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Sir Keir Starmer must provide more clarity on his plans to improve the UK’s Brexit deal at a meeting next week with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, diplomats and analysts have warned.

The UK prime minister will meet von der Leyen in Brussels on Wednesday nearly three months after taking office amid continued divisions in his cabinet over whether to agree a youth mobility deal with the EU. This would enable young people to work and travel more freely in the UK and across the bloc.

However, after a summer of summits, bilateral visits and warm words, senior EU diplomats have indicated they are growing impatient with what they see as the UK’s unwillingness to set out clear objectives for the relationship. 

“The melody is there, but now we have to start concentrating on writing the lyrics,” said one senior diplomat. A second was more direct: “The UK needs to tell us what they want,” they said.

Labour has said that it wants a deep rapprochement with the EU but has ruled out rejoining the single market or seeking a customs union with Europe, preferring to seek additions and improvements to the existing Trade and Co-operation Agreement.

These include a “veterinary agreement” to reduce trade barriers on agrifoods, easier access for service professionals and a deal to reduce paperwork for touring musicians and other artists.

Analysts said Wednesday’s meeting was being seen in Brussels as a significant stepping stone to more detailed negotiations beyond Starmer’s general expressions of a desire for deeper co-operation with the EU on security, policing and trade.

“Starmer has to use the meeting to provide a greater, concrete sense of what the government actually wants to do. It can’t be another ‘mood music’ meeting — that won’t land well in Brussels,” said Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group political risk consultancy.

The prime minister will also see the presidents of the other big EU institutions, Charles Michel of the European Council of national leaders, and Roberta Metsola of the European parliament.

Differences have emerged between the two sides over the question of a youth mobility deal. Brussels has prioritised it as an important first expression of warmer ties but a deal has been rejected in London as appearing to be too close to the “free movement” of people that was ended by Brexit.

This week Pedro Serrano, EU ambassador to the UK, played down the youth mobility issue ahead of the meeting, suggesting the scheme should resemble a “gap year” programme that would not grant European citizens the right to work in Britain. The commission proposal, now being revised by member states, suggested four years’ residence for the under-30s.

However, speaking after Serrano’s intervention, Starmer reiterated his position that he has “no plans for a youth mobility scheme” between the UK and EU. He added that he shared the view of Yvette Cooper, UK home secretary, that it risked undermining public perceptions of the government’s approach to immigration.

Cooper wants to cut down on legal migration and to focus on training young people in Britain to fill skills shortages.

Despite the differences, UK ministers say they believe “landing zones can be found” on the issue, while arguing it is important not to “lose sight of the big picture” as the EU and the UK jointly face the challenges of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, populism and irregular migration.

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves is also pushing for an ambitious deal to reduce trade barriers with the EU, including telling the Financial Times before the election that she was willing to sign up to the Brussels rule book in certain sectors, including chemicals.

“Rachel is relaxed about that,” said one ally of the chancellor. “She doesn’t see any problem with being a rule taker in established industries.” The Starmer government is, however, still attached to the idea of Britain having regulatory flexibility in emerging technologies.

Reeves’s role in the forthcoming talks with the EU will be vital, given the chancellor’s focus on delivering the government’s overarching mission: boosting growth.

Her allies say the chancellor believes a compromise can be reached with Brussels on a youth mobility scheme but she also supports Cooper’s position that it cannot look anything like the pre-Brexit free movement of people.

A MUM has urged shoppers to snap up free nappies “even if you don’t have kids” before Morrison’s shoppers issued a stark warning to parents.

Stephanie Pim shared a post on Facebook encouraging shoppers at the major supermarket chain to check the app to see if they’re eligible for free nappies.

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She wrote: “If you have a Morrisons card check your app. Free nappies.”

However, it’s not just those with children that can snap up the essential item.

The savvy mum added: “Even if you don’t have kids- grab them and pop in the food bank.”

Stephanie’s Facebook post received hundreds of likes and comments from fellow shoppers.

One user wrote: “Thank you for the heads up, it is on mine.”

“I got them a couple of weeks ago,” said another.

However, many shoppers commented that even after signing up for the Morrison’s card and baby club, they still weren’t eligible for the free nappies.

This user commented: “I’m in baby club and not on mine.”

Another added: “Not on mine.”

While a third explained: “Spoke to someone in Morrisons who said it’s potluck if you get them or not which seems silly as people who don’t have children get them and there are others out there with children who need this.”

Morrison shoppers have also complained about the lack of nappies in stock with many customers expressing frustration on social media.

