Ben Judah: Labour’s new voice on Europe        

The role of the Special Advisor to a Minister or a Shadow Minister has so far escaped serious examination by the academics and think-tankers who examine modern British politics. This may be about to change, with the appointment of Ben Judah as the Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s special advisor.

So far Sir Keir Starmer has not had to worry too much about foreign policy other than the Israel and Gaza war. It is quite a contrast to 1997. Then, Labour and much of the broader liberal foreign affairs community, allied to many in the United States, were angry and depressed by the Tory government’s and the EU’s soft-soaping of the Serbian autocrat Slobodan Milosevic – a Balkan Vladimir Putin before the KGB agent took over Russia. By contrast, there are now no sharp divides between Labour and Tories on most international issues. Starmer remains part of the Western democratic consensus on Ukraine and Gaza.

Even on Europe, there is no major difference between Labour, the Conservative Government and the Liberal Democrats. All agree that a fast rejoining of the EU is politically impossible in Britain, especially as any such decision has to go through the sieve of a referendum.

No Labour or LibDem spokesperson, let alone a Tory, wants to draw attention to the 5-year decline in trade for Britain since Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit was imposed. The US Nobel Laureate, Joe Stigltiz, may describe the UK as one of the “sick men” of Europe, but there is no electoral mileage for a future Foreign or Defence Secretary in proclaiming Britain’s shrinking status, influence and economic or reduced diplomatic and military clout in the world.

In an October poll only 16 per cent  said Brexit was an important issue. That may be a better test of public opinion than the polls uniformly saying that a clear majority now think Brexit was a mistake. Up to 90 per cent of voters aged 18-25 say they would vote to rejoin the EU. The problem is that this cohort doesn’t much bother with voting.

But now David Lammy has taken a political gamble by appointing one of the smartest Anglo-French international policy analysts and writers on the Left as his Special Advisor. Ben Judah, 36, has an impressive record of writing on French as well as European Union politics.

The commitment to Europe is in his DNA as his father, Tim Judah, writes for the Economist and New York Review of Books on the Balkans and France. Tim Judah is married to the writer Rosie Whitehouse, whose mother was a Jewish resistante, a Maquisarde who was sent by de Gaulle to build a resistance movement in south west France in 1944.

Their son, Ben, is fluent in French and was educated at the Lycée Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington. He grew up in the Balkans during the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, as Tim Judah produced the best book-length reporting on the region that is still a bleeding wound in Europe’s south-east flank.

Ben Judah began his journalistic career more than a decade ago writing brilliant essays about Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe for Standpoint magazine. He later worked for the US Atlantic Council, where he interviewed and wrote about Emmanuel Macron, trying to situate and explain the young French President to the largely monolingual US-UK foreign policy establishment.

Ben Judah’s latest book This is Europe: The Way We Live Now (Picador) is 500 turnable pages about the stories of today’s Europeans, who are constantly on the move. It is a new kind of foreign reporting, far removed from the worthy, sturdy, wordy works of establishment foreign correspondents and professors.

It moves from Ireland to Istanbul, with two dozen life stories, told in a vivid, sharp prose. We learn of the star school student in Romania who gets a European scholarship to go to an Atlantic College in Italy. It will lift her out of impoverished misery. But the money she gets does not extend to buying the airfare. To raise it, she finds someone who gives her money in exchange for posing naked online.

Or the fear that European lorry drivers have in England, where lorry park robberies are said to be the worst in Europe. Or the African migrants desperate to get to France and willing to walk over the freezing snow and glaciers of winter-time Italian Alps. Some don’t make it and their bodies are found when the ice melts in the spring.

Ben Judah’s book is not about the EU but gives the lie to the idea of a super-state Europe. On the contrary, Europe remains a hotch-potch of sharp-elbowed nations. The EU has little if any authority or power to enforce reform, end trafficking and the relentless exploitation of workers. This especially applies to the undocumented ones, who will never turn back as long as there is no hope in the countries where they were born.

Ben Judah’s commitment to Europe is strong. Yet he is no starry-eyed Brussels insider. He is a very powerful, Euro-knowledgeable addition to Team Starmer. The problem is that Europe is much more than France (though don’t tell any French political or official that).

Macron has been involved in major rows with Germany on how to handle Putin. He has threatened to close France’s borders with Italy to staunch undocumented immigration from people fleeing poverty or repression in the failed states on the south and east of the Mediterranean. He has largely withdrawn France as a military force from the Sahel, the mainly Muslim region of Africa south of the former French colonies of Algeria and Tunisia. Into this vacuum has stepped Russian soldiers dressed in mercenary uniforms, but clearly controlled by Moscow under Putin’s orders.

Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have built a reasonable relationship with Macron, based on giving him lots of British money in the hope he would better police the dunes on the French coastline between Calais and Dieppe.

But France cannot provide what Starmer (like Sunak) wants – namely a privileged cherry-picking status for Britain that will lessen barriers to trade and travel but not accept reciprocal obligations under EU laws. France has just one vote out of 27 at the European Council, the body which decides EU policy towards its recently departed member state, the UK.

So Ben Judah will provide a welcome, refreshing, engaged Francophone and Francophile addition to Starmer’s tiny number of advisors who speak European languages and actually know how EU politics works. But he won’t be able to unlock a new post-Brexit relationship between the UK and Europe. That is what the Germans call a Chefsache – a level of politics that only heads of government can undertake. That requires serious decisions and an ability to forge public opinion around new thinking on Europe, after eight years wasted on Theresa May’s fantasy that a politics of “making Brexit work” was or will ever be possible.

Denis MacShane was a Labour MP for 18 years and Minister for Europe and the United States under Tony Blair. His latest book is Labour Takes Power: The Denis MacShane Diaries 1997-2001 (Biteback).

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