Burnham’s Brexit betrayal

Because I was a Brexit blogger for ages, far longer than any sane person would have been, a lot of my mutuals on X are still of the Brexity ilk, and they’re all hopping mad this week because of Andy Burnham’s much vaunted EU reset - which contains a number of nasties. Our hapless PM’s idea of negotiating is much like his predecessor; cave into every demand and pay them for the privilege.

Part of the EU resent, as anticipated is an SPS deal on food etc. Britain is also to offer cheaper university fees to EU students. The Times, meanwhile, reports that Brussels is demanding that ministers scrap plans to increase the number of European criminals who can be deported from Britain.

No agreement has yet been reached on a youth mobility scheme. The UK has now offered a higher cap of 75,000 to 80,000 but the EU continues to push for 100,000. In its Common Understanding, both parties agreed to pursue a formal link between their respective emissions trading systems, with the intention of enabling mutual exemptions from their CBAM regimes.

It’s still early days as to whether any of this will actually happen, but Labour is setting great store by it. They have no other ideas to promote growth. Anything that might helped has been ruled out on ideological grounds. Ironically, the things that might help call for greater divergence from the EU, as Robert Jenrick spelled out last week. There are several areas where I would go further.

While lacking proper detail, Jenrick’s wishlist is a list of things that the Tories should have done in the wake of Brexit with their eighty seat majority, and had they done so, they would not now be in opposition, and Reform wouldn’t even exist.

But this is why I’m not especially hopping mad the same as the Brexit crowd. Labour was always going to go crawling back to Brussels. The case for relinking our regulatory systems makes itself when there has been so little divergence, not least because of the Windsor Framework. This is the inevitable (and wholly predicted) consequence of not having a Brexit plan or post-Brexit policies. It was always going to play out this way and the Brexiteers are as much to blame.

What it means for the the future is that any right wing government will be on a collision course with Brussels, not only to undo the EU reset, but to go much further, perhaps even challenging the basis of the TCA and Northern Ireland Protocol. Reform should pledge to reverse the EU reset and make Jenrick’s demands conditional for any deal with the Tories. The bottom line is that Brexit was never properly resolved and there will be no return to growth until it is.

Straight off the bat we need to reverse the renewables directive, carbon taxes, and ETS, deleting also the Habitats directive thus streamlining infrastructure planning. Had we done so, we could by now we could be seeing some of the cheapest energy in Europe as opposed to the most expensive. We should also have dumped the landfill directive and the recycling scam, resulting in cheaper council tax and cleaner streets.

We also need to dump the EU SPS system, to instead become a European livestock restocking reserve, deleting the wasteful veterinary inspection system to rebuild local and sustainable slaughterhouses, thereby reviving British agriculture. We should also invest in rebooting the UK fishing fleet thereby regenerating Grimsby.

There are plenty of things we could and should have done. Removal of state aid rules might well have saved British steel production, and we could have saved our domestic fertiliser production to prevent the price of food rising. We could also have put tariffs on food imports while subsidising East England high tech greenhouse farming (running off SMR CHP desalination plants, harvested by robotics) making the UK the agriculture IP capital of the world.

We could have abolished the Working Time Directive and the minimum wage, thereby easing wage compression, and liberating the jobs market meaning more people would be employed and on better wages, especially if we got a grip on immigration.

That's just off the top of my head. We could be looking at a multi-sector economic renaissance but instead we're bankrupt socialist basketcase shackled to a corpse - all because the Brexiteers never bothered to think about post-Brexit policy and put an oaf like Boris Johnson in charge.

Personally, I’m of the view that challenging these agreements such as the TCA directly is unnecessary, much the same as leaving the ECHR. The core benefit of Brexit, and the whole point of it, is that we are not subject to ECJ rulings, and can disregard much of the EU’s opinion on domestic reforms. A confrontation is inevitable, but when the rest of the EU is agitating for much the same (not least a row back on Net Zero policies), picking a fight with the UK is hardly worth their political bandwidth - especially given what’s going on in their own backyard in Poland, Germany and Ukraine.

The problem is, we won’t see the necessary depth of thinking to properly put things on track. Jenrick’s wishlist is more complex than he imagines, where deregulation is a red herring. Many industries require a complete regulatory re-design and modernisation, for which our politicians lack the curiosity or intellectual capacity to entertain. One problem Brexit didn’t solve was the low quality of our politicians.

We see this in the opposition to any upcoming SPS deal where the talking point is about gene editing (a minor Brexit benefit). Nobody is making the case for a complete departure from the SPS system to completely reboot British farming and save the meat industry. There’s no vision there at all. This is why I have argued that parties of the right need to develop serious policy with technical insight, and serious people to promote them. That, though is not happening. Jenrick’s policy efforts are more of the same bullet points.

What’s also needed is a policy strategy. If we are at some point going to drive a horse and cart through the GFA, Windsor Framework and TCA, then there are going to be consequences, requiring one hell of a mitigation plan - without which, the right’s time in office will be very short lived.