The rituals of democratic renewal can create possibilities from previous dead ends. With a changed UK government and soon a freshly selected European Commission, many hope for a new era of collaboration between the two polities.
Labour’s appetite for closer relations is obvious, despite bright red lines against joining the EU’s single market and customs union. So is its hope that rising geopolitical uncertainties have made EU leaders more open-minded.
Labour’s red lines are very different from those of previous governments, reflecting a pragmatic rather than ideological take on sovereignty. Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s quip that no one “voted Leave because they were not happy that chemicals regulations were the same across Europe” was no afterthought.
The new approach is evident in the briefing notes on a planned product safety bill, which “will enable us to make the sovereign choice to mirror . . . updated EU rules”. Welcome back the “dynamic alignment” that once caused so much drama in Conservative “star chambers” and backbench groups.
The notes also suggest aligning, where sensible, standards in Great Britain with the EU ones applying in Northern Ireland — in effect, Theresa May’s idea of limited regulatory union to avoid intra-UK trade barriers.
All this makes several low-hanging fruit ripe for picking: a veterinary and food standards agreement, common energy trading and carbon tariffs and a merging of emissions trading schemes. Each would amount to a worthwhile reduction in existing or imminent costs to trade. The EU should find all acceptable once the UK is prepared to align dynamically, including European Court of Justice rulings on them.
But this will only improve trade frictions on the margins — less paperwork in a few sectors, but no absence of border checks. To restore anything like the ease of economic exchange between EU members, the UK would have to join the European Economic Area (EEA), or the EU would have to create a new structure of deep integration bespoke for the UK.
That is not what Sir Keir Starmer’s government appears to be working for. Its calls for “structured dialogue” mean, at most, regular summits and occasional invitations for British ministers to join EU council meetings as observers. EU diplomats say summits make “perfect sense”; the bloc has them with other countries and groups. But this is easy to grant in part because precious little comes out of them.
Talking regularly is obviously better than not. In defence and security, where Brussels has a small, if growing, role relative to national capitals, one can imagine decision-making that includes the UK. Indeed a Franco-German-UK “E3” defence ministers’ meeting took place even during the contentious 2020 post-Brexit trade talks.
London is now investing time and effort into forging a good rapport with the EU. “It’s about setting a mood, an atmosphere. I don’t think we should be underplaying that,” says Nick Thomas-Symonds, Starmer’s EU envoy.
But we shouldn’t overplay it either. Few big EU transformations happened just because leaders wanted them. New forms of integration have rather come from leaders giving up resistance to something required by economic logic and patiently pushed by Brussels.
The single market may have had its greatest champion in Margaret Thatcher, but she had Jacques Delors’ integration-hungry commission to work with. The single currency was on the drawing board for decades before free movement of capital helped overcome governments’ scepticism. The post-pandemic recovery fund had parents in the Spanish, German and French capitals, but the EU’s most federally minded institutions had long hankered for common borrowing.
What equivalent burning economic logic, with long-term support in Brussels, exists to create a new berth for Britain? There is the EEA — Delors’ construction to let non-EU members join the EU market — but London does not want it because it lets economically self-sufficient people migrate freely.
But we could imagine a subset of the single market, for goods trade only, expanded beyond the EU, as the Windsor framework does in Northern Ireland or the EEA does for all four economic freedoms. The prize is big: lifting all but rules-of-origin checks at the border.
Both sides would have to change entrenched outlooks. London would need to embrace systematic rather than ad hoc rule-taking. The EU would need to see its structures as strategic assets and abandon the theology of four inseparable single market freedoms. It must actively want to tie others into its regulatory orbit for goods, and the UK must want to be tied in. Only that would begin to restore broken links.
