Dear Subscribers,
Chancellor Rachel Reeves will join the Eurogroup meeting of EU finance ministers this week and is expected to call for closer economic cooperation between the EU and the UK. The big risk is that the government swaps regulatory alignment for privileged access to aspects of the single market. This would be the worst of both worlds: rejecting the opportunity to design bespoke rules that are in British national interests while also having no seat at the table when rules are designed in Brussels.
Minister goes to the wrong meeting.
The EU Commission has concluded a free trade deal with Mercosur, the South American trade bloc. The deal has been in the works for 25 years. It is extremely unpopular in France, where people are worried about poultry and beef imports undercutting farmers. The deal must now be ratified by the Council and the Parliament, and some aspects covering investment will have to be ratified by each individual member state legislature.
Michel Barnier has resigned as Prime Minister of France after losing a confidence vote following a botched attempt to pass a budget. It was always a strange appointment: a veteran establishment conservative appointed just after voters had abandoned establishment parties for popular movements on the left and the right.
Bye bye Barnier
Keir Starmer set out six ‘milestones’ by which he wants voters to judge him at the next election. With respect to the Prime Minister, voters should judge him by whichever standards they choose, not by standards he sets for himself. Pundits say the latest ‘reset’ is a sign that Starmer is a man without a plan, but Starmer’s various plans, missions, milestones, etc. are fairly consistent. Perhaps a better explanation is that the Whitehall machine is a hindrance as much as it is a help.
Media
Briefings co-editor Prof. Robert Tombs on Macron’s legacy of failure.
Kate Hoey on the Windsor Framework
Blog
Another attempt to turn the UK into an EU colony by Catherine McBride
The CITP paper promoting dynamic alignment with the EU’s SPS regulations is full of half-truths. The paper’s assumption that only border checks could have contributed to the decline in UK agrifoods exports to the EU shows a complete misunderstanding of the economics of trade and is a misreading of the trade data.
The UK now has free trade agreements with some large agricultural producers. Not just Australia and New Zealand but also Peru, Chile, Mexico, Canada, Malaysia and Vietnam. And we may soon have trade agreements with India and maybe even the US. Why would anyone want to tie the UK into an SPS agreement with the EU when we are the buyer of their products, and the EU should know – the customer is always right. Perhaps the EU would consider complying with UK animal welfare regulations in order to continue exporting 650 thousand tonnes of pork and 300 thousand tonnes of beef to the UK each year. Have our trade officials even suggested this? I doubt it. Maybe our trade officials need to ‘be more Trump’. To coin a phrase.
Key Points
Alistair Campbell was on BBC Question Time this week and appeared to make a case for ‘rejoin’, saying he was disappointed that Keir Starmer had not mentioned Brexit in his big ‘reset’ speech. Campbell repeated some of the usual falsehoods and remainer fantasies and got the usual tepid applause for it. But for all his talk of ‘the future’, his position, like that of all rejoiners, is fundamentally nostalgic.
Campbell’s argument was that Brexit caused significant economic damage to this country, and so to repair that damage Keir Starmer should lead the UK back towards Europe. The first thing to say, and Briefings has said it many times, is that there is no strong evidence that Brexit caused significant economic damage to the UK. The oft-repeated 4% hit to GDP has been thoroughly debunked.
But even if Brexit had caused significant economic damage to the UK, it does not follow that the way to recover is by going back. The EU has not flourished since 2016. The leading European economies are stagnant, France is on the brink of a debt crisis, and there is political instability across the continent. There is no evidence that EU membership is allowing existing member states to flourish in a way that Britain cannot outside the bloc.
By contrast, independence is an opportunity to explore new ideas. Instead of simply applying rules from the byzantine system of committees and commissions and councils that produces EU law, the UK can now move quickly and design its own solutions to its own peculiar problems. Surely a dynamic government with bold new ideas should be excited about the opportunities that Brexit presents?
The fantasy that rejoining the EU would be a silver bullet for Britain’s economic problems might be comforting, but it is still a fantasy, one rooted in nostalgia and one that displays a lack of imagination. Campbell and other rejoiners have no new ideas to offer and Keir Starmer would do well to ignore them.
