Late-night negotiations, last-minute breakthroughs, furious accusations of “selling out” and “surrendering”. No, this is not 2018. Welcome to Keir’s Starmer’s EU reset and the right’s backlash.
In February, Kemi Badenoch channelled her inner Gordon Brown and set “five tests” for the big renegotiation with the EU – and breaching any one would make any potential deal unacceptable to the Conservatives. Readers of this newsletter will not be surprised to learn that, in the Tory leader’s view, the deal announced on Monday (including access to a £126bn EU rearmament fund, an agri-food agreement and the reopening of e-gates for Brits, in exchange for dynamic alignment on food standards, a youth mobility scheme and an extension of existing fishing rights for EU vessels for 12 years) breaches all of them. As such, Badenoch has vowed that the Tories will reverse the deal… just as soon as they get back into power.
There is so much that could be said about this mindset, but let’s start for a moment with the deal itself. It is neither as sensational as Labour figures trumpet nor as disastrous as the Conservatives howl. It’s a series of good, solid steps in building closer UK-EU relations after Brexit. Like any trade agreement, it involves trade-offs on both sides and small wins taking on symbolic importance. (As a former trade secretary, you might think Badenoch would know all of this.) Those hoping Britain might soon rejoin the Single Market or Customs Union (or, indeed, the EU itself) will be disappointed at the lack of ambition, but perhaps reassured that something is better than nothing – £9bn, which is what the government says will be added to the UK economy by 2040 as a result, is not to be sniffed at.
As for the concessions, well, the Mail on Sunday commentator Dan Hodges put it best: “none of the concessions to the EU – and they are there – come close to the concessions granted by Theresa May, Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak”.
This puts the Conservatives in their usual post-election quandary. As with so many policy areas (NHS waiting lists, immigration, economic stability), their attack lines at Labour are hampered by the memory of their own recent policy failures. But it is particularly potent on this issue because of how Brexit became part of the Conservative Party’s core identity over the past decade, and the subsequent memories this evokes. Take David Frost and his outrage at the extension of the very fisheries deal he himself negotiated, which he tried to argue sacrifices a hypothetically better fisheries deal which sadly he wasn’t able to negotiate at the time.
(Speaking of fish, incidentally, we should probably add some context. The UK fishing industry is worth an estimated £1.1bn. It directly employs 6,800 people, around the same as the employee headcount at Harrods and just half the number of yoga instructors working in the UK. It’s true that we can’t feed ourselves on yoga, but given the UK exports most of its fish, it’s not like we’re eating what we catch anyway. And for all the talk of selling out, some parts of the UK fishing industry – Salmon Scotland, for example, which represents the Scottish salmon industry – are delighted with a deal that will make it easier for exporters to sell to Europe.)
But back to Kemi Badenoch. “We’ve got to be a little bit more realistic and a lot less naive,” she told a press conference on Monday afternoon, flanked by Victoria Atkins and Priti Patel for emotional support, shortly after saying she was gobsmacked by Starmer doing a fairly run-of-the-mill trade negotiation. This was accompanied by an awkward video of various Conservative shadow ministers explaining why they had misgivings about Starmer’s deal, trying to look natural while boiling a kettle or stacking papers and speaking to camera at the same time. It was just as excruciating as it sounds – although not quite as excruciating as Boris Johnson branding Starmer “the orange ball-chewing gimp of Brussels” (not an image I wanted either) and knocking Badenoch off the splash of the GB News website.
All of which is to say: does this look like a government-in-waiting? You could argue that no opposition licking its wounds 10 months after an election would do, but then, you could equally argue that no opposition licking its wounds 10 months after an election would be threatening to reverse the reset anytime soon.
Nigel Farage, incidentally, has also said he’ll tear up the deal if he gets into Downing Street. But he hasn’t spent the past 24 hours having the very public breakdown the Tories have (no domination fantasies or gimmicky videos of him trying to slam UK veterinary policy while closing a car door).
No doubt he knows he doesn’t need to. Voters who still view a modest realignment of the UK’s trading relationship with Europe as total Brexit betrayal are already going to vote Reform. And, as George pointed out yesterday, they are in a minority: two thirds of voters supporter closer relations with Europe and over half actually want to rejoin the EU. Farage has the Brexit purist vote locked in, and is now casting his net further afield. Badenoch, meanwhile, is fishing in a dwindling pool of voters who have, if their primary concern is immigration, probably already abandoned the Tories, while further alienating the majority who really do favour some common-sense cooperation.
Though Badenoch is claiming her approach will stop us “reopening the Brexit battles of the past”, she more than anyone else seems stranded in 2018, when another beleaguered Conservative leader tried to dig in her heels against the combined forces of commercial reality and electoral maths. And we all know what happened to her.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: The dangerous relationship]
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