‘Britain’s problems are not unique and Keir Starmer should count himself lucky he is not Michel Barnier,’ says Nigel Nelson

A country with a debt mountain so huge it cancels out the national wealth it creates.

A country talking of breaking international law to curb its influx of irregular migrants.

A country facing unpopular tax rises and spending cuts to balance the books in a painful budget next month, and with problems on both the left and right of its political spectrum which threaten to spill over into street violence.

And a country which will need to clamp down on the benefits it pays to older people if it is to be able to afford its ballooning ageing population.

Sound familiar?

But this is not Britain but France.

If Keir Starmer thinks he is having a rough ride he should count himself lucky he is not new PM Michel Barnier.

The EU’s former Brexit negotiator is also facing difficult choices, all of them bad.

And the only difference between him and Starmer is that Barnier does not have the luxury of a huge Parliamentary majority to get him over the line.

France now has the most fragile government in recent history thanks to the inconclusive election President Emmanuel Macron called in July.

The left’s New Popular Front is the biggest grouping in the National Assembly, but the right’s National Rally is not that far behind.

And together they comfortably outnumber Macron’s centrists.

That means Barnier faces losing a no confidence vote if both sides combine.

He is relying on National Rally abstaining to stay in power which makes figurehead Marine Le Pen the kingmaker.

That would be like Starmer needing to keep Nigel Farage sweet to stop Labour’s administration from falling.

It is why Macron chose the 73 year old conservative to lead the government.

The hope is that Barnier’s political experience will be enough to unite the centre, right and far right.

The Gaullist was first elected an MP more than 40 years ago. He tried and failed to become EU Commission president in 2014 and French president in 2021.

But his negotiating skills are not in doubt following the impressive way he steered the EU through Brexit.

That did not make him a popular figure in Britain, but it did with Brussels. Barnier always thought Brexit was a mistake, a tragedy for both the UK and the EU.

This is not the place to rehash old arguments over whether he is right. But the challenge he had to deal with was Britain’s unrealistic expectations in early post-referendum days.

As Barnier said himself, Britain didn’t know what it wanted aside from having its cake and eating it.

We flirted with the idea of retaining access to the single market. Barnier said that was impossible without free movement.

We toyed with the notion of staying in the customs union. Barnier said that was impossible if we also wanted unfettered trade deals elsewhere in the world.

The bottom line was the UK could not expect better treatment outside the EU than member states had within it. Whatever side of the Brexit divide you fall on, that is not a position that can be faulted if seen from Europe’s point of view.

Barnier will need those skills in spades if he is to deliver a budget to lawmakers on October 1 without provoking a confidence vote that will bring him down.

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French public debt is 110 per cent of GDP – a little worse than Britain’s 100 per cent. The EU rule is that it should not exceed 60 per cent.

Yet Le Pen, like Liz Truss before her, favours tax cuts not rises. And she doesn’t want to see the pension age raised from 62 to 64 as Macron is proposing.

That is the circle Barnier has to square.

And stamping down on immigration could put him at odds with international law and the European Court of Human Rights, the issue our previous Tory government faced.

I mention all this to illustrate that Britain’s problems are not unique. Immigration, debt, terrorism and people living longer are global issues and need global solutions.

I’m unhappy about Starmer taking away winter fuel payments from 10 million pensioners, but the answer is not to raid the foreign aid budget instead.

We need that to meet our international obligations to combat global warming. You might as well say we should cut our Trident fleet down from four submarines to three and use the money saved to give to pensioners.

One boat is always at sea in places so secret not even the crew know where they are, another is on permanent standby while a third is in dry dock being spruced up.

Had Ed Miliband become PM he was going to look into whether we could do without the fourth boat if all it was doing was hanging around twiddling its thumbs. But defence is also a global issue, all the more so since Vladamir Putin went off his rocker and invaded Ukraine.

We may need those four boats on the grounds keeping Britain safe becomes a higher priority than keeping pensioners warm.

Britain is not alone in the world. But we could be very lonely in it if we look no further than our own borders.