One shopper wrote: “The problem is tons of people got this offer and my local Morrisons has never had the nappies in stock.”

It comes after several lucky shoppers were surprised to learn they could get free Pampers nappies from Tesco.

One excited shopper shared her Tesco receipt on Facebook, revealing that she could choose from either a pack of 55 size ones, a pack of 44 size twos, or a pack of 40 size threes.

The savvy mum, who posted the find on social media, urged parents to check their receipts to see if they’re eligible.

Those lucky enough to be selected get a pack of Pampers nappies for free.

The popular brand costs around £10 normally.

The mum’s Facebook post received numerous likes and comments with shoppers eager to get their hands on the free nappies.

One user commented: “If we go to Tesco. Always yes for a receipt.”

“Need to go to Tesco, worth seeing if we’re one of the lucky ones,” wrote another.

While a third said: “If anyone gets anything like this but doesn’t need them, put them in the Foodbank Collection boxes.”

Other ways to save money when you shop

Cashback sites have amazing freebies for new customers, such as a takeaway from Just Eat or a Benefit beauty product.

Free gifts can change regularly so do check online to see what is being offered before you sign up.

Look for cashback on everything

You can claim on things such as MOTs, insurance, train tickets and holidays.

It is worth looking around and what companies offer cashback schemes as you could be earning hundreds.

TopCashback reckons its average user makes £345 a year.

Save money at the supermarket

It’s a good idea to download apps Shopmium, Check-outSmart, Quidco ClickSnap, GreenJinn and TopCashback’s Snap and Save.

Check out what is available, pick it up in-store and upload a photo of the receipt to get your cashback.

Combine cashback offers with promotions

Double savings and maximise cashback by matching third-party offers from cashback sites with in-store and online promotions.

You can’t always use discount codes with cashback, but you can take advantage of sales and offers such as free gifts.

Download cashback notifiers

The website Honey has a great notifier.

It sits in your browser, pops up when you click on a website that offers cashback and searches for voucher codes.

COPS have launched an urgent probe after three women were caught in crossfire following “shots being fired from a car”.

Emergency services raced the victims to hospital after horror unfolded on Frederick Street, in Wolverhampton, at around 11pm yesterday.

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West Midlands Police confirmed one woman still remains in hospital.

She is in a stable condition, while the other two victims have since been discharged.

Officers are now trawling through hours of CCTV amid their manhunt.

They have launched an urgent appeal for any information regarding the suspected shooter.

A spokesperson for the force said: “An investigation has been launched after three people were injured in Wolverhampton yesterday (27 Sept).

“We received reports of shots being fired from a car on Frederick Street at around 11pm.

“Three women were taken to hospital. Two women have since been discharged. A third woman remains in hospital in a stable condition.

“We are carrying out a CCTV trawl- and other enquiries – to identify those involved.

“We’re working to establish why this happened and we’d ask anyone with information to speak to us.

“Such violence is unacceptable and won’t be tolerated.

“We will have an increased presence in the area to reassure the local community.

“You can contact us via Live Chat on our website, or by calling 101, and quote log 5427 of 27 September.

“Alternatively, ring independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. Tell them what you know, not who you are.”

Welcome back. No discussion of Europe’s future omits to place defence and security at or near the top of the list of policymakers’ priorities. For Nato’s European members, the aim is to deliver not just higher but better-quality defence expenditure.

Still, the obstacles to an integrated European defence effort are formidable — and the question of how far to involve the EU remains contested. I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

A ‘true defence union’

In 2014, when Nato governments pledged to spend at least 2 per cent of GDP annually on defence, only three countries met the target. This year, 23 of the alliance’s 32 states will do so, according to Nato estimates.

In principle, then, there is progress. But the leaders who will run the EU’s Brussels-based institutions for the next five years say, correctly, that more needs to be done. They take the view that the EU can play a vital role in stimulating and co-ordinating an improved effort from national governments and defence industries.

Speaking at the European parliament in July, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said:

For the first time in decades our freedom is under threat . . . I believe now is therefore the time to build a true European defence union.

An early sign of her commitment was her nomination of former Lithuanian premier Andrius Kubilius as the EU’s first defence commissioner.

The EU legislature has still to confirm the appointment of Kubilius. But he has wasted no time in airing proposals that, if put into effect, would define his five-year term.

One is to make EU governments stockpile minimum levels of ammunition and other supplies. Another, more controversial idea is to draw on unused tens of billions of euros in the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund to ramp up defence expenditure.

