Sir Keir Starmer has said Britain should consider rejoining the £100million European Union defence pact despite talks collapsing last year.
Talks to be a full participant in the programme collapsed in November, after France told the UK to pay £5.7billion into the Security Action for Europe (Safe) programme.
Sir Keir told reporters accompanying him on his trip to China: “Europe, including the UK, needs to do more on security and defence. That’s an argument I’ve been making for many months now with European leaders.
“We’ve got to step up and do more. It’s not only President Trump who thinks Europe needs to do more but other presidents as well. I think the same.
“I do think on spend, capability and co-operation we need to do more together. I’ve made the argument, and that should require us to look at schemes like Safe and others to see whether there is a way in which we can work more closely together.”
Britain is currently enrolled in the program as a “third country”, which means they are competing against countries such as the United States for a limited number of contracts, and can only contribute at a 35 per cent component value limit.
Full participants in the initiative can take out Brussels-backed, low-interest loans to jointly procure defence systems.
France has led the argument that Britain is not entitled to the loans unless taxpayers “pay to play”.
The Prime Minister wants closer ties with the bloc
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PA
France has said that on principle, the UK should contribute to Brussels’ budget for any closer ties with the European single market.
Safe has been considered a large success in the EU and some member states are calling for a second edition of the programme, according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
EU Ambassador to Britain Pedro Serrano and British officials have both suggested that the UK could reach an agreement during a possible second round, but this is not yet under consideration.
A European Commission spokesperson told Politico: “We will not speculate on a possible second SAFE fund at this stage.”
Closer cooperation could come from joining the EU’s €90billion loan to Ukraine, which has been proposed by the Netherlands.
Ukraine can already buy defence systems from the US if they are unavailable in the EU, however France has again suggested that non-EU countries should pay a fee to participate.
European Commissioner for Trade, Maroš Šefčovič and European Commissioner Economy and Productivity Valdis Dombrovskis will visit London next week to meet with senior ministers, including Chancellor Rachel Reeves, to discuss the tightening of EU-UK relations.
Sir Keir also responded to a statement from Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, suggesting that the UK was “betraying” Brexit.
He said: “As far as Nigel Farage is concerned, let us remind ourselves that he said if we left the EU it would be £350million a week for the NHS. That didn’t happen.”
The Prime Minister added that he would like to have closer ties to the EU on issues such as defence and security, energy, emissions and trade.
He said that accepting Europe’s SPS agreement on food and agriculture standards will “lead to lower prices in our supermarkets, which is welcome”.
Sir Keir, referring to a second EU-UK summit, said: “We will not only follow up on the ten strands that we set out at last year’s summit, we’ll also want to work closer with an iterative process.”
