Sir Keir Starmer and his Labor Party team are reveling in warm, cuddly sentiments about the European Union. While Starmer has ruled out returning to the customs union or EU single market, Labor says it will improve the UK’s relations with the EU by negotiating a veterinary agreement that would reduce border controls and seek mutual recognition agreements that would allow touring artists and professionals to export their products. Services to the EU.
But what is equally clear is that Labour’s feelings about the EU are not reciprocated. Labour’s proposals were met with brutal disdain from EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. He warned that the EU would block Labour’s plan to improve Brexit terms as “uselessness” if Britain did not accept all the obligations of the single market, including the free movement of workers. Barnier’s intervention highlights a fact known to everyone except those who, for some reason, still yearn for 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 the EU wants is to use trade terms as carrots and force its neighbors to comply with product standards and rules dictated by Brussels. The EU has achieved almost complete compliance with single market rules by the EEA countries Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Switzerland has fought harder against EU attempts to contain it, but it still has to comply with EU rules in many areas and accept the free movement of workers.
This is what makes trade negotiations with the EU much more difficult and dangerous than negotiating with other trading partners around the world. If they think trade makes sense from their perspective, they will agree to things like mutual recognition, for example by allowing their professionals to export their services to the UK market in exchange for access to professionals in the UK.
But the EU will also demand that the UK maintain control over its own rules as the price of such regulation. In exchange for mutual recognition of professional qualifications, professions in the UK will be required to comply with the rules set out in the EU’s own directives. In return for a seemingly innocuous veterinary deal to ease border controls on meat, he will demand that Britain comply with the full extent of the EU’s own entrenched veterinary medicines law.
Most worryingly, Rachel Reeve suggests Labor will seek mutual recognition for bankers and financial services workers, paving the way for Brussels to reimpose some of the anti-competitive rules it has just gotten rid of.
It is extremely harmful to comply with EU rules that are beyond our control. We have no right to vote on future changes that will be made in the EU’s interests and not in our interests. This takes away democracy and our right to control our own laws. It prevents us from innovating and improving the competitiveness of our economy, and it could also interfere with our trade agreements around the world with other countries that view many Brussels rules as protectionist barriers to their exports.
Starmer and Reeve’s comments about trying to negotiate with the EU to improve Brexit terms reveal that they are naive about the EU and its goals. Their initiative will fail completely in the face of the EU’s demands – probably the most likely outcome – but if they do strike a deal, it is likely to come at a very heavy price, such as loss of independence and control in exchange for modest trade benefits.
But Labor would more openly and enthusiastically follow the path already secretly followed by Rishi Sunak and his government. Last year he abandoned Liz Truss’s Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, passed by the House of Commons, which would have resolved the issue of EU laws applying in Northern Ireland. Instead, it agreed to the Windsor Framework, which consolidated the EU’s control over all laws relating to goods in Northern Ireland in exchange for some narrow and limited relaxations on trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
It’s not just Northern Ireland that’s affected. Jeremy Hunt was unable to increase the VAT registration threshold for the whole of the UK by more than £5,000 due to the EU’s VAT rules that apply in Northern Ireland. As part of the government’s deal to bring the DUP back into power sharing, it agreed to limit differences between rules on goods in Great Britain and EU rules to prevent further barriers to trade within the UK across the Irish Sea. .
Of course, there is nothing wrong with removing barriers to trade within the UK, but this 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 Labour, excited by the harmless goal of making trade with the EU easier, but naively eager to cede back to the EU the hard-won control of our laws. The Conservatives, who have a record of pushing the UK deeper into EU compliance over the last two years, despite their opposition to Brexit, with reform promising to repeal all remaining EU law and scrap the Windsor Framework. Or of course the Liberal Democrats, who have a longer-term goal of returning to EU membership.