The SNP has fired a broadside ahead of the EU UK summit, warning that “there will never be a better deal than being back in the EU” as Brexit continues to batter the UK economy.
With talks expected to yield only a modest agreement, SNP Europe spokesperson Stephen Gethins MP accused the Labour Government of ignoring the real prize, rejoining the EU single market and customs union.
The criticism follows a series of parliamentary questions from SNP MPs, which revealed that the UK Government has not commissioned a single forecast or analysis on the economic benefits of renewed EU ties.
Instead, ministers have leaned on gloomy figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which estimates a 4 percent hit to GDP and a 15 percent slump in trade since Brexit.
But there has been no official effort to understand what regaining access to the single market could mean for struggling sectors or squeezed households.
According to Gethins, that silence speaks volumes.
“After almost a decade of damage and decline in broken Brexit Britain, there are no ifs or buts,” he said.
“There will never be a better deal than being back in the EU.”
He called it the UK’s biggest and best growth strategy and accused Labour of turning their backs on it out of fear of backlash from right wing populists like Nigel Farage.
By failing to produce any new economic analysis ahead of the summit, Gethins said Labour was deliberately avoiding the truth about Brexit’s harm and the healing power of European cooperation.
“They’re happy to publicise the losses but refuse to quantify the gains,” he said.
“The Labour Party once had the courage to stand for EU membership.
“Now they’re too frightened to even run the numbers.”
The SNP’s intervention cuts at Labour’s current positioning, neither for nor against a full EU return, but squarely focused on minor fixes.
Gethins was blunt in his assessment.
“Keir Starmer once believed in the benefits of freedom of movement and EU membership.
“Now he’s choosing silence over substance,” he said.
“Labour have embraced the same hard Tory Brexit that was engineered by Farage and Johnson.”
He went further, claiming Starmer’s unwillingness to re examine EU membership shows political weakness, not pragmatism.
“This is the one manifesto promise they could break and the public would actually applaud them for it,” he said.
“But instead, they’re covering their ears and hoping nobody notices the economic car crash Brexit has become.”
As the summit unfolds, SNP voices are once again making the case that the real choice for Scotland lies not in half measures from Westminster, but in full membership of the European Union.
“Politics is about choices,” Gethins said.
“If the Labour Government can’t choose to fix what Brexit broke, then Scotland must ask how much longer we can afford to remain shackled to a Westminster system doing us so much harm.”
