Latest news with #EUrelationship
The Independent
28-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Boris Johnson's ex-wife hits out at his Brexit deal
Marina Wheeler, Boris Johnson 's ex-wife, is releasing a book titled A More Perfect Union that critiques the Brexit deal her former husband negotiated. Ms Wheeler's book will advocate for a closer relationship between Britain and the EU, urging political leaders to acknowledge Europe's central role in Britain's future. The book's publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, likens Mr Johnson's Brexit deal to a bare-minimum divorce settlement, emphasising the need for broader cooperation between Britain and Europe. Ms Wheeler, a human rights lawyer who separated from Mr Johnson in 2018, argues that the current global instability presents an opportunity to rectify past mistakes and build a stronger, more unified Europe. The announcement follows Boris Johnson's recent criticism of current Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer 's Brexit deal, which he described as "hopelessly one-sided".
The Independent
19-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Starmer's EU strategy isn't a Brexit betrayal – it's a necessity
Keir Starmer is being accused of 'betraying the 2016 Brexit vote' by seeking a closer relationship with the EU to improve our economy, in his 'Brexit Reset' today. And here's why we shouldn't care. The Brexit vote was nearly 10 years ago. We voted on it before we'd even negotiated what the new relationship with the EU would be. Everyone, including the parties who supported it, thinks the new relationship is a disaster. And we're in a poverty crisis that matters a lot more than all the above. The only betrayal would be tolerating that poverty by not going far enough against Brexit. Keir Starmer's Labour Party has said for years that they would not take us back into the Single Market or Customs Union of the EU. The Single Market is how EU countries have the same rules for products and services so that anything made in one country is automatically legal to sell in another. The Customs Union is how the EU negotiates trade deals as a single bloc. Both mean that EU countries can sell products and services between each other without the need for checks or paperwork, which keeps prices down. And neither was on the ballot paper in 2016. For example, Norway, a non-EU country, is in the Single Market. In fact, Daniel Hannan, a committee member of the Vote Leave campaign, said, 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market.' And in both of the following elections, the majority voted for parties that promised to retain all the benefits of the Single Market. So Starmer's red lines about staying out of the Single Market and Customs Union have no basis in democracy. He's just making it harder for himself to properly address the cost-of-living crisis by tying his own hands during these negotiations. This raises the question: why? Last week, the prime minister announced a major crackdown on immigration, where he said that immigration risked turning the UK into an 'island of strangers'. Downing Street denies deliberately parroting Enoch Powell's famous 'Rivers of Blood' speech, where he said immigration would make Brits 'strangers in their own country'. But the fact that a Labour politician's words could even be considered an homage to one of the most famous racists in UK history should raise both alarm bells and the question 'why?' The answer is simple: the Reform Party. Keir Starmer is avoiding going too far in undoing Brexit and parroting racist lines about immigration because he's scared of losing votes to Reform. But you either believe progressive policies are good for people, or you don't. If you do, then be progressive – talk progressively and enact progressive policies so that people can see in their bank balances and their kids' bellies that lefty politicians are on their side. Making our trade with Europe less expensive – to fight poverty – while blaming immigrants and maintaining that staying out of the Single Market is in the national interest just looks confused. It sends the message that people's lives would be better if they went with a party like Reform – a party that is rabidly pro-Brexit and unashamedly hostile towards immigration. The irony is that Starmer's fear of Nigel Farage becoming prime minister is what is preventing him from properly addressing the cost-of-living crisis. And that fear of a Farage PM is what will deliver a Farage PM. This is particularly ludicrous, given that several Reform Party politicians have admitted that Brexit is making us poorer – and that if they were in charge, they would damage our food supply for the next 20 years by pursuing a No-Deal Brexi t. And we're expected to believe that Starmer, one of the most successful lawyers in the country, couldn't win a debate about whether Brexit is bad for working-class people against a party that has admitted that Brexit is bad for working-class people? If we're aligning with EU rules to make our supply chains cheaper and lower the cost of living, then just say we're moving towards the Single Market because it's in the national interest. These red lines are only slowing us down. As with any positive change in human history, one shudders to think of the number of people whose lives would have been saved or drastically improved if that change had come just a few years sooner. We know Brexit is making people poorer. Every medical body in the UK says Brexit is damaging the NHS. And we know poverty and sickness cost lives. So the question is: how many lives are going to keep being ruined because Starmer is too scared to put his foot down?
Times
18-05-2025
- Business
- Times
Resetting our relationship with the EU should be a no-brainer
Tomorrow, the government will fire the starting gun on the development of a new relationship with the European Union, with UK and EU leaders meeting for their first formal summit since Brexit. It cannot come soon enough. It's no secret that the business community was seriously sceptical about Brexit. Businesses thrive when they have open access to markets and as few trade barriers as possible. The form of Brexit we currently live with — however you cut it — is the opposite of that. It has made it harder for us to trade with our largest, closest and most important partner. A chocolate manufacturer recently told me they can get their products into the US in two days, but France can take up to two
The Independent
15-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
The Brexit ‘reset' could make or break Keir Starmer's prime ministerial legacy
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.
The Guardian
09-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Bank of England governor urges EU trade rebuild as key summit looms
The governor of the Bank of England has said that the UK now needs to do 'everything we can' to rebuild its long-term trade relationship with the EU, after a breakthrough agreement with the US to reduce some of Donald Trump's tariffs. Andrew Bailey said that while he would not pass judgment on the UK's exit from the EU in early 2020, reversing the trade impact of Brexit would be 'beneficial'. The government is in talks with the EU – after moves by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, to 'reset' trade relations since coming to power last year – before a summit in London in 10 days' time where a new UK-EU partnership is due to be unveiled. 'Having a more open economy to trade with the European Union … would be beneficial,' said Bailey, in an interview with the BBC as he prepared to make a speech in Iceland later on Friday. 'Because there has been a fall-off in goods trade with the EU over recent years.' The EU remains the UK's largest trading partner, but in sectors such as food and drink, exports have tumbled by more than a third since Brexit. 'It is important we do everything we can to ensure that whatever decisions are taken on the Brexit front do not damage the long-term trade position,' said Bailey. 'So I hope that we can use this to start to rebuild that relationship.' Earlier this week, the UK agreed a long-desired trade deal with India. The agreement, which took more than three years of negotiations under successive governments, was described by Starmer as a 'landmark deal' that would cut tariffs and add £4.8bn a year to the UK economy by 2040. Bailey said that the UK's dealmaking is setting an important example to other countries. 'It demonstrates that trade deals are important,' said Bailey. 'Trade deals can be done, and the trade is important … honestly, it seems an unpromising landscape at times. But I hope that we can use these deals to rebuild the world trading system.' On Thursday, the Bank cut interest rates by a quarter point to 4.25% to cushion the UK economy against the impact of rising economic uncertainty. The central bank also warned that the UK economy would slow by a further 0.3% over the next three years.
