Brexit. Still deceiving ourselves

The recent report by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to assess the government’s progress against its own objectives for their UK-EU “reset” is revealing. The 2018 comment from Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel about Britain, that “they were in with loads of opt-outs, now they are out and want a load of opt-ins”, was never truer. Cameron in 2015 was trying to negotiate more opt-outs but in the end didn't satisfy the Eurosceptics in his party, or in the country. Since then, we have had Brexit, followed by five years of struggling to negotiate opt-ins with some limited success. The reset is simply the latest iteration.

The problem isn't in deciding what we want. Everybody in Europe knows what we want. Britain wants to have frictionless trade with the EU, three out of the four freedoms of movement, no obligation to follow the rules of the single market and all without contributing a penny to EU coffers. Essentially, we want to enjoy all the benefits of EU membership for nothing and have the freedom to do as we please, whenever we like. There is no secret to any of this, it's what we've always wanted.

The problem is that such a status was never available and will never be available.  We are the proverbial blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that isn't there. It is an exercise in futility, and the "reset" is simply an official attempt to prove that it is. 

The 2024 Labour Party Manifesto identified three areas for negotiations. These were (a) a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement to reduce border formalities, (b) new arrangements to remove barriers that prevent British artists from touring freely in the EU and (c) progress on mutual recognition between the UK and EU of professional qualifications.

However, since coming to power, more cherries have been added to the wish list, including new agreements on carbon markets, chemicals, medicines, and mutual recognition of conformity assessments for manufactured goods, as well as UK re-accession to the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention, which would ease tariff-free treatment on some non-qualifying British exports to the EU.

And there are more. Britain's desire to participate in the EU's "SAFE" programme, which aims to increase defence spending to counter the Russian threat. Negotiations on this were ongoing until the EU demanded financial contributions.  

And now concerns that being excluded from the EU's proposed "Made in Europe" rules will harm exports, particularly of cars:

Reports of carmaker’s warning come as lobby group says EU proposals could damage £70bn cross-channel trade www.theguardian.com/business/202...

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— Bremain in Spain (@bremaininspain.com) 5 March 2026 at 17:37

These are just the explicit aims. In January Starmer also suggested he was considering further alignment with the EU in other sectors without specifying any details, and there have been calls for more cooperation on security and home affairs. The 2024 manifesto envisaged a UK-EU Security Pact to “strengthen co-operation on the threats we face.” 

It's quite a list, isn't it?  The Select Committee report rightly concludes that "The UK-EU relationship is, and will always be, a work in progress."  You can say that again.

The committee say their inquiry has "highlighted shortcomings in how the Government has formulated its EU policy and conducted the negotiations to date: a lack of transparency about UK objectives and priorities, which appear to be shifting and changing constantly; a haphazard approach to consultation; and, most importantly, a lack of an overall vision for the new Strategic Partnership." 

They say that "recognising its red lines, we want [the government] to produce a more coherent, and ambitious, economic agenda with the EU" and even suggest a White Paper "with a coherent vision for the future of the relationship to frame this process."  

I am bound to say the committee is just as naive as the government. They too, are convinced there is some finely calibrated point on the out-in spectrum that Britain will be satisfied with, not too close and not too far away, the Goldilocks position.  It's a pipe dream.

The recent debate in Westminster Hall on the impact of Brexit has shown that nobody is satisfied with the current position. Some claim they didn't get the Brexit they voted for (most of these were from Northern Ireland, which voted to remain!) while others lamented the loss of trade and tax revenue. As far as I can see only Stephen Gethin (SNP) and Pippa Heyling (LibDem) openly called for the UK to rejoin. The country is moving towards a position where two-thirds of the population are consistently saying Britain should rejoin, but most politicians are either stuck in the past or too fearful to suggest the obvious solution. 

It's this lack of openness in having a clear objective that we can all understand, which is at the root of the government's problem. Either Starmer genuinely believes he can find this Goldilocks position, that it actually exists and more importantly, that the EU will allow us to negotiate ourselves into it and that it will be sustainable into the future, or he is gaslighting the nation and dangling a prospect before us that is simply unattainable.

I am reminded of the words of Sir Ivan Rogers, our former UK REP to the EU and one of the experts who foresaw all of this in a series of speeches before Brexit was sealed. This one is from December 2018:

"We are indeed, a soon-to-be third country and an opponent and rival, not just a partner, now. Again, that is what Brexit advocates argued for. It is time to accept the consequences.

"Some of those will be beyond tiresome. And one of them will be that we shall be, like Switzerland, in a state of permanent negotiations with the EU about something highly intractable, on which they may have more metaphorical tanks than us."

And he also said this:

"It is, in the end, the total absence of a serious realistic plan for the process of Brexit as well as a serious coherent conception of a post Brexit destination, which has delivered this denouement to stage 1 of what will be, whether Brexit proponents like it or not, a much longer process.

"For the next stage, we need much less self-absorption, a vastly clearer, less self-deceiving understanding of the incentives on the other side of the table, and a less passive approach to the construction of the process. We need serious substance not plausible bullshit."

I am sorry to say that seven years on, we have still not accepted the consequences and are still self-absorbed, self-deceiving and engaged in producing plausible bullshit. We are always coming at the problem from behind, always begging the EU for some concessions, always catching up, always complaining, always the demandeur.

British manufacturers and exporters are constantly looking over their shoulder at Brussels to see what's coming down the pike, having no influence over decisions being made that could have a profound impact on their businesses and not knowing if the government will adopt a new regulation, ignore it or develop their own version. It is a recipe for permanent uncertainty.

This is what Brexit has reduced us to.  It's well past time we got real.