, when I compared ‘reset means reset’ with the days of ‘Brexit means Brexit’, I pointed out that there is at least one important difference. The Brexit negotiations took place within a process and timescale which was at least semi-defined by Article 50. Any reset process will be more nebulous, and shouldn’t really be thought of as a process, in the singular. At the same time, a virulent backlash against the reset is now beginning and, with it, a new phase in the battle for post-Brexit politics.
The Brexit resetThe reset can be understood in terms of two kinds of process. The first kind consists of the things which the UK can do unilaterally, meaning without any agreement from the EU, such as maintaining regulatory alignment with the EU, both by eschewing active divergence and by avoiding passive divergence. There are
many signs that this kind of reset is underway. This is beneficial, as it means that businesses do not have to produce to two different standards, but doesn’t in itself improve terms of trade with the EU. Moreover, as occurred last week with the
introduction of the EU General Product Safety Regulation, there are some forms of EU regulatory change which cannot simply be ‘shadowed’ by the UK (or, in this case, and others relating to goods trade, Great Britain), but have to be accepted as new barriers to trade.
The second kind of process consists of things involving negotiation with the EU. Most obviously that means agreeing measures which go beyond the existing Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), perhaps including a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement, a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS) agreement, and a Mutual Recognition of Professional Qualifications agreement. It could also include a security and defence pact. However, it also includes negotiations within the various mechanisms built into the existing agreements because there are some things potentially within their scope (such as
linking carbon pricing systems) which, if pursued, would contribute to a reset.
Equally,
there are other things, including the full implementation of the Windsor Framework, the resolution of ongoing problems in implementing the settled status scheme for EU citizens in the UK, and the full introduction of UK import controls, which are likely to be seen by the EU as a prerequisite for any substantive new agreement(s). This was brought into sharp focus
this week with the news that the EU is taking the UK to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over its failures, going back to 2020, to uphold all the citizens’ rights provisions agreed in the Withdrawal Agreement and some other matters (all of which, be it noted, go back to the Tory government’s alleged failure to do what it, itself, had agreed; note also that it agreed to the ECJ’s role in these matters).
Resolving such issues is part of the reset because it would help to rebuild trust with the EU and to improve the ‘tone’ of the relationship, something which has been underway since the election, and which saw further developments in the last fortnight. These included
Rachel Reeves attending the EU finance ministers' meeting and
Keir Starmer meeting the President of the European Council. It’s wrong to scoff at such things as mere symbolism: symbolism matters, not least because of the way it relates to trust.
As for substance, there have been
further signs that the UK will end up agreeing some form of YMS. Doing so, along with
extending the agreement on fishing rights beyond its expiry in June 2026, looks to be the basic requirement of agreeing any wider reset with the EU. How the substance of the reset develops from now on will define Labour’s post-Brexit policy and, indeed, the UK’s post-Brexit polity, and negotiations with the EU look set to be the Brexit story of 2025 and perhaps beyond.
The reset backlashAlthough these two reset processes have barely begun, it is already clear that what the economics commentator
Simon Nixon calls “the Brexit reset backlash” is now underway, and it has gathered force just in the last two weeks. Thus last weekend saw the reset being
denounced in the Mail on Sunday as what David Frost called, with his trademark dreary predictability, the work of a “Surrender Squad” which is set on “betraying” Brexit. An
accompanying editorial warned that Starmer’s plans will make Britain “a rule taker” rather than “a rule maker”.
The next day, again in the
Mail,
Boris Johnson fulminated about the need to “fight, fight and fight again for the freedoms people voted for in 2016”. Meanwhile,
in the Express, Johnson again appeared, this time to warn that the UK’s accession to the CPTPP, which
occurred last Sunday, was in danger of being sacrificed by Starmer (a particularly disingenuous comment, as there is nothing in the reset which is anticipated to preclude CPTPP membership,
including an SPS deal). And in
this week’s PMQs Kemi Badenoch accused Starmer of being “about to give away our hard-won Brexit benefits” whilst
the Sun launched a “campaign to stop Brexit betrayal”.
These and many other examples of the backlash reprise all the rancid arguments of the last eight years with the ever-present accusations of betrayal along with
those of ‘submission’ to the EU and lack of patriotism. There’s something particularly fatuous about calling the reset a ‘betrayal’ when it comes, as it often does, from those who have spent those eight years calling every single aspect of Brexit a betrayal. Just how many times can Brexit be betrayed? However, the backlash is also distinctive, or at any rate specific, in being aimed at particular possibilities envisaged within the reset such as a carbon emissions agreement and an SPS agreement. In particular, the backlash has, rather belatedly, honed in on Labour’s longstanding omission of ECJ jurisdiction from its ‘red lines’.
