Only now do we see the utter smallness of Sir Keir Starmer, the short-term, petty, tactical calculations that rule him.
Scrambling around to save his leadership, the Prime Minister has decided to give his Euro-fanatic backbenchers something symbolic.
Britain will automatically download EU rules in the fields of energy and food in return for… well, in return for nothing much beyond Europhile vibes.
Eurocrats couldn’t believe their luck. Here was a British government agreeing to something that they had barely dared ask for during the disengagement talks in 2017. No, not just agreeing to it: actively proposing it.
Rubbing their eyes in disbelief, EU officials decided to push their luck further. If Starmer wanted unilaterally to adopt various EU rules – a process known as ‘dynamic alignment’ – that was fine. But he would need to pay for the privilege.
‘The agreement would establish a permanent mechanism for an appropriate financial contribution of the UK towards reducing economic, social and territorial disparities between the regions of the EU,’ they said. ‘The financial contribution of the UK should appropriately reflect the relative size of the UK’s economy.’
We can only imagine their incredulity when the Prime Minister, who is fighting to find savings in every other budget, said yes to that, too.
It is important to be clear about what Starmer means by ‘dynamic alignment’.
What is proposed is not that Britain and the EU recognise each other’s standards in certain areas. That is the normal way in which trade agreements happen and the normal way in which the EU negotiates deals. Brussels, for example, has a mutual recognition agreement with New Zealand.
Nor is it proposed that Britain and the EU should jointly agree in advance to certain standards on, say, animal welfare or food safety.
No, what Starmer is offering, quite disgracefully, is something very different, something almost unprecedented among sovereign nations. What he proposes is to write a blank cheque. Whatever standards the EU might adopt in future, Britain will automatically copy them.
They might be ludicrously expensive. They might be inappropriate to our conditions. They might make the environment dirtier or food less safe. Whatever their content, we would have no option but to copy them.
There would be no debate in Parliament, no vote in the House of Commons. Brussels would dictate and Britain would scramble to obey.
Such arrangements are almost without precedent in the world. Tiny San Marino adopts Italy’s regulations, and Lesotho adopts South Africa’s. But for a nation of 70 million people, a nuclear-armed global power, to invite a foreign government to set its rules, has until now been unthinkable.
Starmer, tellingly, is leaning into the anti-democratic nature of what he is doing, talking up the sidelining of Parliament in the hope of picking a fight with the Eurosceptic parties in the run-up to the council elections.
As a Labour spokesman put it yesterday: ‘Reform and the Tories are stuck with the ghost of Brexit past, happy with the broken status quo. But in a world of rising global tensions, we need politicians who can build bridges rather than burn them.’
Did you ever hear such content-free fluffiness? In order to sound more pro-EU, Labour is proposing a terrible deal. In order to shore up Sir Keir Starmer’s collapsing leadership in advance of what promise to be disastrous local election results next month, ministers will ensnare their successors for decades. It is not only the Eurosceptic parties that are upset by the way the House of Commons is being ignored.
‘We need a closer relationship with Europe, but we also need parliamentary democracy,’ the Lib Dem MP Munira Wilson ingenuously told the BBC yesterday.
Well, fine, but there is a trade-off between those things, which is why we had the referendum in the first place. What is proposed now, incredibly, is even less parliamentary control than we had as full EU members.
I write, by the way, as someone who has argued for closer commercial relations with the EU. I was, and remain, a committed Brexiteer, but my Euroscepticism was always political rather than economic.
I wanted Britain to live under its own laws, not to put up trade barriers against its neighbours. My ideal is of a sovereign, global Britain, trading freely with every continent including Europe.
That, though, is not what this is about. If Starmer simply wanted easier trade in food products, he would continue to push for a mutual recognition agreement.
If the EU is unwilling to grant us one out of spite, then we should wait until it signs a trade deal with the Pacific bloc, the CPTPP, of which we are members. Since it could not then uniquely penalise Britain, any outstanding trade obstacles would be removed.
If Starmer doesn’t want to wait that long, there is another alternative. We could recognise EU food standards in parallel to our own, as we do with medicines.
In other words, British producers could choose between following UK rules (which smaller companies would generally do) and EU rules (which the relatively few number of companies that export to the EU might prefer). There are arguments for introducing such a dual system anyway. It would give us regulatory competition, ensuring British standards did not become too onerous.
But, to repeat, Starmer is not interested in practical solutions. His policy is vibes-driven, designed to show how different he is from the awful, nationalistic Tories.
The Growth Commission has calculated that the cost of unilateral alignment (as opposed to offering EU standards alongside our own) is £15billion a year.
It adds that this figure does not take account of the opportunity cost – that is, how successful Britain might become if it were free to experiment outside one of the most risk-averse regulatory regimes on the planet.
The rest of the world is forever bringing cases against the EU on grounds that its food rules have nothing to do with science and are driven by protectionism. Britain would find itself at odds with several of the countries with which it has just signed trade deals, including Australia, India and Japan. It would also have to drop the idea of a treaty with the US.
Britain would be foregoing trade with parts of the world experiencing economic growth, to copy the regulations of a shrinking bloc. Since 2009, the US economy has grown two thirds faster than that of the EU. Why tie ourselves to the Europoors?
What a betrayal. Brexit was an opportunity for Britain to be more competitive and more global, to embrace cheaper energy and ambitious trade deals. The previous Conservative government, through a combination of feebleness, civil service inertia and Covid distractedness, failed to seize those opportunities. Now a Labour government is ensuring that they will never be seized.
British ministers and Eurocrats are working to ensure their deal is ‘Farage-proof’, meaning a future administration could not withdraw from it without triggering sanctions in unrelated fields.
Shame on Keir Starmer. And shame on the rest of us for putting up with him.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is President of the Institute for Free Trade
