23 hours ago
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Five years since Brexit, the UK wants to reset the EU relationship. A simple question of sitting down with the EU and negotiating, surely?
Sort of, though not quite. It’s easy to see why a self-professed growth-obsessed government might seek to be closer to the EU. It’s less clear why it’s seeking what it is, or whether achieving any of it will be easy.
There is one debate we can now surely put to bed. Brexit has had, and is continuing to have, a negative impact on the UK economy. It’s more complicated and costly to do business with a bloc that accounts for over half of all our trade. That plays out in investment, and, perhaps most strikingly, in goods trade. All of this was predicted, but now the data is supplementing the forecasts.
No surprise then that the government wants to improve what it calls the “botched Brexit deal” negotiated by Boris Johnson. But that’s when things get harder. The measures specified – a veterinary deal, recognition of professional qualifications, and a better deal for UK creative artists wanting to tour in the EU – will not make much of an impact in macroeconomic terms, if they can be obtained at all.
Ultimately, the real economic gains from a closer relationship with the EU reside in either some customs arrangement that reduces or removes the need for time-consuming and expensive paperwork at the border, or from UK participation in the single market, meaning British firms could sell goods freely in the EU without the need for conformity checks.
Yet these are precisely the areas the government has ruled out in its desperation to prove Brexit is safe in its hands. All that’s left is tinkering around the margins of the existing deal. Even here, it won’t be easy. Successful negotiations require commitment and tenacity. The UK appears to have neither. Six months after taking power, the government still hasn’t built on the meagre proposals in its manifesto, via either greater policy detail or additional proposals. The EU waits for both.
In the meantime, it’s left to EU officials to seize the initiative, ruling certain proposals in (a veterinary agreement) or out (a touring artists deal). We’ve even had the bizarre spectacle of the EU trade chief freelancing creative improvements to the trading relationship, a relationship the UK is more anxious to improve than is the EU.
Yet we should not mistake the EU’s assertiveness for enthusiasm. When it comes to the reset talks, the EU is relaxed about “no deal”. It’s far happier than the UK with the status quo on trade and has plenty of higher priorities than relations with the UK. Which in turn means Brussels will need to be incentivised to negotiate ameliorations. There is little in the UK’s proposals of interest to its European partners and the government is remarkably hesitant to concede ground on the thing the EU really seems to want – a mobility agreement for young people.
The UK-EU relationship is not just about the reset, however much our government might think otherwise. Our post-Brexit relationship comprises many strands, any or all of which might interact with and derail reset negotiations – were these ever to formally begin.
Take some of the outstanding issues dividing us from the EU. Brussels has initiated two legal disputes, over the UK’s protection of EU citizens’ rights back in 2020 and a current UK ban on the fishing of sand eels; talks over the future status of Gibraltar also remain deadlocked. And by June 2026, the terms of cooperation on energy and fisheries must be negotiated.
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Each could potentially explode into a political row, disrupting the reset. It’s all too easy to imagine, for instance, the EU refusing talks on a veterinary agreement if the fisheries chapter has not been satisfactorily renegotiated, or if sand eels still swim in blissful freedom in the Dogger Bank.
Five years on, Brexit continues to haunt us. It’s posing real economic problems. The government doesn’t like the equilibrium we’ve reached but is unwilling to do much about it. Meanwhile, the EU feels little pressure to change the status quo. The long shadow of Brexit is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Anand Menon is director and Joël Reland research fellow at UK in a Changing Europe
