Sir Keir Starmer boldly claimed in the House of Commons this week that his ‘reset’ deal with the EU would ‘release us from the tired arguments of the past’. The truth is that it will do the exact opposite. The country will need to confront yet again tired old arguments which we thought had been resolved.
Brexit was all about getting back control of our laws, our borders and our money. A Brexit in which we formally leave the European Union but still follow its laws is senseless. We lose our freedom to choose our laws, and we don’t even have a vote on the shape of the laws which continue to govern us.
This reset agreement is a disaster for Brexit, for the UK and for the future relationship between the UK and the EU
Such has been the political rush to get the Starmer reset deal announced that no actual legal text has been agreed. Instead, there are a series of vague aspirational documents containing agreements of principle. But they are concrete enough to reveal an astonishing series of concessions and surrenders by the Starmer government to the EU in return, as far as one can see, for nothing at all.
Huge concessions are disguised by technical verbiage. There will be a so-called UK-EU ‘Sanitary and Phytosanitary Zone’. In fact this means a commitment by the UK to apply the whole of the EU’s rules on the production, distribution and consumption of agrifood products, live animals and pesticides, rules on organics and marketing standards. This pulls the UK back into the EU single market across the whole field of food and agriculture. It is a flagrant breach of Labour’s 2024 election manifesto promise that there will be no return to the single market.
The UK will be obliged to ‘dynamically’ apply EU rules. This means that whenever the EU changes its rules in this field, the UK must follow. In addition, those rules will be interpreted under a dispute resolution mechanism which ensures that the ECJ is ‘the ultimate authority’ on the interpretation of those rules. Thus, not only will we be accepting a huge body of foreign law to apply across the country, but we will also be accepting that that law is to be interpreted by a foreign court. And not just any court, but a court with a track record of ignoring legal texts in order to further the European project.
Despite the fact that the last government found itself able to make only limited changes to the huge body of EU law which we inherited at Brexit, the reimposition of that law as it stands today would do huge damage. One important change which has been belatedly made in our law is to allow gene editing of crops, a vital technology for the British life sciences sector and for the benefit of consumers. This was banned within the EU by a technophobic decision of the ECJ. If this ban is reimposed on the UK then a whole industry will be killed stone dead.
The government claims that this SPS agreement will allow the easing of checks on some goods which are traded between the UK and the EU. But the solution of applying the whole of EU law to agricultural goods which never go near the EU in order to avoid paperwork on the small percentage of some kinds of goods which are exported there is crazy. The government could more usefully have pressed for mutual recognition of agricultural standards, which the EU has agreed with New Zealand. This requires basic food safety standards but does not mean that all regulations have to be the same.
It is difficult and dangerous to negotiate with the EU. Unlike most other trading partners, the EU is not interested in trade for its own sake. Instead, it constantly tries to use trade and trade agreements as a means of exercising control and imposing its own standards. One important objective of the EU in doing this is to drive up the cost of production to EU levels, making it easier for their own producers to compete, and to keep out competing goods from other countries which do not conform with EU rules even though they are completely safe. For this reason, this SPS agreement risks senselessly damaging the prospects of a UK-US trade agreement.
We are a net food importer from the EU so this SPS agreement is a massive concession, locking in a highly profitable UK market for the EU where they can sell at well above world food prices. And in return for making this concession, we are to make further concessions. Our fishing waters, which were to return to us next year under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, will continue to be plundered by the EU until 30 June 2038 – 22 years after the UK voted to leave the EU.
And we are to make further concessions. We are to negotiate participation in the EU’s internal electricity market under an agreement which ‘should include dynamic alignment with EU rules where relevant’ – again involving the jurisdiction of the ECJ.
A youth mobility scheme and the re-entry of the UK to the Erasmus programme are touted as potential benefits of this reset. Past experience shows that both freedom of movement and the Erasmus programme operated vastly in favour of the EU and against the UK, with the number of British nationals going to the EU hugely outnumbered by EU nationals coming the other way.
Other claims have been made about this reset, such as that it will enhance cooperation against illegal migration and enable better defence cooperation and possibly the participation of British defence firms in EU procurement programmes. The vague text on talks about talks gives no assurance of any such participation.
This reset agreement is a disaster for Brexit, for the UK and for the future relationship between the UK and the EU. It was possible to hope that that relationship might be progressively improved over time on the basis of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement. That could do with improvement but is basically satisfactory for an independent UK trading with the EU and the rest of the world. The Starmer reset will take us back in time to when Remainers were devising mechanisms to achieve a BRINO (Brexit in Name Only). It will turn our whole agriculture, food and energy sectors into BRINOs where the UK will be a vassal state subject to laws over which we have no control.
Unfortunately neither Starmer himself nor the civil service caste which is incompetently conducting these negotiations seems to have learned anything from that bitter period of time. If this reset goes through, Leave voters will be disrespected once again, and we will need to have another rupture with the EU before we can hope to be once again an independent nation in control of our own laws.
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