Sébastien Maillard / Sep 2026
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Enhancing industrial capacities should serve as a strategic basis for bolder EU-UK relations
European leaders do not exactly know what to expect from Andy Burnham. He is the United Kingdom's seventh prime minister in just 10 years. He started by staying deliberately focused on his domestic agenda. Besides declaring that Britain must be “bolder” in seeking closer relations with the European Union, he has not been very vocal nor specific on his European policy over his first weeks at Downing Street. But concentrating on Britain and engaging the country with the European bloc are not necessarily at loggerheads. They may even set a new basis for EU-UK cooperation.
Reviving the relationship requires fresh momentum indeed. Burnham came to power this summer at a moment when the "reset" launched by Starmer two years earlier is losing steam. The relationship has become too much of a transactional one, with each party trying to find the best trade-off in an overall deal on lifting controls over agri-food products, joining carbon emissions markets and reducing tuition fees for Europeans studying in the UK. A compromise on these three files looks at what can be expected at best from the second EU-UK summit postponed and now due most probably in early November, in Brussels. Failing to deliver this outcome would be a setback on both sides. But will succeeding such a deal be up to the geopolitical shift facing the continent?
The change of era certainly deserves more. The quest for growth and competitiveness cannot be detached from shared economic security concerns. These require diversified supply chains but also enhancing regionalised-made production. The new British Prime Minister and his European counterparts seem here to be more on the same page. Unlike his predecessors, Burnham also talks about "boosting our sovereign capabilities," "reducing foreign dependency" and "building new industrial partnerships with allies." This should ring a bell across the Channel, not only to French Gaullist ears. The wording comes close to the one on “European sovereignty” developed in the EU since Brexit or what Von der Leyen calls “European independence”. These objectives should open a new discussion.
The test case is reindustrialisation. While the EU is negotiating during the Fall the exact scope of the “European preference” introduced in its future Industrial Accelerator Act, Burnham promises a push in manufacturing, especially in defence, with an emphasis on domestic production. His approach to the digital sector seeks to gain better technological sovereignty. Existing deals with US firm Palantir Technologies for health data management may suffer as a result, for instance.
But no industry is an island. Britons and Europeans must think continentally as a community and cooperate more intensively when having the ambition to strengthen their own productions of electric vehicles, clean techs and in strategic heavy industries. The preference for "Made in Europe” in public procurements (which represent 15% of Europe’s economic production) or in publicly subsidised sectoral programmes should thus be articulated with the "Made in Britain" approach. Joint conditions of reciprocity, of social and environmental safeguards and of local added value to manufactured products could enable a British opt-in European preference and vice-versa.
Joint efforts for truly European reindustrialisation offer a strategic basis for a deeper, more geo-economic EU-UK relationship. Much more than repeated but vain British attempts to gain unilateral greater access to the Single market. It would also be more politically realistic than a customs union with the EU, re-entering the Single Market, let alone fully rejoining the bloc - which is just too big, too soon.
Boosting British capacities in a pan European framework would not undermine the “Makerfied test” that Burnham wants his policies to pass, named after his pro-Brexit constituency won in northern England. By moving closer to the EU through industrial cooperation, he can simultaneously re-engage with the most deprived areas of Britain. But it would require the UK to demonstrate some clear EU preference itself. While Starmer tried to balance relationships with Washington, Beijing and Brussels, Burnham can hardly avoid to prioritise them more in an increasingly multipolar world. On the other end, should the EU-27 decide to keep Britain fully out of its industrial acceleration, as it did last year with the Safe (Security Action for Europe) programme for investments in defence, it will push the UK to prioritise differently.