A new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrativeThus this reset backlash can be understood as a new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative. The
first phase of that battle began in earnest after the transition period ended in January 2021, and it was decisively lost by the Brexiters. That is evidenced by the now well-established negative public view of Brexit. For example,
according to the Statista data series, since June 2021 the view that it was ‘wrong to leave’ has always been greater than the view that it was ‘right to leave’, with the gap between those rising steadily. In June 2021 44% said ‘wrong’ and 43% said right, but by May 2024 (the latest date in this data set) those figures were 55% and 31%. Many other polls and similar polling questions show the same pattern. At the same time, Brexiters became increasingly unwilling to defend Brexit and increasingly
convoluted in such defences as they offered.
The arrival of the new government has provided Brexiters with an opportunity to regroup. In addition to opposing the reset itself, this regroup has two main axes.
The first axis consists of trying to give the impression that all the false claims made for Brexit were, in fact, being delivered on by the Tory government and are only now being squandered, or failing to materialise, because the Labour government has turned its back on them. Thus
the fact that the Tories found that substantial regulatory divergence was impractical, and regulatory freedoms were largely an illusion, is being glossed over, and the failure to deliver them blamed on Labour. In a similar way, Badenoch and others are pretending that
it is only Labour’s lack of commitment (£) which stands in the way of a supposedly (though actually fictitious) “oven ready” UK-US trade deal, especially once Trump returns to power.
The second axis is to re-write the ongoing damage of Brexit as being, in fact, the failure of the Labour government. Though minor in itself, a strikingly brazen example was
an article in the Telegraph (£) last week bemoaning that “London’s stock market is in danger of sliding into irrelevance under Labour”. Yet, last January,
an article in the same paper (£) reported that Brexit was “the prime suspect in the death of the stock market”. Not only were they in the same paper, but both articles were co-authored by the very same journalist, Chief City Correspondent Michael Bow.
This is only a small foretaste of what is likely to come. In particular, sooner or later (and sooner, if a reset with the EU is going to happen), the government is going to have to introduce full import controls. These are a direct consequence of Brexit, but one the Tories postponed multiple times,
as did the Labour government this autumn. Undoubtedly when it happens it will be blamed on Labour mismanagement and, very likely, twisted round to be blamed on the reset itself (i.e. as a ‘concession’ in order to get the reset).
Labour’s culpabilityIn a sense, Labour have only themselves to blame. Promising to ‘make Brexit work’ was always likely to lumber the government with responsibility for all the ways in which Brexit does not, and will never, work. Nor has the government helped itself since coming to power. For example, treating, and initially rejecting, YMS as an ‘unacceptable EU demand’ simply plays into the hands of Brexiters, enabling them to present it, if (and almost certainly when) accepted, as a ‘capitulation’. It would have been much better to treat it as a great prize, and evidence of the potential value of the reset.
Another example is the UK’s accession to CPTPP. Of course the Trade Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, was bound to
speak positively about this, but he was not obliged to do so in terms almost identical to those which would have been used by his Tory predecessors, saying it showed that “Britain is uniquely placed to take advantage of exciting new markets” etc. Here, again, the government is too willing to accept the Brexiters’ framing.
In the same way, the Brexiter attack line that the reset will make Britain a ‘rule taker’ ought to be challenged head-on by emphasising that Brexit created a situation where Britain is, in practice, a rule-taker (think
tethered plastic bottle caps). The reset is partly designed to deal with this reality in a more efficient way, by facilitating alignment through, for example, the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, and perhaps in due course by agreeing to, for example, dynamic alignment of SPS regulations. So, far from being the
cause of rule taking, the reset is a consequence of it and, in turn, a consequence of the delusions of Brexit.
In short, if the reset is to be successfully defended against the backlash, it will be necessary to challenge, and to not to reproduce, the underlying framing Brexit of itself. Just talking of the Tories’ “botched Brexit deal” isn’t enough. What is needed is a positive justification of the reset.
Justifying the resetThe most crucial justification is that the Labour election manifesto was quite clear about its intention to seek to reset relations with the EU. Conversely, the attempt the Brexiters are now making to depict the reset as undemocratic and a betrayal of the 2016 vote is, unequivocally, a lie. To the ire of many of its supporters, the Labour government is not reversing Brexit, and there is nothing at all in the referendum or what happened afterwards to say the UK-EU relations are bound to remain in the form Johnson and Frost negotiated (a form which, anyway, included provisions for future changes). Indeed, the crux of the Brexiters’ argument was that the British parliament should be free to pursue the policies which British electors had mandated. The reset has that mandate.
The second justification is that the reset also has popular support. The latest evidence for that came with
a report from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) which includes a lot of crunchy survey data about public attitudes in the UK and in EU member states to UK-EU relations. I won’t even try to summarise it here but, as regards UK opinion, a couple of figures are worth flagging. One is that, overall, 55% favour closer relations with the EU, 22% favour relations as they are and 10% favour more distant relations. The other is that, amongst ‘Red Wall’ voters these figures are 44%, 14% and 18% respectively. Additionally,
and prominently reported, the survey found majority support, even amongst leave voters (54%), for the return of freedom of movement in return for single market “access”.
