From the man who knows: Starmer surrenders the Brexit deal in return for nothing

The Labour government’s “reset deal” with the EU has dominated British news past this week. It has reopened the wounds of Brexit and re-ignited the arguments.  It is more than a simple reboot of relations: it is, in embryo anyway, a significant step back towards the EU by a country that has just chosen to leave it.  Why?

The simple answer is that we have a Labour government that believed its own propaganda on the trade deal that I, as British chief negotiator and subsequently minister, drew up with Michel Barnier back in 2020.  The agreement has in fact been working perfectly well.  With the partial exception of Northern Ireland, it has delivered free trade for both sides.  It has given Britain back control of its domestic regulations and allowed gradual (perhaps too gradual) innovation.  And it has enabled us to reach new trade agreements with others: Australia and New Zealand in 2023, a full free trade agreement with India — a deal that has eluded the EU for the best part of twenty years — and a first-step trade agreement with the Americans.  Britain’s economic growth, while sadly anaemic, has not suffered in relation to the rest of the EU, and indeed has been faster than France, Germany, and the whole Eurozone since the trade agreement came into force.

Our Labour government believed, despite all the evidence, this was a bad deal for Britain.  They soon discovered the truth – and realised that it wasn’t actually possible to “improve” it, in their terms, except by going back into parts of the EU’s single market.  So that is what they have done.  Britain will once again be bound by EU agrifood laws, by its emissions trading scheme, by its carbon border tariffs, and, eventually, by its energy trading rules.  Add to that the abandonment of the right to fish our own fishing waters for another 12 years.

In return, we have agreed a defence and security agreement, a risible document which essentially allows Britain, still the continent’s primary foreign policy and defence power, the right to attend a series of EU talking shops.  If anything this document is a British concession, not a benefit.  It certainly shouldn’t have been accompanied by give-aways on anything else.

In 2018, one member of the EU negotiating team was famously caught on camera by the BBC describing the provisional agreement just reached with Theresa May’s government as making Britain “our first colony”.  Fortunately, and rightly, the deal failed to pass the British parliament, and I and Boris Johnson were able to put in place the current trade arrangements.  Sadly, this week’s deal repeats all the British negotiating mistakes of 2018.  It brings us back towards EU norms again.  That’s bad for us – but it is also bad for supporters of the nation state in the EU, too.

Most Europeans, reading this week’s news, if they paid attention, will probably have thought “good if Britain’s working with us a bit more closely again” and then moved on.  But obviously there is more than that to it.

If you are sitting in the European Commission, if you are in the entourages of Emmanuel Macron or Friedrich Merz or Donald Tusk, you are going to be actively delighted.  For nothing, Britain has agreed not to be a competitor in important areas.  We’ve agreed not to innovate in our food and agriculture sector, but instead to go along with whatever the EU wants.  We’ve agreed, explicitly, not to have less “ambitious” net zero laws than the EU.  And we’ve agreed we’ll import the EU’s (50 per cent higher) carbon price without any say in how it works.

You will also be very well aware that one thing leads to another.  Starmer has sold his deal in Britain by saying there will now be barrier-free trade on food with the EU.  Yet Britain’s tariffs on many food imports are now a lot lower than the EU’s.  Unless Britain is to become a back way into the EU’s customs union, EU customs controls are going to have to bite and mean something.  It won’t be long before von der Leyen is sweetly saying, “You’ve already agreed to operate our carbon border tariffs.  Why don’t you just join the customs union for food too?”  And bit by bit we will slide back into EU rules – just without any say in them.  If you’re a Euro-federalist it is the perfect way of neutralising the Brits.

But what if you are a European national conservative, perhaps sitting in Meloni’s or Orban’s teams?  Maybe you are thinking that, while you can see the problem, it’s not a priority issue for you.  You have your own arguments with the Commission.  If the Brits are coming back, well maybe that helps a bit?

If so, I urge you to think again.  For one thing, from your point of view, the British rapprochement is entirely defanged.  We don’t get any say in laws or outcomes.  We can’t help those who don’t like the direction of the EU’s travel.  We just get locked in to others’ laws.  Moreover, if you hope that British reforms, innovation, or experimentation might make something similar happen in the EU – forget it.

For another, European national conservatives have an interest in preserving and strengthening the nation state, and ideally in weakening supranational policy-making too.  But this deal will be seen by its advocates to weaken any argument that nation states can sensibly make their own policies in important areas of national interest.  If even Britain can’t sustain national decision-making outside the EU, they will say, how are you going to be able to sustain it within it?

This reset damages British freedom and national independence.  But not only ours.  John Donne, the great English poet, famously wrote “No man is an island”.  Nor is any European nation state, for any weakening of the nation state diminishes all our nations.  European conservatives, real conservatives that is, should take heed of the poem’s final words: “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allerton CMG was Britain’s chief negotiator for exiting the European Union.