week came as something of a shock, not only because of its undisguised hostility to Europe, but also because of the basis of that hostility. The speech was focused on ‘culture war’ issues around immigration, reproductive rights and religious dissent. Vance’s claim, that these internal issues were somehow a bigger threat to Europe than Vladimir Putin, was frankly bizarre. My reading of Vance’s book ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ indicated that Vance is a balanced, thoughtful and humane man. However, his Munich speech suggests a very different person. We don’t know how far Trump had vetted his speech beforehand, but there have been no visible repercussions since, so we can take it that he approved it, before or after, as the Trump administration’s view of Europe.

There are several possible explanations for the speech, some of them not mutually exclusive. Let me run through a few, with ratings:

‘Tough Love’ shock therapy to get Europe to pay more for its defence. But that doesn’t stack up. Vance actually minimized the external threats to Europe, telling us that we are our own worst enemies. 2/10

A sincere exhortation to Europe to converge with Trump and Vance’s version of the US: Christian, conservative and white. Vance would certainly be the right man to put that case, as he seems to really believe in that version of America. For Trump its just a vote-winner. But the hectoring hostility of the speech surely casts doubt on that explanation. 3/10

A signal to Europe’s far right that they have a friend in America. That has a little more credibility. Far right governments in Europe would be more compliant with US policy than the present incumbents; But the far right would be even more compliant with Russian policy. Do Trump and Vance realise that? 5/10

A signal to Vladimir Putin that the US is no longer a friend to Europe, so no longer its protector against Putin’s ambitions. Yes, that certainly has more credibility. Even Vance’s language echoes some of Putin’s anti-liberal rants. 7/10

A pre-justification exercise, casting Europe as unstable and corrupt. By implication that makes Europe unfit to be included in the Ukraine negotiations. This explanation probably comes top on credibility, now that Trump has started negotiating with Putin about Ukraine. Without Europe. 9/10

Whatever the intention, the speech clearly signals a widening ideological gulf between the US and the present political order in Europe. If we put this alongside Trump’s territorial demands and threats against Canada and Denmark, its fairly clear that the NATO alliance is a dead letter. The US is recasting itself as an adversary to most of its former allies. Its tone is aggrieved and predatory.

NATO was founded on the assumption of US leadership, and has worked on that basis for 75 years. It’s hard to imagine how that could be unpicked if the US turns rogue. A fresh start is the logical response, though the practical challenges of that are huge. The only pre-existing institutional arrangement that includes most (not all) of the other NATO members is the EU, which in institutional terms is completely unsuited to being the framework for a miliary alliance. But there is no obvious alternative, other than a return to 1930’s Europe, with small states jockeying for position, and short-lived two or three-state alliances, mostly being picked off and gobbled up by Hitler or Stalin in the end. Not a good model.

Stephen Wilmot

Tag: russia

Happy New Year for 2026!

Vance’s Speech at Munich