These figures, especially the latter, attracted a certain amount of
exuberant comment from ‘remainers’ or ‘rejoiners’ along the lines that the Labour government no longer need fear public opinion, not just as regards a reset but as regards reversing the entirety of, at least, ‘hard Brexit’ (i.e. no single market). I don’t think it is anything like as simple as that, whether viewed in terms of the narrow calculus of Labour electoral advantage or from the broader terms of the politics of Brexit.
On the first, it may well be the case (and, though I don’t have the data, I suspect it probably is) that a relatively small number of voters who don’t want closer relations and don’t want freedom of movement, and who feel strongly about both, could prevent Labour winning the next election. The wider issue is that opinion polls have many limitations, and can’t capture how voters would react if Labour followed where these ones point, given the backlash that would result. Most importantly of all, for Labour now to abandon its ‘red lines’ would immediately deprive the government of the democratic legitimacy which the election has given to its reset policy.
It may be tempting to think that, since that reset in itself attracts the ferocious and dishonest backlash we are seeing, the government might as well go the whole hog and pursue a reversal of Brexit, just as its Brexiter critics claim it to be doing. Actually, if anything, the backlash shows how limited Labour’s space for manoeuvre is. But the more important point is that there is a huge difference between defending against a false charge and against one which would be true. Moreover, if there is ever to be a durable rejoin policy it would have to be one which clearly had democratic legitimacy. So whilst the opinion polls give strong support for Labour’s reset, that is all they do.
The third justification for the reset is its substantive benefits. Just last week saw the publication, for the first time so far as I know, of a credible estimate of its economic impact. It came from
John Springford of the Centre for European Reform, and, whilst necessarily rough and ready, suggests that the reset could deliver an annual uplift of 0.3% to 0.7% in the long-term, defined here as ten years.
Of course this is fairly trivial compared with the foregone GDP growth resulting from Brexit (and, actually
this is Springford’s main point). However, in a
generally low-growth economy, it is not nothing. For example, on
present OECD predictions, UK growth in 2024 will be 0.9%. Moreover, on this estimate the reset is of considerably greater than the benefit of the long-term annual uplift of the CPTPP deal, estimated to be
0.04% to
0.08% of GDP. Even the Brexiters' much-vaunted UK-US trade deal would only be worth
an estimated 0.07% to 0.16% of GDP. So, small as the value of a reset may be, those who dismiss it as worthless should be careful not to inadvertently give the backlashers a free pass on how it compares with such ‘Brexit benefits’.
In any case, the reset has more than an economic value. For one thing, if achieved, it would have a defence and security value, and that at a time of huge international turmoil. For another, it could act as a confidence-building measure to be built on subsequently. Indeed - and this, too, ought to concentrate the minds of those ‘rejoiners’ who dismiss the reset as trivial or even pointless - if there is ever to be a route to joining the EU again it seems all but certain it would need to pass through something like the reset along the way.
The bigger pictureIt is in this latter respect that the Brexit reset backlash is most important, and most dangerous. At one level, it is just about domestic politics. It is a transparently opportunistic attempt by both Tory and Reform parties to re-kindle the populist anger of the referendum, and the ‘Brexit wars’ which followed, in order to boost their electoral fortunes.
At another level, those attempts are inseparable from UK-EU relations. The Brexiters’ visceral hatred of the EU makes them determined permanently to pollute those relations with their political faeces. They know that the more anti-reset opposition they can whip up, the less likely it is that the EU will have the confidence to entertain even minimally closer relations, let alone anything else. Already
Jacob Rees-Mogg is urging “both the Tory and Reform leaders … to promise if elected to leave any new Labour deal”, and that is quite deliberately designed to wreck EU confidence in the reset. It is hideous and, if anything deserves the label, ‘unpatriotic’ in its attempt not just to derail the elected government’s reset policy but to engender perpetual hostility with Britain’s neighbours and allies. But it is happening and it can’t be wished away.
In that sense, this new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative is a crucial one for the government but, more widely and in the longer-term, for anyone who rejects the vicious and self-harming politics of Brexitism. Labour’s reset may be frustratingly timid, but the backlash against it is a reminder of the obstacles even to timidity. If it is defeated by that backlash, or even if it allows the Brexiters to regroup, the hold of that vicious and self-harming politics on our country will be strengthened. Conversely, if the Brexiters lose this second phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative, as they did the first, those politics will be weakened. At one level, the reset is about technocratic tinkering with the UK’s relations with the EU, but there is much more stake than that. Hence, indeed, the Brexiters’ desire to destroy it.
With that, another year of Brexit blogging ends. Many thanks to all who have read this year, taking the total visits to this site to well over the 10 million mark, and the number of posts to over 450. Your readership is always appreciated, and never taken for granted, especially with the huge volume of blogs, newsletters, vlogs, and I-don’t-know-whats that compete for attention. Thanks, too, for the (generally) urbane and (often) interesting comments made since I re-opened the facility a bit over a year ago. Best wishes to all readers for Christmas and the New Year. The next post will be on Friday 10 January 2025. I think I will continue in the new fortnightly pattern, but if (as seems possible) there is a lot of Brexit-related news next year then I might revert to the weekly format.
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