Next week’s agreement with the European Union will be the third, the most important and yet also the least substantial trade deal that Sir Keir Starmer will have struck this month.
The India-UK agreement has a great deal of long-term potential, giving Britain easier access to the most populous market in the world, although the government cautiously estimates that it will add just 0.1 per cent to British national income in 15 years’ time.
The US-UK agreement is a welcome exercise in damage limitation, reducing the cost to the British economy of Donald Trump’s tariff war.
But it is the EU-UK agreement that offers the best prospect of making the British people better off in the short as well as the long term. The easier that we can make exports to and imports from the EU single market, our biggest single trading partner, the better it will be for Britain’s uncertain prosperity.
As with the US deal, of course, it could be said that this “reset” of the EU relationship is an attempt to limit damage – in this case, the harm done to the British economy by Brexit. What would have been best for our living standards would have been if we had remained a member of the EU.
However, there is no point in relitigating that decision, taken nearly 10 years ago. Ever since, The Independent has argued that if we must leave the EU, we should try to have the “softest” Brexit possible. Unfortunately, Boris Johnson, by his weakness and opportunism, delivered a needlessly “hard” Brexit and made the country poorer than it ever needed to have been.
Now, Sir Keir has a golden opportunity to rebalance the terms of our exit from the EU. We accept, reluctantly, that now is not the time for the government to be talking about rejoining – although it would be good to hear more from politicians who are not ministers about how a plan to rejoin in some years’ time might work.
We do not know exactly what is going to be announced on Monday, when Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and António Costa, president of the EU Council, visit Downing Street.
Indeed, some of the wording of the communique has yet to be finalised, as the two sides engage in last-moment wrangling over fish and the youth mobility scheme – how typical that seems of decades of EU-UK negotiations.
And whatever is announced on Monday then has to be hammered out in a legal agreement in further torturous negotiations, expected to last for at least the rest of this year.
But we are anticipating a defence and security agreement that will usefully enhance European cooperation in the face of President Donald Trump’s downgrading of US support for Ukraine and Europe’s defence generally.
The main feature of the trade aspect of the “reset” is expected to be a veterinary agreement that will make it easier to import and export food and agricultural goods. This is welcome, but does not go as far as it could in reducing the friction of border checks for the rest of our trade.
Sir Keir insists that he will not cross his self-imposed red lines and that Britain will not seek to rejoin the single market or the customs union – but there ought to be creative ways of easing trade that stay inside those red lines.
Our hope is that, if the rest of the “reset” on Monday goes well, it will open up political space for the government to seek more ambitious deals down the line. If the two sides can agree on a youth mobility scheme that allows equal numbers of young people to work or study in the EU and the UK – along similar lines to the scheme that allows young Australians to work in Britain – that would allow Sir Keir to sell the benefits of a closer relationship with the EU without returning to free movement.
But the prime minister will have to work hard to ensure his legacy does not become one rooted in the “Rwanda-lite” bid to send failed asylum seekers abroad to Albania, in an attempt to appeal to those wooed by Reform UK’s hard-right stance on immigration.
Once the benefits of a softer Brexit deal become apparent, and the charge from the Conservatives and Reform that it involves “reversing” Brexit is disproved, Sir Keir should be able to move “further and faster”, in his words, towards a closer and mutually beneficial relationship with the EU.
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