How wonderful that Britain will have an ‘adult in the room’ for tomorrow’s summit to reset relations between the UK and EU, not an infantile and petulant leader like Donald Trump. That at any rate is what the Government, and ‘enlightened’ Remainer opinion, will want us to think.
A more rational appraisal of the last few weeks would come to the opposite conclusion: that a Trump-like figure is exactly what we need in this situation – someone to lob a few grenades into the debating chamber, insult the other team and walk out of meetings (something which wouldn’t be difficult for The Donald given his virulent dislike of the EU).
Then, at the 11th hour, our hero would come over all smiles and flattery before sealing a deal that would be very much weighted in Britain’s favour.
Instead, rather tragically, we have Sir Keir Starmer to represent our interests. You can almost sense the jubilation on the faces of EU negotiators as they eye up our fish and dream up ways to trap Britain in their regulatory claws – all in return for some minor concession on inspections for exports of cheese, which will end up being dumped on the autoroute by French farmers anyway.
We know what is coming because Starmer has told us as much. He claims to have turned the page on his personal campaign of trying to reverse the Brexit result, telling us several times since he became Labour leader that he cannot foresee any circumstances in which Britain would rejoin the EU or the single market.
Yet on the other hand he told a conference of centre-Left leaders in Canada in 2023 that ‘actually we don’t want to diverge, we don’t want to lower standards, we don’t want to rip up environmental standards, working standards, food standards and all the rest’. In other words, he wants to tie us down to EU regulation without the UK actually being a member of the bloc.
Indeed, he seems to believe that the EU is the only vehicle by which Britain can possibly avoid what he sees as a low-regulation nightmare. Starmer is taking us headlong into the vassal state, the ‘rule-taker but not rule-maker’ that Theresa May and Boris Johnson tried so hard to avoid – not, it has to be said, entirely successfully.
Starmer, on the other hand, very much will achieve what he wants because the EU is only too happy to draw Britain back into its regulatory orbit. What it has always feared most is that Britain would end up as the fabled ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ – a dynamic, business-friendly economy, moored 20 miles off Calais. Or there was a model provided by the US, whose economy since the turn of the century has outgrown Europe’s by over 20 per cent.
rather tragically, we have Sir Keir Starmer to represent our interests at tomorrow's summit, says Ross Clark
The Conservatives failed to pursue any vision with vigour, but with Starmer we are in a far worse place. He is setting himself up for the worst of all deals. Businesses will be hog-tied by EU red tape over which we no longer even have a marginal say, free movement will be sneaked back in via a youth mobility scheme – and still the EU will be inventive with non-tariff barriers to frustrate the export of EU goods and services.
It is becoming increasingly clear, on the other hand, that Trump has played a blinder. While his enemies enjoyed a few days portraying him as an American Liz Truss who crashed the markets through his own bluster and naivety, it is beginning to look very different.
Markets have largely recovered – with the S&P 500 back to where it was on January 1 – as the world begins to realise that the punitive tariffs which Trump announced on ‘Liberation Day’ on April 2 were not intended as a permanent wall around US markets; they were a typically Trumpian opening gambit for negotiations, which will maintain freeish trade while readjusting the rules in America’s favour.
Just look at the UK-US trade deal announced earlier this month, and which seems a model for many more deals to come. The end result will not crush free trade but it will mean that US exporters will face slightly lower tariffs than they did before Liberation Day while UK exporters face slightly higher ones.
Starmer has earned credit for not laying into Trump, but if he wanted the best deal for Britain, that is exactly what he would have done initially, before coming to the table and laying on the flattery with a trowel. This is Trump’s modus operandi – and it works.
There is another difference between the US President and Starmer that makes it more likely that the former will succeed while the latter gets walked over. Trump makes up his own rules.
Starmer’s instinct, by contrast, is always to look for rules to follow, whether or not they are to his and Britain’s advantage. He is a sucker for anything that resembles what he would call an ‘international rule-based system’. Just look at how he abdicated Britain’s interests in favour of obeying a perverse ruling by the UN’s International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea that the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands ought to belong to Mauritius.
We are not talking about a conquered territory that needs to be handed back to anyone; the Chagos were uninhabited before being discovered by Europeans.
There is another difference between the US President and Starmer that makes it more likely that the former will succeed while the latter gets walked over—Trump makes up his own rules
Starmer could have made these arguments and damned the UN’s Tribunal for what it is: a politically motivated kangaroo court with a lack of democratic accountability. Instead, all that echoed around his head were the arguments of his friend – and lawyer representing Mauritius – Philippe Sands, who said Britain must hand over the islands in order ‘to have any credibility around the world on the rule of law and its global branding’.
To our PM, being a UN class pet is more important than Britain spending £90million a year to lease something it already owns.
As with the Chagos Islands, so with the EU. Starmer is attracted to the European Court of Justice just as he is drawn to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. He needs its guidance to be able to show that Britain is an obedient, law-abiding nation. The idea that Britain could truly break away from the EU way of doing things and plough its own furrow is an anathema to him.
The tragedy of Brexit is that, since 2016, we have not had a government whose political skill comes anywhere close to matching that of the Leave campaign. First, we had Mrs May, whose heart was never in Brexit. While she kept saying ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, the signals she sent out suggested that she believed the exact opposite – which emboldened the EU to come up with a withdrawal deal that was punitive for Britain.
Johnson showed a little Trumpian mettle in that he threatened to walk away from negotiations. Yet he never dared do what he should have done and told the EU and then-Irish PM Leo Varadkar: So what if we have a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, there is no way we are drawing one between two parts of the UK. The result was a mess which had to be – partially – sorted out through Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework.
But with Starmer in charge of the latest renegotiations, the chances that Brexit could end up enriching Britain are all but over. We are doomed to a future as an EU satellite, forever pulled down by the bloc’s growth-destroying mentality. All we will be able to do is to watch as Trump’s America, supposedly compromised by its President, continues to pull ahead as it has done all century.
- Ross Clark is the author of Far From Eutopia: How Europe Is Failing – And How Britain Could Do Better.