Vulnerable Europe

The sense of urgency is not misplaced.

Writing for the US Council on Foreign Relations, Thomas Graham puts matters bluntly:

Currently, Europe is in no position to defend itself. Comfortable in its reliance on the US as its security guarantor after the cold war, it allowed its military forces and defence industries to atrophy to devote greater resources to raising standards of living.

As a result, European military forces cannot effectively operate without direction and material support from the US.

Now, Graham says, Europe has been “shocked out of its geopolitical slumber” by two developments: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and a possible second term in the White House for Donald Trump.

Legal and constitutional constraints

Various difficulties stand in the way of an EU-led defence effort. In this collection of articles for the EconPol Forum, a Germany-based research network, one essay highlights the problem of lack of co-ordination:

European states are not aligning their military spending priorities. For this reason, a simple increase in national defence spending does not automatically lead to a higher joint industrial and operational capacity of the EU but increases the risk of wasting the growing military resources.

Another article underlines the legal and constitutional constraints on the EU:

On the one hand, the EU treaties currently do not provide a fully fledged legal basis for a proper EU defence; on the other hand, several national constitutions (including the German, Italian, Irish and others) include clauses that limit what can be jointly achieved in terms of defence.

In this article for the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank, Delphine Deschaux-Dutard explains that, in spite of these constraints, the EU has launched some useful initiatives, mostly in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

They include:

1.    The European Peace Facility, which finances the delivery of military equipment to Ukraine

2.    The Act in Support of Ammunition Production, which promotes collective European procurement of ammunitions

3.    The European Defence Industry Reinforcement through Common Procurement Act, which sets up a fund to assist weapons purchases

Where to get the weapons?

Defence procurement poses a particular challenge for Europe. According to the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, EU countries announced over €100bn of defence purchases in the 15 months after Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022.

Of that sum, 78 per cent represented armaments from outside the EU. The major suppliers were the US (80 per cent of non-EU procurement), South Korea (13 per cent) and Israel and the UK (3 per cent each).

The EU has programmes in place for a more self-reliant, collaborative European defence effort, especially in research and development, but the sums of money involved are small.

Defence industry executives and specialists recently drafted a report that highlighted shortcomings in the EU effort. “Companies are worried their collaborative outputs will be put on the shelf, never again to be looked at once EU funding runs dry,” Aurélie Pugnet wrote for the Euractiv news site.

Who should run the show?

Not all EU governments are convinced that von der Leyen’s commission should be handed more control over European defence policy.

In this FT article, Paola Tamma and Henry Foy quoted a senior EU diplomat as saying: “We would not accept a power grab by the commission.”

For good measure, this unnamed policymaker dismissed the idea of commonly issued EU defence bonds as “pure fantasy”.

Where will the money come from?

This raises the question of how to maintain or increase defence expenditure when budget deficits and public debt are already high in many EU countries after the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid pandemic and the subsequent energy crisis.

In a survey published this week by the World Economic Forum, some 53 per cent of chief economists identified public debt as a major risk to the stability of advanced economies.

The fiscal pressures facing EU governments are outlined in this authoritative European Central Bank study, which highlights the huge costs involved in addressing defence and security, demographic ageing, digitalisation and climate change. These are depicted in the ECB chart below.

However, the ECB makes the point that, if skilfully managed, higher defence spending could be beneficial for European economies and the public finances:

Additional defence spending could potentially increase GDP growth in the EU, with positive implications for fiscal sustainability in the longer term, if it (i) is concentrated in R&D-intensive investment, (ii) does not crowd out other productive investment, and (iii) focuses on EU-based sources.

EU budget

The fiscal constraints on defence spending are linked to the question of the EU’s next long-term budget, due to run from 2028 to 2034.

Any hope that the EU’s 27 states will reach an early consensus on the budget has been complicated by the domestic political weakness of President Emmanuel Macron in France and the troubles of Germany’s three-party ruling coalition.

After conversations this month with high-level policymakers in Brussels, Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group consultancy concluded that the budget debate will be extremely fraught. An expansion of the EU’s Covid-era joint debt issuance is far from certain, he says:

Opposition to more common borrowing is now so entrenched that most senior EU officials do not believe it will happen in the short term.

The small window that existed to do something more quickly — essentially between now and Germany’s federal elections in September 2025 — has effectively been closed by . . . Macron’s early election gamble.

This both weakened Macron’s voice in Europe and arrested the momentum that was building behind the idea of more common financing for intra-EU security and defence.

