Keir’s ‘Brexit reset’ is all pain, no gain

There was a time not so long ago when Keir Starmer insisted that Brexit would be ‘safe in my hands’. Before he was elected PM, he even tried to co-opt that famous Vote Leave slogan, ‘Take Back Control’. It was all part of an unconvincing attempt to pose as a born-again Brexiteer, to reassure Eurosceptic voters that he would respect the result of the EU referendum. Now, Starmer has abandoned any such pretence. His plans for a ‘Brexit reset’ amount to an explicit betrayal of what the public voted for, and what he himself had promised.

Starmer’s ministers are currently drawing up plans for a ‘Brexit reset’ bill which will, for the first time since we left the EU, authorise the transfer of lawmaking powers from the UK parliament to Brussels. It will also allow those laws to be adjudicated by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), a ruthless enforcer of the EU’s will. This is, quite straightforwardly, a transfer of sovereign decision-making power from Britain’s elected domestic parliament to an unelected foreign body and its court. There could hardly be a more serious violation of the spirit of the Brexit vote.

The Labour government insists the powers being handed over are fairly limited, while the potential economic gains are considerable. In reality, the opposite is true. While the UK’s negotiations with Brussels are ongoing, reports suggest the Brexit reset bill will give the government a wide mandate to fritter away British sovereignty. It will allow for ‘dynamic alignment’ of regulations, which is EU-speak for accepting Brussels’ rules, without having a say. Among the areas that could soon be subject to foreign control are agriculture and energy – vast, critical sectors, in other words. The risks here are considerable.

On farming, Starmer claims realignment with the EU will make British food cheaper. This is despite the fact that food in the UK has long been cheaper than in the EU, and there has been no divergence in prices since the Leave vote (despite the oft-repeated complaints about post-Brexit red tape for food imports). And what of the enormous farmers’ protests that have rocked just about every EU member state over the past five or so years? EU directives on everything from pesticides and fertilisers to carbon taxes and nitrogen rules have led to farmers facing penury, forcing them on to the streets, blockading Brussels and national capitals with their tractors. Does the Labour government, recently forced into a humiliating retreat over inheritance taxes on farmland, really want to risk another round of furious farmers’ rallies?

Arguably, the greatest act of self-sabotage is in Labour’s plan to align the UK with the EU’s energy market, which also involves signing up to the EU’s carbon market, or Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Starmer has touted this as a major economic win, although it seems almost certain to increase Britain’s already staggeringly high energy prices. After all, since Brexit, carbon taxes in the UK have fallen significantly relative to those in the EU. And Brussels plans to revamp its ETS in order to raise carbon prices higher still. This will load yet more costs on to household energy bills and on what’s left of Britain’s industry. For Starmer to tout even higher energy costs as a way to grow the economy defies rational explanation.

All of which raises the question, what is it about the failing, sclerotic EU that Labour is so keen to cosy up to? Which of our struggling European neighbours does the UK government want to emulate? It surely can’t be France, which could well be on the verge of a sovereign debt crisis. Can it really be Germany, which is now in terminal industrial decline? Hopefully, it’s not Italy, whose PM, Giorgia Meloni, warned last month that while 2025 may have been ‘difficult’, 2026 will be ‘much worse’.

Starmer’s starry-eyed view of the EU as an engine of economic growth is based on pure fantasy. It requires a wilful blindness to the reality on the ground on the continent and an ignorance of Brussels’ myriad failures. The ‘Brexit reset’ is all pain, no gain, trading Britain’s precious sovereignty for precious little in return.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.