UK Government is paving the way for Labour’s great Brexit betrayal

David Frost

The Leader of the Opposition has finally come clean. To the Financial Times (of course), Keir Starmer says that he will renegotiate the Brexit arrangements we put in place in 2020. We always knew he would, but it’s good to have it said.
For some reason, Starmer thinks the 2020 deal is “thin”. In fact, it’s the biggest and broadest such deal ever – the first deal with no tariffs on any of either side’s goods, and including not just trade but also aviation, transport, social security, health (your UK health insurance card is valid in the EU thanks to this deal), fisheries, security and law enforcement, and more. So for Starmer and Labour, this is all about ideology not fact.
He also thinks Brexit is “not working”. Economically, that’s obviously not true – as the ONS’s recent sudden correction told us. What he really means is that “self-government is not working”: that Britain cannot govern itself without an injection of EU laws from Brussels. That’s clearly what metro “progressive” Labour really thinks, and it’s what makes these renegotiation ideas so dangerous. Possibly Starmer is operating in the fantasy world in which the EU will make concessions purely because they are so pleased to see Labour back in charge in Westminster. In reality, no one on the EU side is pressing to change this deal. Yes, in 2020 the EU wanted the review mechanisms in case we rapidly and aggressively exploited our Brexit freedoms while still having zero tariffs. They can see there is not much risk of that now, more’s the pity, so why would they do anything other than tinker at the edges?
The only people who want to go back to the argument are the unreconciled fanatics on both sides of the Channel: on one side Guy Verhofstadt sneering at British democracy on Twitter; on the other, David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, who in 2019 compared Brexiteers to Nazis and proponents of South African apartheid. If Starmer is indulging in such wishful thinking, he’ll get nothing.
But it’s hard to see his Islington base being happy with this. Labour will have to offer fundamental change, a return to EU law and supervision. Perhaps Starmer will begin with a food and veterinary deal, accepting the only one that will be on offer, one that comes with the imposition of EU laws and control by the Commission and the ECJ. Perhaps he’ll look for a migrants’ returns agreement, accepting that he will have to commit himself to taking a share of EU migrants too. But it won’t stop there, and before long we will have the worst of both worlds: the EU setting many of our laws again, this time with no UK say at all.
The worrying thing is that, despite these obvious problems, Labour feel the wind is in their sails. That’s not surprising when the Government itself is responsible for the wretched Windsor Framework and does very little to speak up for the 2020 Brexit deal. One could be forgiven for asking why our rulers are so keen to keep watering down what every other country outside the EU has: the right to set its own laws and run its own affairs, well or badly. Yet so it is. Brexiteers must provide a counterbalance: come together again to get out the arguments, protect what we thought we had definitively achieved in 2020, and explain what we can yet achieve with it. Hold on to it – or lose it.