‘We cannot let the challenges of the recent past define our relationships of the future,’ declared the Prime Minister ahead of today’s meeting of the European Political Union at Blenheim Palace. The meeting, he added, ‘will fire the starting gun on this government’s new approach to Europe’. The subtext to this is: the grown-ups are back in charge, and from now on we are going to have a far more constructive relationship with the EU. Keir Starmer has even promised a renegotiation of Britain’s trading relationship with the EU, which is supposedly going to make life easier for our exporters.
Keir Starmer has even promised a renegotiation of Britain’s trading relationship with the EU
He can dream on. If he really thinks that the EU is going to treat him in a fundamentally different way than it treated David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, he is in for a rude awakening. The EU will carry on behaving as it did throughout the Brexit process: do all it can to try to ensure that Britain gets as bad a deal as possible, even to the point of cutting off its own nose to spite its face and making life difficult for EU companies which want to do business in Britain. It will do so because it has become a macrocosm of the old East Germany. It needs to erect barriers because it is terrified of losing more member states – a threat which has intensified following the election of far-right MEPs in the European Parliament elections in June.
The EU could have avoided Brexit altogether had it treated Cameron with a little less disdain when he went to try to renegotiate the UK’s membership ahead of the 2016 referendum. It should have been obvious that it needed to send Cameron home from Brussels boasting of some kind of victory. Instead it treated his request for a brake on free movement with contempt – in spite of knowing the high levels of concern in Britain (not to mention other EU states) that free movement was undermining local labour markets and overloading public services in some places. All the EU would offer was a one-off four year set of restrictions on benefits paid to migrant workers. Even then, Britain would be obliged to pay child benefit to children who were not even living in Britain, although payments could have been reduced to reflect the cost of living in the country where the children lived.
The result of the EU’s intransigence was a referendum which was narrowly lost, followed by Brexit itself. During those negotiations, lest it be forgotten, the EU refused to discuss anything until Britain had agreed to pay a large bill for leaving. It declined to enter talks for a trade deal until we had actually left and were trading under the transitional arrangements. When a trade deal did come into force we soon learned that that the absence of tariffs was more than compensated for by non-tariff barriers – i.e. petty forms of regulation – designed to make life a misery for UK exporters to the EU.
That is the kind of ‘constructive’ attitude which Starmer can expect again. The first test is going to be the Prime Minister’s promise of a ‘migrant returns deal’ under which France and other countries would agree to take back asylum-seekers who have travelled to Britain from EU countries.
But there is, needless to say, a sting in the tail. Such an agreement would depend on Britain accepting a certain number of refugees already granted asylum in other EU states. A genuine, balanced treaty of this kind would make sense, but it is not hard to guess where this is going to go. The EU will eye up Britain as a suitable dumping ground for migrants. The EU will try to make sure that the numbers of migrants which Britain is bound to accept vastly outweigh the numbers currently making the Channel crossing to Britain. And will France really take back migrants who have travelled to Britain anyway? We are already paying France supposedly to police its shores and stop the boats, yet is France really doing all it can to prevent boats from entering UK waters?
Maybe I am being too cynical, but I will believe that the EU is prepared to enter a new, more positive relationship with Britain when I see it.
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