Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour team enjoy warm cuddly feelings about the European Union. Although Starmer has ruled out returning to the customs union or the EU’s single market, Labour says that it will improve the UK’s relationship with the EU by negotiating a veterinary agreement to reduce border checks and seeking mutual recognition agreements allowing touring artists and professionals to export their services to the EU.
But what is equally clear is that Labour’s feelings about the EU are not reciprocated. Labour’s overtures were met with a brutal put-down from EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. He warned that the EU will block Labour’s plan to improve the terms of Brexit as “cherry picking”, unless the UK accepts the full obligations of the single market, including free movement of workers. Barnier’s intervention highlights a truth which is apparent to everyone, except, for some reason, to those who still hanker for a step by step return to EU membership. The EU is not interested in improving trade with its neighbours as an end in itself. What it wants is to use trade terms as a carrot and stick to force its neighbours into following product standards and rules dictated by Brussels.The EU has achieved near total compliance with its single market rules by the EEA countries Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Switzerland has put up more of a fight against the EU’s attempts to impose control on it, but still has to follow EU rules in many areas and to accept the free movement of workers.
This is what makes negotiating about 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 trading sense from their point of view, for example by allowing their professionals to export their services into the UK market in return for giving access to professionals from the UK.
But the EU will also demand control over the UK’s own rules as part of the price of this kind of arrangement. In return for mutual recognition of professional qualifications, it will demand that UK professions comply with the rules laid down in the EU’s own directives. In return for a seemingly innocuous veterinary agreement to ease border checks on meat, it will demand that the UK comply with the whole panoply of the EU’s own ossified veterinary medicines law.
Most worryingly, Rachel Reeve has suggested that Labour would seek mutual recognition for bankers and financial services workers, which would open the door to Brussels reimposing some of its anti-competitive rules from which the City has only just been freed.
Aligning with EU rules over which we have no control is extremely damaging. We have no vote on future changes to them, which will be made in the EU’s interests and not in ours. This negates democracy and our right to control our own laws. It prevents us from innovating and improving the competitiveness of our economy, and can also interfere with our trade deals around the world with other countries who regard many Brussels rules as protectionist barriers against their own exports.
Starmer’s and Reeve’s comments about trying to negotiate with the EU to improve the terms of Brexit reveal their naivety about the EU and its objectives. Their attempt will either fail altogether in the face of the EU’s demands – probably the most likely outcome – but if they do a deal, it is likely to involve a very heavy price in loss of independence and control in return for modest trade benefits.
But Labour would only be following more overtly and enthusiastically a route already embarked on surreptitiously by Rishi Sunak and his government. Last year he abandoned Liz Truss’s Northern Ireland Protocol Bill which had been passed by the House of Commons and would have solved the problem of EU laws applying in Northern Ireland. Instead he agreed the so-called Windsor Framework, which entrenched the EU’s control over all laws relating to goods in Northern Ireland, in return for some narrow and limited easings on trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
It is not only Northern Ireland which is affected. Jeremy Hunt was unable to increase the VAT registration threshold for the whole of the UK by more than a paltry £5000, because of the EU’s VAT rules which apply in Northern Ireland. And as part of the government’s deal to get the DUP back into power sharing, it agreed to limit divergences between the rules relating to goods in Great Britain and EU rules, in order to avoid further barriers to trade across the Irish Sea inside the United Kingdom.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with preventing barriers to trade inside the UK, but this should be done by freeing Northern Ireland from EU rules, not by shadowing EU rules across the whole of the UK.
So the choice is between Labour which enthuses about easing trade with the EU, an innocuous objective in its own right, but is naïvely willing to cede hard-won control over our laws back to the EU. The Conservatives, whose record over the past two years is one of tying the UK deeper into aligning with EU laws, despite their protestations of delivering Brexit. Reform which promises to axe all remaining EU laws and scrap the Windsor Framework. Or of course the Liberal Democrats, who have a longer term objective of returning to EU membership.