Keir Starmer is being duped by the EU
- The EU doesn't innovate, it only regulates
- The European Union is disguising economic punishment as conservation regulations
- Non-tariff barriers to trade are often even more damaging than tariffs
If we are to believe all the ballyhoo surrounding Keir Starmer’s recent ‘trade deals’ with the US, India and the EU, anyone could be forgiven for believing the Prime Minister has solved our economic future by taking a couple of long-haul flights and welcoming Ursula von der Leyen to a jolly in London.
The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of how absurdly difficult is is to negotiate with EU bureaucrats on any terms but theirs.
With the EU, ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’ – this is a negotiating technique that means what you have already conceded can be reopened and fresh concessions demanded. The EU will always offset attempts to alleviate inspections for goods crossing the Irish Sea by one of its member state proxies demanding, say, the manning of Gibraltar border checks or maintaining access to our fisheries. This time round it will cost us £1 billion of fish lost to foreign boats – £12 billion until 2038.
This points to the failure of the British public and media to realise it is not tariffs (which have been removed by the EU-UK trade and co-operation agreement), but the EU’s non-tariff barriers that represent the greatest problem when dealing with the bloc.
5 comments:
I think we can safely assume that Keir Starmer is being duped by everyone he talks to.
If anything, this makes one feel sorry for the civil servants doing the actual negotiating. Either the whole thing is a sham and they know they are wasting their time, or they are dealing with incredibly complicated regulations with Starmer only having the faintest idea of what is going on, and the Europeans malevolently gaming the system.
dearieme - yes, including the Cabinet.
Sam - the whole thing certainly comes across as a sham because the rules of the EU game seem designed with that in mind. They can go on forever insisting on an endless fog of minutiae they designed into it.
Having read Richard North's writing for many years, (he knows the minutiae of EU rules and aquis), I'm cognisant of the fact that our politicians, at the very least do not have a clue about the EU and how its treaties and mechanisms work. That was what was so depressing about the Brexit question in 2016, neither side had the faintest idea what they were talking about.
Tammly - to my mind the Brexit debate should have been a comparatively high level constitutional one rather than delving into the detail of how the EU works. A strategic question with fairly clear constitutional implications either way.
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