DAN CARDEN: Why I can’t stand by and watch my occasion break a solemn pledge to the British individuals

It is the time of promises and resolutions for the new year ahead. For all of us, it is a time to hope that no matter how 2025 turned out, the next 12 months will be different.

Sir Keir Starmer has done just that in his own New Year message. As the Prime Minister made clear, it is the time to show that under Labour, Britain is turning the corner and getting ‘back on track’.

I could not agree more. We need to counter a growing sense of hopelessness that decline is inevitable and that this once-proud nation can no longer stand on its own.

However, 2026 is not the time to break a solemn pledge made to the British people: that under Labour, there would be ‘no return to the single market, the Customs Union or freedom of movement’.

The words, in the 2024 Labour election manifesto, were clear.

As a Labour MP re-elected on that manifesto, I can never support the UK joining a Customs Union with Brussels. And yet we hear suggestions that this is being seriously contemplated by some at the very top of the Government.

Moreover, we hear that it appears to be the aim of people who now have designs on the PM’s job.

Andy Burnham has declared how he wants to see us back in the EU in his lifetime, while Wes Streeting wants us to have a deeper trading relationship with Europe.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (right) speaks to Ursula Von der Leyen (left), President of the European Commission on May 19, 2025

Labour MP Dan Carter (pictured) said he could never support the UK joining a Customs Union with Brussels

This yearning among some Labour colleagues for closer ties to the EU is based on the hope that it will bring a quick economic boost.

I understand that desire. In my own constituency in north Liverpool, the cost of living, poverty, poor housing and struggling public services weigh down the community and chip away at people’s enjoyment of basic liberty.

But the European Union is itself a low-growth bloc with a declining share of global GDP.

And joining a Customs Union would mean scrapping our newly acquired, post-Brexit trade deals with places that are the 21st-Century growth centres such as the USA and India. Shifting closer to Brussels would mean giving up our hard-won national freedoms. It would be a recipe for disaster.

I look further back in my party’s history than the EU, welfare and the Equality Act for inspiration.

The roots of the Parliamentary Labour Party were in 19th- and early 20th-Century organised labour, and in Christian societies sceptical of state power overriding the collective endeavour of trade unions and communities.

Their socialism was founded on the principles of brotherhood and mutual aid. Without these principles, Labour looks a pretty vacuous entity unable to address the problems of modern Britain. People feel that their lives are governed by forces they cannot name, with neither the state nor the market able to help.

The state itself can actively hinder if it simply taxes more and hands out more. This alone is not the way to respond to widespread cultural and spiritual exhaustion.

Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham arrives for the Remembrance Sunday service on November 09, 2025 

However, Labour can bring about national renewal if it relies on the people themselves to do it. That means sometimes holding back the state and market and finding new (or old) ways for people to make decisions and take control. As a

politician of the Left, I believe there are circumstances where the state must intervene, such as doing more to solve the housing crisis.

But as the state cannot fix every problem, what is needed is a renewed sense of society. Yes, the sort of society Margaret Thatcher was once accused of denying even existed.

Now is the time to re-establish that society as a fundamental pillar of our democracy.

Here, the Government does have a key role. It should seek ways to lift the burdens of modern life and enable citizenship, starting with education and apprenticeships, and making good employment and housing central to its mission.

To succeed in the world we need people to invent, to build and to sell – from manufacturing to financial and legal services to tech and AI.

In this new era, we cannot look elsewhere for an institution or multi-national body to magic up growth from nowhere.

The countries with the highest growth rates have populations that are young, studying and working.

Wes Streeting speaking to the media at Wellington House, London, on December 17, 2025 

A Labour politics worthy of the name should be bold enough to transform Britain – not least by embracing our Brexit freedoms.

So I urge Sir Keir not to seek to tie the UK into a new Customs Union or indeed any other such arrangement which may carry a disguised name but amount to the same thing.

Not only did the PM make a solemn pledge to the British people to do no such thing, but it would be simply wrong to conclude that Brussels is where he will find the renewal and transformation of this country that he seeks.

Dan Carden is Labour MP for Liverpool Walton and chairman of the Blue Labour Parliamentary Group.