With the great reset Keir Starmer has bowed to reality

After the reset this week in relations between London and the EU, the same could probably be said of Brexit. In reality it never had a chance.

The potential freedoms it brought never materialised, partly because of Covid and recession, but mainly because politicians failed to deliver on those opportunities. They gazed at clear blue water to be different from the rest of Europe, but were afraid to jump in.

This applied to Conservatives, who campaigned for Brexit, but then delivered, through Boris Johnson, a botched, rushed exit deal with Brussels. All Keir Starmer has done this week is bow to reality.

People are quite simply out of love with Brexit; all polls suggest that with the knowledge they have now people would never have voted for it; even a majority of those who backed it admit it has not delivered.

The only unanimity on the issue is that no-one wants the political blood-letting that would surround a new referendum vote. On that basis tweaks, such as the changes agreed this week, will be the way ahead with reports that the government is set to sell off the costly customs facilities built to handle post-Brexit trade with Europe. The new deal is a fraction of what the UK had before Brexit, but it has been widely welcomed by most sectors of industry.

The exception is the fishing industry, which has never had the freedom it was promised under Brexit and now knows it was never going to happen. Europe is, and always has been, our biggest market for food and agriculture. The UK is also the EU’s biggest and most profitable export market. Anything that eases red tape is by definition good. That is the basis of this new deal, which is more about tweaking than a great reset. On food the EU and UK still have common standards. Both have, in a global context, farming industries that have high costs and quality standards; both need to protect their markets from low-cost, low price global competition. They make natural bedfellows, which is why Brexit created such confusion.

The deal will hopefully be the basis for a further easing of costly checks and controls, but we remain a long way from a free market.

We are also far away from the free trade customs union relationship others, such as Norway and Switzerland, have with the EU single market through the European Economic Area.

That remains our likely final destination. The reaction to the reset in relations has been predictable. Businesses see it as common sense and a deal to be welcomed because it eases red tape. Boris Johnson, the architect of a botched Brexit, accused Keir Starmer of a “total sell out”. For him and the current Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, it was a betrayal of Brexit. She vowed to reverse the deal if the Conservatives were ever back in power.

That seems a bizarre commitment, based more on principle than practicalities. It would be a path for more, not less, red tape and against a more secure Europe with higher spending on defence, just what the Tories have been seeking for years.

The shadow Scotland Secretary Andrew Bowie claimed the deal would leave the UK a “rule taker, rather than a rule maker”. There is no evidence for that to be the case. It was tired rhetoric like this that landed us with the bad relations with our biggest trading partner that will now hopefully ease, to the benefit of consumers and business. In many of the political comments there is a big element of sour grapes. The Conservatives might have delivered Brexit, but never capitalised on the freedoms promised.

The promised global trade deals never materialised, and where they did with the southern hemisphere they were to the disadvantage of agriculture; there was no bold vision for farming to be more globally competitive and no commitment to food security. Instead we got second hand EU green policies, the same as before Brexit, and as the EU eased back on those the Tories and now Labour pressed harder on the accelerator.

On that basis this reset deserves more than a knee jerk reaction from a party that delivered a bad Brexit deal and now frames every comment with one eye on the threat to its existence from Reform.