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German blockage

To restore the momentum, there would need to be significant change in Germany, the EU’s largest economy.

After Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the creation of a €100bn fund for modernising Germany’s armed forces. But Rafał Ulatowski, writing for the Washington Quarterly, contends that there are good reasons to doubt whether this initiative has really transformed the country’s defence policy.

It’s not that Germany lacks the money. Rather, as Markus Jaeger argues in the Internationale Politik Quarterly, the problem is twofold.

First, Germany’s constitutionally enshrined “debt brake” imposes restrictions on deficit spending that hinder investment in defence.

Second, there are political constraints — “less in the sense of a lack of public support and more in terms of a lack of political leadership”.

Scholz’s coalition is on the ropes amid a rise in support for radical parties of right and left that oppose both support for Ukraine and an expanded defence effort.

In conclusion, the outlook for European security will be shaped not only by November’s US election result. A great deal hangs, too, on Germany’s Bundestag election a year from now.

More on this topic

Power for progress: why the EU needs a new global strategy — an essay by Giovanni Grevi for the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Tony’s picks of the week

• Chinese merchants have flooded online marketplaces to sell US presidential election merchandise, as Democrats and Republicans seek to promote locally made products in a campaign marked by hostility towards China, the FT’s Sun Yu reports from New York

• Tuvalu, the Pacific coral island chain state, hopes to establish a legal basis for its continued sovereignty even if it disappears beneath the waves because of climate change, Kirsty Needham reports for Reuters news agency

A RESTAURANT in Solihull less than a 10 minute drive away from Birmingham Airport has been crowned best ‘hidden gem’ restaurant in Britain.

Lavang restaurant was awarded the accolade for its rave reviews from customers and its out the way location – nestled in between an electrical shop and a Chinese takeaway on a residential estate.

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The award was given by Tripadvisor in its Travellers’ Choice Awards Best of the Best Restaurants 2024.

Winners of the awards were chosen by looking at the quality and quantity of reviews and ratings for restaurants from travellers over a 12-month period.

Lavang’s location may not be the most exotic, but its menu serves up a tonne of South East Asian delights.

There’s everything from flavourful tandoori dishes to delicious charcoal grills.

And the prices on the menu are cheap too – poppadoms, a starter, curry, rice, naan, and chips for two people will set you back around £40.

Lavang’s chic and sophisticated style is also realised once you step inside.

The decor includes a beautiful white blossom ceiling, and customers describe everything as looking very clean and well presented.

Diners have also commented on Lavang’s staff being extremely friendly and efficient, with dietary requests always accommodated.

The restaurant is even commended for having an “impeccable playlist”.

Mr Miah, Lavang’s owner, explained to Sun Travel why the restaurant is perfectly located for customers.

He said: “Being located in Solihull; we’re in close proximity to both the NEC and Birmingham Airport – this in turn allows us to invite customers that are both local, and that are visiting the region.”

He added: “We are incredibly honoured and thrilled to receive this award. It’s a testament to the hard work and dedication of our entire team, who strive every day to provide exceptional food and service to our guests.

“Winning this award reinforces our commitment to excellence and motivates us to continue elevating the dining experience at Lavang.

“We are extremely grateful to our loyal customers for their support, and we look forward to sharing many more memorable moments with them.”

One customer who visited the restaurant in August this year and shared their experience on Tripadvisor.

They wrote: “After finding this gem of a restaurant I haven’t dined anywhere else for the same type of cuisine! That’s saying something because I love going to different places.

“Starters often taste better than the mains in a lot of restaurants; possibly because when you first sit down you’re hungry. Not here! Starters and mains are perfectly prepared each and every time; you truly savour and enjoy the whole meal.

“The level of service attention, helpfulness and friendliness is at exactly the right level creating a relaxed ambience of a great evening out.”

Another offered a tip with their review: “Do book as it’s always busy but this does not detract from its quality – it just adds to the enjoyable buzz of the restaurant.”

Two restaurants that missed out on the top spot on Tripadvisor’s hidden gems list were Sotto Sotto in Bath and Coronation Curry House in Bristol.

Sotto Sotto is an Italian restaurant known for using high-quality ingredients and its romantic setting.

It’s located in a basement cellar with stone vaulted ceilings and bare brick walls, with candlelit tables. 

Coronation Curry House in Bristol has fun colourful decor and Indian artwork adorning the wall, and customers describe its chicken tikka as “comforting and tender”.

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