Daniel Hannan: Starmer may think he’s been clever with the electorate despite being craven with the EU

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade

Sir Keir Starmer had plainly calculated that the reaction wouldn’t matter.

Whatever he came back with, he’ll have reasoned, the Right-wing press would go ballistic.

Any deal, regardless of its contents, would be howled down by the Tories and Reform as servitude and vassalage and the surrender of our birthright. So he might as well go totus porcus and get as close to EU membership as he could short of actually joining.

He’ll have looked at the polls showing that most people favour closer defence ties and a youth mobility scheme.

True, some voters feel passionately about Brexit, and are on the lookout for any sign of backsliding. But, the PM will have reasoned, nothing would reconcile this group to Labour. They have moved, in Kristian Niemietz’s formulation, from supporting Brexit (leaving the EU) to supporting Brexitism (howling down anything that has “Europe” in the title so as to be more Brexity than the next chap).

Has Starmer got away with it?

When this week’s headlines are being used as wrappers for imported fish-and-chips, will British exporters adapt to the new rules, leaving the Tories and Reform looking eccentric for wanting to reopen the issue?

I don’t think so.

The problem for Starmer is that this deal confirms the negatives that most voters (not just Brexitists) have about him: that he is weak, unpatriotic, lawyerly, inconstant, keener on the approval of his fellow politicians than on that of the British public. People have seen him give way on a series of issues where he had previously promised to stand firm. Fisheries is the clearest example, but ministers had also claimed for months that they were against a youth mobility scheme.

So when voters see Labour claiming long-standing EU objectives as British gains, they don’t buy it. Whatever the arguments for and against European defence integration, or unified carbon trading, everyone can see that these were Brussels rather than British asks.

The actual British asks – easier access for touring artists on the Continent, for example, or equivalence for our financial services firms – were either dropped or not tabled at all.

What stings is not the sneakiness, but the credit Labour is giving to our intelligence. We are supposed to be happy about ceding control to the EU across the board and subsidising the university fees of Eurocrats’ kids (Eurobrats?) in return for… well, what exactly?

Access to passport e-gates?

“Here you go, working-class thickoes! Don’t bother your dense skulls with the economic stuff. You’ll save ten minutes on your way to Torremolinos or Magaluf or wherever it is you people like to go!”

Let’s leave aside the fact that even the claims made on e-gates may be untrue, as policy is usually set locally. The EU should let Brits pass through its e-gates for the same reason that we let EU passport holders use ours: it makes airports more efficient and saves everyone time and money. It was pure vindictiveness that prevented the EU from offering such a deal in the first place.

If we insist on treating passport e-gates as a matter of diplomacy rather than self-interest, the trade-off should be that we continue to allow the same access to EU nationals, not that we make unrelated concessions in fisheries or budget contributions.

There are two further reasons why Starmer has miscalculated.

First, he has revived the bad atmosphere that followed the Brexit vote. I can’t be alone in being reminded of how infuriating it is to see Eurocrats making unreasonable demands, insisting on being paid for them and then, on getting their way, congratulating British leaders for their “realism”.

Our own negotiators seem to be working in the European rather than the British interest. It feels almost as if Ollie Robbins is back in charge. (Oh, wait: he is.)

The swarms of #FBPE sociopaths who positively want Britain to suffer, because they see it as payback for having voted the wrong way, are back after a couple of years of quiescence. None of it makes for a positive domestic mood.

Brexit polarisation is bad news for Labour.

If the party wants to win, it needs to hold Leave-leaning seats across Wales, the Midlands and the North where it is trailing behind Reform. That will only happen if the electorate divides along traditional Left-Right lines rather than over Brexit and related culture wars.

Worst of all, the deal will hurt Britain’s economy. Starmer (like the #FBPE sociopaths) seems not to care about long-term global trends. The EU accounted for 18 per cent of the world’s economy at the start of the century, is 14 per cent now and will be below 10 per cent by 2050. That shrinkage, not Brexit, has been driving a decline in our exports to the EU for four decades.

There is nothing Britain can do about over-regulation or demographic decline in the EU. But we can look further afield. Labour’s language when it ratified the CPTPP (finalised by the previous government) and the India FTA (98 per cent negotiated by the Tories) suggested that it had internalised this point. But its deal with the EU makes future trade accords much harder. We may struggle to complete the US deal that was flagged up last month when the temporary suspension of some tariffs was announced.

William Hague, a Remainer and who broadly backs the new deal, is concerned that Britain will no longer be able to innovate in areas where it has ceded control. For example, “the UK will not now be able to proceed with precision-bred crops despite parliament having recently legislated to permit them”. Quite.

Once again, Labour has taken the line of least resistance, sacrificing our long-term competitiveness to the immediate approval of the EU.

In doing so, it has also guaranteed a massive row under whichever party forms the next government. Any hopes that the EU would, in the light of the Ukraine war, see us as an ally rather than a recalcitrant province, have evaporated.

Eurocrats have gone home with everything they wanted. Mission accompli. So long, and thanks for all the fish.