Starmer's reset inflicts real harm on the British economy

Yahoo

20-05-2025

There is a coherent case for Britain to rejoin the EU as a full member. There is an even more coherent case for it to be a self-governing nation under its own Parliament, laws and courts, geared towards world trade and diplomacy.
There is no coherent case for what Sir Keir Starmer has just agreed with Brussels. It breaches a large constitutional and democratic principle by submitting Britain to the EU's law-making machinery over food and farming, as a satellite state without voting rights, which is what 'dynamic alignment' means.
It violates the terms of our membership in the Asia-Pacific trade pact (CPTPP) and guarantees lawsuits that will put us in an invidious position. It shows that Britain cannot be trusted to uphold a treaty arrangement that it has just joined.
It signals to the world that there is no longer much point trying to do a deal with Britain since the country has given up part of its regulatory autonomy. Can anything now be salvaged from talks about stage two of the US trade talks?
Labour recrossed this legal Rubicon without a mandate, for no plausible economic gain and probably at a substantial economic loss. It could hardly have made a greater mess of the matter.
The only reason why a sane government would agree to such one-sided terms is if the true objective is to shift this country back into the EU orbit one step at a time, creating a series of precedents via the incremental Monnet method until the logic becomes unstoppable.
The key stakeholders supposed to benefit from the 'great prize' of Sir Keir's reset do not want it on these terms.
British farmers and the food and drinks industry would certainly like to cut the sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) barriers imposed by Brussels in a needlessly aggressive fashion after Brexit, but they have also stated that this is no longer paramount and should not be sought at any price.
They are finding that life outside the EU has its compensating advantages after all.
Tom Bradshaw, the president of the National Farmers Union, fired a warning shot last week. 'It's vital that any progress on an SPS agreement protects our ability to make our own production choices. The new EU-UK SPS agreement must respect the UK's autonomy while reducing barriers to trade,' he said.
Ministers present dynamic alignment as a cleaning-up exercise to remove barriers in one area for mutual gain. This is political malpractice. The clause gives the European Commission deep reach into laws governing wide areas of the British economy, extending into biosciences and the fast-growing ag-tech sector.
The EU did not insist on dynamic alignment in its deal with New Zealand for the obvious reason that global trade is not conducted on such terms, and Wellington would have walked away. Consenting sovereign states normally trade on the basis of mutual recognition, and agree to differ on laws.
To add parody to injury, Britain had to pay for Sir Keir's prize with 12 years of fish, along with the continued eco-degradation caused by European bottom-trawling megaboats. Will the UK have to repeal its post-Brexit ban on live animal exports and the use of animals for testing cosmetics?
Presumably, the UK will have to replicate the EU's curbs on gene-editing, and in particular a 2018 ruling by the European Court of Justice that raises the bar on gene-edited crops to near impossible levels.
Will it have to accept the EU's Novel Foods Regulation, which has led to an exodus of European start-up companies developing lab-grown proteins and precision fermentation, both of which will be required to feed the world?
A majority of EU states are digging in their heels, calling cellular agriculture a 'threat to genuine food production methods at the very heart of the European farming model'. The Italian, French, Spanish and Romanian agro-industry knows how to weaponise the 'precautionary principle'.
How is this going to be compatible with the Food Standards Agency's new regime for cultivated protein, which aims to create a top global hub in Britain for ag-tech innovation?
'The UK has a unique opportunity to be a global leader in the alternative protein industry,' said Lydia Collas, from the Green Alliance, a think tank.
She said the sector could be worth almost £7bn a year by 2035, but whether that happens depends on securing a 'specific exemption' from alignment as the detailed terms of the deal are thrashed out.
It is an example of the rising costs of moving back into the EU legal orbit, but only one of many. Brussels has also shot itself in the foot on AI by trying to become the world's super-regulator, rushing through a sledgehammer directive before it understands what the technology does.
We have probably gone beyond the economic crossover point on Brexit. We have been through the adjustment – and survived, in better shape than I feared. At this stage the British economy would probably suffer net damage by becoming entangled in the EU Acquis again.
The calculus depends on what you think has happened since 2016. What I see from my angle covering the world economy is that the UK has done no worse than the big three eurozone economies. Any Brexit effect has been overwhelmed by the larger shocks of Covid, Putin and Trump.
What puzzles me about this reset saga is why Labour is still in thrall to the EU since a) it is an increasingly reactionary project; and b) it is in serious economic trouble.
The political centre of gravity has moved to the Right. The European Council and Parliament are becoming hostile to Labour's belief system. Hard-Right parties are ascendant or waiting in the wings across most of the major states, and Hungary and Slovakia have gone over to Putin.
Why does Labour want our laws to be set by the parties of Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders or by Alternative for Germany, rather than by our own Parliament?
I would advise Labour ministers to shut themselves away for a morning and read the Draghi report. All illusions will fall away. They will learn just how far the EU has fallen behind America in digital tech, and how far behind China in green tech. Why is this still a model in the Labour mind?
I don't wish to be stubbornly purist about an EU reset. I backed Rishi Sunak's Windsor deal. I back closer defence ties, though not if presented as a British 'ask'. I am relaxed about free movement – within limits – because we are in a new era of cut-throat global competition for high-skilled labour.
If the plan is to shoehorn the UK back into the EU, Labour should have told us in its manifesto last year. It went to great lengths instead to disguise any such intention. Why might that be?
This is to repeat the insidious practice of both the EU priesthood and the British establishment over the last half century of slipping through European integration by stealth, with hooks in the fine print of seemingly innocuous texts, and lying to the people at every stage.
God forbid that we should ever go back to that.
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