One of Keir Starmer’s persistent priorities is ‘resetting’ the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union. A year ago, before the general election, I wrote that the narrative underlying Labour’s approach to the EU was that ‘Britain did a terrible thing, we disgraced ourselves in front of our endlessly patient European neighbours, and it is vital that we now seek to expiate our sins and rehabilitate ourselves in their eyes’. I have seen nothing to dissuade me from this.
On the last day of 2024, Politico reported that the Prime Minister had ‘filled his diary with trips to Brussels’ for the first months of 2025, and major UK-EU summit is being planned for the first half of the year. Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister directly responsible for EU relations, intends to meet fortnightly with Maroš Šefčovič, an executive vice-president of the European Commission, whose expansive portfolio includes co-chairing the Partnership Council overseeing the UK/EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
A number of subjects are on the agenda, but there is an overarching theme of trade and regulation, as the Government seeks to minimise the barriers to commercial activity with the EU since the UK’s decision to leave the European Single Market and the Customs Union as part of Brexit. Starmer is said to be particularly eager to reach a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement which would ease trade in animal and plant products currently subject to stringent and costly health inspections.
This is all pursued under the banner of free trade. Starmer has visited the Gulf and India in pursuit of trade deals, identifying – for once, correctly – that the more we can engage in commerce with the rest of the world, the more our economy will grow and the more prosperous the UK will be. The Government’s objective is to negotiate ‘the high-quality trade deals the UK needs to give businesses access to international markets, boost jobs and deliver… growth’ and ‘supporting more small businesses to export and tearing down unnecessary barriers to trade, jobs and communities will be supported in every part of the UK’.
Against this backdrop, the EU has somehow come to be portrayed as some champion of free trade, a heroic advocate of commerce without barriers striving for global prosperity. That is, of course, a partial and fundamental misrepresentation: the European Union, like the European Economic Community from which it evolved, is a trading bloc which seeks integration within its boundaries, but is fiercely protectionist in its stance towards the rest of the world.
That this is so can be seen by the very fact that the UK is having to undertake this frantic diplomatic activity at all. Since Brexit, we have been subject to regulations, customs processes and duties which do not apply within the Single Market. That is an observation, not a complaint: anyone who had thought seriously about leaving the European Union rather than acting on a knee-jerk nativist, isolationist or anti-immigration instinct ought to have realised that our former partners would inevitably raise trade barriers against us.
The EU is not like other free trade areas. Be it the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the UK recently joined, the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), the African Free Trade Zone, the ASEAN Free Trade Area, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement: none has so explicitly a political and integrationist objective nor such dominant central institutions as the EU, and the EU alone is a member of the World Trade Organisation in its own right.
None is seriously regarded as a major step towards a single federal super-state, as many still conceptualise Europe, and therefore none requires such agonising decisions over sovereignty as does membership of the EU. None claims the exclusive competency in international trade, the Common Commercial Policy, exercised by Brussels. The Single Market is complemented by the Community Customs Union, which means that there is free movement of goods, services and people within the EU but a common external tariff on anything imported from beyond its ramparts.
This is ‘free trade’ the Donald Trump way, free within your own borders but the drawbridge raised to outsiders. Viewed from the other end of the telescope, it is protectionism with a broad base, or, to use the terminology of Joseph Chamberlain in the early 20th century, ‘imperial preference’. It is a political tool as much as an economic or commercial one.
Free trade is a powerful phenomenon. We know it stimulates enterprise, innovation, efficiency and economic growth, and that it has played a major part in transforming the lives of the world’s poorest populations in the past 60 years or so. This was the foundation of Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’, Henry George’s ‘Protection or Free Trade’, Jacob Viner’s ‘Studies in the Theory of International Trade’ and Milton Friedman’s ‘Capitalism and Freedom’.
It is not a foundational belief of the EU, which remains a fundamentally dirigiste organisation, distrustful and disdainful of le modèle Anglo-Saxon. That is the right of member states. But if Britain genuinely believes in the transformative power of free trade, we should acknowledge and accommodate our differences from our neighbours, not elevate them to the status of principled visionaries.
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