🇬🇧From Surrender to Strategy: the Quiet Return of EU Co-Operation
A subtler Brexit shift is underway, with Starmer eying deeper EU ties and dodging headlines while hardliners howl and Britain edges back towards pragmatism.
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Peter Beckett is a partner at Three Six One public affairs
At some point, British fishermen were going to be thrown under the bus.
There aren’t very many of them, and they produce just three-tenths of a percent of UK GDP and pay less tax than British tech giant OnlyFans. Yet, for some reason, they’ve been totemic in the Brexit debate over the last decade, and today’s right-wing media coverage leads with their supposed plight (although the people who actually process and sell fish to Europe are quite pleased with the deal).
There was only so long that fishermen (and women) could hold back the other 99.97% of Britain’s stagnating economy from a deal with Europe it desperately needs. Titans of British industry are lining up to praise the relatively modest progress made at the London summit this afternoon.
The thing is, what we have is not yet a deal, much less a surrender, despite parts of the press fervently pushing that line. It’s a “Common Understanding”. You know they want to big up something of relatively little significance when they have to make up an official-sounding name for a document.
The Common Understanding is a framework for future negotiations. If those negotiations deliver, and there is no guarantee that they will, then we’ll have an actual deal to critique. So the fisher-folk have been introduced to the underside of the bus (that part is official), but all the rest is subject to negotiations. And the difficult part of the negotiation is yet to come.
Take youth mobility. The UK and the EU have merely agreed to “work towards” an agreement on a “youth experience” scheme (because apparently calling it a “youth mobility” scheme is too triggering for the nativist right).
They’ve saved difficult conversations on numbers, what a "young person” actually means, how long this “experience” should last, and so on, for later.
Likewise, on energy co-operation, the UK hasn’t agreed to join the Single Market on electricity, but rather to “explore in detail” the necessary parameters for joining.
Those parameters are many and complex, and will no doubt lead back to questions of sovereignty and “rule-taking”. And that, just as day leads to night, will induce howls of grievance and betrayal from the right-wing press.
Energy co-operation and the much vaunted veterinary (or SPS) deal rely, to some extent, on the dreaded principle of “dynamic alignment”; or the UK agreeing to follow the EU’s rules in the areas in which it has access to the Single Market. And if those rules change, UK rules will have to change with them.
In practical terms, this doesn’t mean much.
Brexit was sufficiently recent that most EU laws in these areas have already been incorporated into UK law, and the EU is at the beginning of what looks like a sustained deregulation drive. Far from being saddled with new rules over which it has had no say, the most likely outcome is that the EU will cut some of the regulations with which the UK will likely be expected to align with dynamically.
Again, such trivialities will not stop the right-wing press shouting “surrender”.
During the Brexit negotiations, the EU had a term for this kind of selective access to the Single Market. They called it “cherry picking”, and it was omerta. Successive Conservative governments bemoaned how rigid the EU was in its negotiating stance, knocking back even the most practical suggestion of flexibility (Galileo, anyone?) for fear of giving away its sacred cherries.
Well, it looks like cherries are in season again, all Britain needed was some EU workers to pick them.
It’s taken Labour less than a year to turn that around, and now it must turn warm words on paper into binding legal agreements. The Brussels machine, which is not blameless for the air of mistrust around the original Brexit negotiations, reacts better to Labour’s honey than it does to the vinegar and blame-shifting the Conservatives served it on a near-daily basis since the June 2016 referendum.
Who’d have thought?
In quietly backing down from its hardline stance on “cherry picking”, the EU has made a significant concession that might - might - serve as a useful foundation for building future co-operation in other sectors.
This fact won’t be lost on the Cabinet Office or the Berlaymont, and is an opportunity that must be grasped with both hands, but the press won’t mention just how big a potential win this could be for British PM Keir Starmer.
Hardline Brexiters - who can be counted upon to throw their toys out of their pram at the merest hint of co-operating with Brussels - will either miss the win completely or wilfully ignore it, all while having ample time to try to roll it all back.
That’s because today’s deal does not “rip off the band-aid” of closer alignment with the EU and facing down press criticism for doing so, it’s more of a slow and painful peeling off, guaranteeing months of speculation and accusations of treason in the more excitable corners of the media establishment.
As negotiations proceed, the usual suspects can be counted upon to shout betrayal at any suggestion that the UK might accept a few young people to work in the UK for a couple of years, or that the government would agree to continue to adhere to laws that are already well established.
That bleating could lead Starmer to call the whole thing off for fear of offending Brexity voters in places Labour needs to win. It wouldn’t be the first time.
If today’s agreement is to produce a meaningful improvement in economic relations, the Faragist right will need to be faced down, and a positive case for deeper co-operation with Europe will need to be made.
If Starmer can’t - or won’t - make that case now, then he likely never will. This is why Starmer should find the courage to face down the usual suspects and tell them to suck it up and do their worst. In fact, as Robert Shrimsley said on Bluesky, if this is what “Britain’s MAGA media” were always going to do, “what was the cost to Starmer of going bigger”?
After all, the fishermen are already under the bus now, so we may as well make sure they were sent there for a good reason.
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