The UK has the whip hand in negotiations with the EU – it’s a shame our leaders don’t realise it
It must have seemed a brilliant wheeze. Labour would offer the EU some juicy concessions as an opening gesture, a way to (as David Lammy keeps putting it) “reset our relationship”. These concessions would bring Britain closer to Brussels in a way that Eurocrats keep saying they want. Yet they could be sold to British voters as practical improvements. Labour would go some way towards satisfying its Remainer base without reopening the issue of membership.
That, though, is not how things have worked out. Instead of delightedly accepting Sir Keir Starmer’s proposals for closer economic, energy and defence links, Brussels has produced its own list of counter-demands. If Britain wants to come under the EU’s regulatory umbrella, say the fonctionnaires, it must first “demonstrate real commitment”.
Eurocrats want us to guarantee EU access to our fishing waters after the current deal expires in 2026. They want us to scrap the mitigations we put in place to soften the regulatory border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, notably those relating to pets and parcels. And, if we won’t accept free movement in full, they want it at least for people under 30 – the so-called “youth mobility scheme”.
Labour is learning what the Conservatives found out during the disengagement talks, namely that any British proposal, even when it matches what the EU was previously asking for, is greeted with huffy remarks about cherry-picking.
When, in 2018, Theresa May offered to keep the UK within the EU’s regulatory orbit, she was told that Brexit meant Brexit, and that Britain must expect to be treated as a third country, Canada-style. When, the following year, Boris Johnson said that, OK then, he’d take a Canada-style deal, he was told that, on the contrary, the EU could not allow a near neighbour to have a different regulatory model.
Perhaps Starmer and Lammy thought that their personal histories would guarantee them a friendlier hearing. After all, the two men did not simply campaign to stay in the EU in 2016. They repeatedly attempted to overturn what Starmer called the “catastrophic” vote.
As Lammy put it (not in a bad-tempered aside, but in a newspaper article), “You can’t write off 48 per cent of voters without a serious fight, and we cannot usher in rule by plebiscite which unleashes the ‘wisdom’ of resentment and prejudice reminiscent of 1930s Europe.” Asked later whether likening Eurosceptics to Nazis wasn’t laying it on a bit strong, he replied, “I would say that that wasn’t strong enough… I don’t care how elected they were, so was the far-Right in Germany.”
Continental federalists will appreciate the sentiment (if not the Nazi reference, which they will consider bad form). But, while Starmer and Lammy may be warmly greeted in Brussels, that warmth won’t melt the EU’s basic negotiating stance, which is that Brexit must be seen to be painful, even if that means also inflicting pain on European citizens. Euro-integrationists look upon us rather as China looks upon Taiwan – as a rebel island to be brought to heel.
Hence their finger-wagging response when Labour proposes the kind of co-operation that they have been asking for. Starmer doesn’t need £2,485 glasses to see who stands to benefit the most. The mutual recognition of professional qualifications would suit both sides, but there are many more EU workers in Britain than the other way around.
An energy pact would mainly help those European states that depended on Russia, and were kept warm last winter by gas sent from Britain. Even France needed our gas when strikes closed its nuclear plants. And the EU wants us to copy its expensive carbon border tax rather than luring affected businesses from the Continent.
As for the deal on chemicals that Rachel Reeves keeps banging on about, Britain opposed the EU’s chemicals regime as a member in 2006. Brexit should be an opportunity to scrap these needlessly expensive regulations and return to the light-touch approach taken by other Anglosphere nations.
In all these areas, any gains to Britain would be dwarfed by gains to the EU. The UK, in diplomatic parlance, is not the demandeur. Yet Eurocrats treat Starmer’s proposals as pleas, to be answered only if Britain gives something in return. Tragically, some of our own negotiators are so traumatised by Brexit that they see it the same way.
Nowhere is the mismatch more pronounced than in defence and security. With the United States radically scaling down its commitment to Europe, keeping Britain involved is important to many European countries. Britain is a nuclear state with the most effective Armed Forces in Europe.
If we were to think in wholly selfish terms, we would have little interest in defending Europe from Russian revanchism. Obviously we want to see international law upheld, and we want democracy to prevail over tyranny. But, bluntly, there is no scenario in which Russian forces will be massed across the Channel threatening us.
But, given the reality of our commitment to European defence, there is a second objection: we have always seen it as Nato’s job. When we were in the EU, we resisted its attempts to create separate security structures, seeing them as, at best, duplicating and, at worst, undermining the Atlantic Alliance. So why cave in now, just as we have started to recover our global vocation through arrangements like Aukus?
Rebuffed in Brussels, Starmer has become the latest in a long line of British leaders to go to Berlin. Labour has always been slightly in awe of Germany’s supposedly grown-up Social Democrats. In advance of the 1975 referendum, Helmut Schmidt was invited to tell the Labour conference why Britain should vote to stay.
In 1998, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder co-authored a pamphlet called “Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte”. It proposed ways “to promote employment and prosperity”, which Schroeder duly did when he went on to work for Russian gas companies, becoming a Putin apologist. The paper also argued that “public expenditure as a proportion of national income has more or less reached the limits of acceptability” – since when the proportion in Britain has risen from 35 to 45 per cent.
Starmer courting the SPD Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is just the latest iteration of this love-in. Yet Germany, being an EU member, has little sovereignty in the areas he wants to discuss. Nor is it the force it was in Blair’s day. In the last two quarters, Britain’s growth was 0.7 and 0.6 per cent, the highest in the G7; Germany’s was 0.2 per cent and minus 0.1 per cent – the lowest. The idea that the EU will end up doing Germany’s bidding because Germany pays the bills has stopped being true (if ever it was).
Labour’s European policy is based on two false premises. First, it believes that any imperfections in the current deal are due to Tory stand-offishness rather than Brussels vindictiveness. In fact, at every stage in the negotiations, Britain pushed for the closest possible trade links. Again and again, we have made concessions that have gone unreciprocated, whether granting equivalence to EU financial services companies or letting EU passport holders use our e-gates.
Second, Labour believes that Britain is poorer as a result of Brexit, and that cosying up to the EU is thus a pro-growth policy. In fact, Britain has outgrown the Eurozone consistently since the referendum, and is forecast to carry on doing so.
Instead of pressing our noses disconsolately against the window, we should let the EU come to us with proposals for closer economic links. And we should have our own counter-demands ready – starting with the dismantling of needlessly intrusive checks in Northern Ireland. But, for Labour, this is less about practical objectives than about a deep psychological need to atone for Brexit. Which is, if you think about it, the worst possible frame of mind in which to approach negotiations.