by Sir Keir Starmer and his Labor team love warm feelings about the European Union. While Starmer ruled out a return to the EU’s customs union or single market, Labor says he will improve the UK’s relationship with the EU by negotiating a vet deal to reduce border checks and seek recognition agreements with touring artists and professionals are allowed to export. services for the EU.
But what is equally clear is that Labour’s feelings towards the EU are not renewed. A brutal ban by the EU’s Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, was ended by Labour’s overtures. He warned that the EU will block Labour’s plan to improve the terms of Brexit as “cherry-picking”, unless the UK accepts full single market obligations, including free movement of workers. Barnier’s intervention highlights a truth that is clear to all, except, for some reason, to those who still want a step-by-step return to EU membership. The EU is not interested in improving trade with its neighbors as an end in itself. What he wants is to use trade terms as a carrot and stick to pressure his neighbors to follow product standards and rules laid down by Brussels. The EU has almost full compliance with its single market rules by the EEA countries of Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Switzerland has put up more of a fight against EU attempts to control it, but it still has to follow EU rules in many areas and accept the free movement of workers.
This is what makes negotiating trade with the EU much more difficult and dangerous than negotiating with other trading partners around the world. They will agree to things like mutual recognition if they think it makes good business sense, for example by allowing their professionals to export their services into the UK market in exchange for giving access to UK professionals .
But the EU will also demand control over the UK’s own rules as part of the price of this arrangement. In return for mutual recognition of professional qualifications, it will require UK professions to comply with the rules set out in the EU’s own directives. In return for a seemingly innocuous veterinary agreement to ease border checks on meat, he will require the UK to comply with the full breadth of the EU’s own veterinary medicines law.
More worryingly, Rachel Reeve has proposed that Labor seek mutual recognition for bankers and financial services workers, which would open the door to Brussels re-imposing some of its anti-competitive rules that the City does not but just after being free.
Aligning with EU rules over which we have no control is very damaging. We have no vote on future changes to them, which will be done for the benefit of the EU and not for us. This rejects democracy and our right to govern our own laws. It prevents us from innovating and improving the competitiveness of our economy, and it can also affect our trade markets around the world with other countries that see many of Brussels’ rules as protective barriers against their own exports.
Starmer and Reeve’s comments about their attempt to negotiate with the EU to improve the terms of Brexit show their naivety about the EU and its objectives. Their bid against the EU’s demands will fail completely – the most likely outcome – but if they do agree, the loss of independence and control in exchange for benefits is likely to come at a very heavy price. small trade.
But Labor would only follow more clearly and enthusiastically in a way that Rishi Sunak and his government have already started to continue. Last year he abandoned Liz Truss’ Northern Ireland Protocol Bill which had been passed by the House of Commons and which would have solved the problem of EU laws in force in Northern Ireland. Instead he agreed to the so-called Windsor Framework, which extended EU control over all laws relating to goods in Northern Ireland, in return for some limited trade facilitation between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
It is not just Northern Ireland that is involved. Jeremy Hunt was unable to increase the VAT registration threshold for the whole of the UK by more than £5000, due to the EU VAT rules in force in Northern Ireland. And as part of the government’s move to get the DUP back into power sharing, they agreed to limit differences between the rules governing goods in Great Britain and those of the EU, to further barriers to trade across the Irish Sea within of the United Kingdom to avoid. .
Of course, there is nothing wrong with removing barriers to trade within the UK, but that should be done by freeing Northern Ireland from EU rules, not by overshadowing EU rules across the whole of the UK.
So the choice is between Labor enthusiastic about easing trade with the EU, a benign objective in itself, but naively willing to cede control of our hard-won laws to the EU. The Conservatives, who have held the record for the past two years as one of the UK’s most deeply committed into alignment with EU laws, despite their objections to delivering Brexit. A reform that promises to scrap all remaining EU laws and end the Windsor Framework. Or of course the Liberal Democrats, whose longer-term objective is to return to EU membership.
