Labour Is Untrustworthy With Brexit.

The Tories and Reform need to expose Labour’s blatant Brexit backsliding.

Starmer’s intention to mirror EU laws and share its asylum burden were not in the Labour manifesto

DAVID FROST21 July 2024 • 7:00am

CREDIT: Thierry Monasse

Writing in these pages on Friday, Fraser Nelson pointed out that every minister in the government, bar one – a Tory defector – had opposed leaving the EU. Yet we are supposed to believe that these people will stand by their commitment not to go back into the EU, its customs union, or its single market, and will happily just “reset” the relationship.

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I say: don’t trust them. All the warm words we saw at the Blenheim Palace Summit this week, all the innocuous-sounding promises to improve trade, are designed to reassure, in the hope that we drop our guard.

I worked in government for 30 years. I know the Whitehall instincts. They never really accepted the referendum result. They never believed Britain could prosper with its own economic and trade policy. Their ideas produced Theresa May’s disastrous Chequers policy. Labour will have no difficulty in turning them to their purposes.

They also know – at least they think they know – how to manage hostile public and political opinion. After all, they have been dealing with it for many years. They will try to deny, to restrict the information flow, and to obfuscate. They have very low regard for Brexiteers, whom they believe can be satisfied with meaningless language about sovereignty, whatever the underlying realities.

We refused to use this playbook in 2020. Boris Johnson and I set out our aims unambiguously from the start, made clear what we needed, and delivered. But otherwise we’ve seen it consistently. We saw it in David Cameron’s half-hearted renegotiation in 2015 – a nothing result sold as a decisive change. We saw it in Theresa May’s withdrawal deal, with the attempt to make us believe that the text didn’t say what it said and that we would not end up stuck in the customs union for ever. And it’s what we saw under Rishi Sunak with the Windsor Framework, with his claim that it would “remove any sense of a border” in the Irish Sea, a view unthinkingly accepted by far too many Conservative Brexiteers.

So expect it again. For the new Labour Government is serious about its EU policy and its calming words hide the reality. We can tell that from the way it’s setting up the bureaucracy. When a government is in status quo mode on Europe, it leaves policy to the Foreign Office. When it wants to achieve something, it puts it in the Cabinet Office or No10. That’s what Boris Johnson did and it’s what Labour have done now. Indeed, the new Minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, is responsible for both EU relations and the British Constitution, a juxtaposition which shows you how Labour think of these things, and which should worry us.

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There are many other straws in the wind. Starmer clearly talked to French President Emmanuel Macron about asylum and migration at Blenheim. He had to. Having dumped the Rwanda scheme, all he can now do is prevail on the French to stop the boats at their end. That won’t happen unless we agree to share the European asylum burden, that is, take lots of their asylum seekers in return. Labour won’t mind that, because fundamentally they believe we should take large numbers of asylum seekers into Britain. So expect this to be where we end up.

A second straw in the wind is the Product Safety Bill slipped into the King’s Speech this week. The briefing says this will give us the “sovereign choice to mirror or diverge’’ from EU rules. But, as I said above, when they use the word “sovereign”, count your spoons.  We don’t need new legislation to diverge. We only need it if we intend to mirror. The Government goes on to note that the Bill will have “specific powers to make changes to GB legislation to manage divergence” between GB and Northern Ireland – that is, once again, to mirror EU law. Take all this together, and you have what we always feared: an intention to use Northern Ireland as a Trojan Horse to force us to follow EU legislation. This is the Chequers deal once again by the back door.

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And finally, we know the Government wants a security and defence agreement with the EU. But since we are the only serious military power in Europe apart from France, the EU has more interest in this than we do: after all, we have Nato already. That’s why in the 2020 talks our message to the EU was “if you want a security deal, make it worth it for us”. They never did. Labour has now offered it up for nothing.

So we can see the direction of travel. These measures begin the process of subordination. For sure, don’t cry wolf: these measures don’t in themselves amount to abandoning Brexit. But they are a step on that road and will be a significant constraint on our national freedom. If Labour get away with them they will move to the next stage.

Both Conservatives and the Reform Party need to get ready to expose what’s going on. There’s nothing in the Labour manifesto about mirroring EU laws. There is nothing about sharing the EU’s asylum burden. These measures can legitimately be opposed. We must make Labour pay a political price and raise doubts on the EU side about how politically sustainable any deal might be in the medium term. And we need to gear up to this now – while it can still be stopped. DT.