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Keir Starmer’s EU reset is built on a lie. It won’t bring a better deal for Britain

Labour is offering Brussels concessions for what? A more cordial atmosphere and an annual summit

It’s almost like the old days after the Brexit referendum. The Prime Minister and his emissaries go back and forth to Brussels for talks with the EU Commission. 
There are warm words in public about the close UK/EU relationship, but behind the scenes there is the familiar disdainful sneering at the UK’s negotiating strategy, the curt dismissal of British expectations, the setting of preconditions on issues of interest to the EU before the UK can hope to talk about anything else. All we need to complete the retro feel is the return of Olly Robbins – and apparently even that is on the cards before too long.
One can only fear the worst therefore from Keir Starmer’s plan to “reset” the UK/EU relationship, which seems to have begun in earnest with his visit to Brussels this week. 
Labour’s naivety about how international relations are really conducted, coupled with the instinct of much of our establishment and bureaucracy to doff the cap to Commission negotiators, means this process is unlikely to end well. The Commission has every interest in reeling us into a series of one-sided concessions and are clever enough negotiators to achieve that. Hardly surprising, therefore, that Sir Keir should have said this week that he didn’t want a “running commentary” on the talks and that he hoped for a “respectful” tone. The last thing he wants is any light shed on what is going on.
It’s crucial at the early stage of any negotiation to have a clear idea of what is really in your interest and what you might be prepared to give to get it. 
Yet it is not obvious that Sir Keir is thinking rigorously about this at all. Labour’s declared aims are to “reset”, to reduce “friction”, to get a foreign policy and security agreement, and to agree a food and veterinary agreement. 
Yet the first two of these are just matters of tone: the easiest way to achieve them is to concede on everything meaningful in the interests of “improving the atmosphere”, and indeed that is what British negotiators largely did under Theresa May and again under the Sunak government on the Windsor Framework. 
As for a foreign policy agreement, that is much more in the EU’s interests than ours. 
We are already allied to virtually every EU member state through Nato. The purpose of such an agreement will be to lock Britain once again into handling more foreign policy business through the EU’s bureaucracy, to enable the EU to set the terms for military procurement, and to drag Britain into supporting the EU’s own military aspirations separate from Nato (plans denounced last month by the outgoing Nato secretary general). It is not obvious why any of these things are in our interest. 
Similarly, it’s far from clear why we need a food and veterinary agreement. Unprocessed agricultural goods amount to the grand total of 0.5 per cent of our total exports, and most such exporters have adjusted to the post-Brexit trade rules anyway. It’s not about complying with EU rules: British food products exported to the EU must do that already. If you want to reduce the border paperwork, then the only way to do so is to move to a single market-like arrangement in which all British food production and all food imported to Britain must comply with EU standards, according to EU law, and policed by the European Court. That is what the EU will want. 
It’s easy to see why it would want to make Britain a captive market for its expensive food – it exports three times as much food here as we do there – but not obvious why it’s in ours.
I personally wouldn’t concede either of these things. We didn’t in 2020. But if Labour were to do so, it certainly should get something valuable in return. 
Yet, because it has defined them as things the UK wants, the EU says we can’t discuss them until we have agreed to its demands first – that is, a youth mobility agreement and guaranteed access to British fishing waters. 
Even to Labour, one would hope, the idea of conceding further permanent access to our fishing grounds should be a non-starter, but who knows? 
And the youth mobility agreement on offer is laughably one-sided: any young people from anywhere in the EU could come here to work, but young Brits would get access not to the whole Union but just one EU country. Best not take a job in Luxembourg. 
All this goes to explain why this negotiation already has such an odd feel about it. We concede things in the EU’s interest in return for … conceding things in the EU’s interest. It’s a pretty strange negotiation in which we make all the substantive concessions in return for nothing more than a better atmosphere and an annual summit – things that can easily be withdrawn if the EU decides down the line it wants to turn the screw on us once again. 
But of course the Government doesn’t see it like that. For Labour, the EU is a beautiful progressive project in which national interests are set aside for the common good. Being outside it is already a kind of failure. 
So what I see as watering down a British interest it sees as a necessary accommodation to the process of putting the UK right with the EU and the world once again, slowly removing the stigma of Brexit. The end justifies the means. 
Labour simply can’t see the EU as it really is: a community of power politics, in which law is set aside if it doesn’t suit the project, one that is ineffective in standing up to real powers, but which is quite happy to bully the weak. 
That’s why it is hopelessly in the wrong frame of mind to conduct these negotiations. 
The best way of handling a bully is to be clear what is acceptable and what isn’t: don’t plead, don’t make unreciprocated concessions, stand up for yourself, and walk away if you have to. We can see Labour won’t do any of this. So another shabby deal is coming. Once it’s done it will be too late. We must expose what it is up to, and fight it, now. 

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