“Shared interests.” It’s a theme that runs through recent pronouncements by ministers about the relationship with the European Union. Which makes sense. It’s about time we realized that the EU is not in the business of doing us any favours, that the mere presence of friendly Labour faces in Government is not enough to unlock future co-operative opportunities. That being said, it’s far from clear whether our interests are as shared as some in London might hope.
The story of Brexit has, in part, been one of the UK misunderstanding the European Union. “They need us more than we need them” was a staple of the Brexit years. The implication was, as David Davis put it, that within “minutes of a vote for Brexit the chief executives of Mercedes, BMW, VW and Audi will be knocking down chancellor Merkel’s door demanding that there be no barriers to German access to the British market”.
The reality, of course, proved somewhat different. The EU – as anyone who had spent any time thinking about or studying it could have predicted – played hardball in the negotiations, defending its interests and ensuring that the trade deal which emerged reflected its priorities.
The deal that we signed with the EU when we left – the Trade and Cooperation Agreement – does a lot for trade in goods (where the EU enjoys a trade surplus with the UK) but not that much at all for services (where the opposite holds).
And since then, the UK has faced another problem. Not merely negotiating with a rigid, inflexible negotiator that needs a deal less than we do, but getting them interested in the first place. Now we’ve left, and a deal the EU is extremely happy with has been put in place, we have dropped like a stone down their list of priorities.
We’ve seen what this means in practice. The EU took a long time even coming up with negotiating mandates ahead of the talks now ongoing on an agricultural deal, linking the emissions trading systems of the two sides, possible British participation in the EU’s electricity single market and youth mobility.
And when it comes to the talks themselves, the EU has made it pretty clear that if they don’t get what they want – youth mobility – the negotiations on British asks such as the agricultural deal might mysteriously stall. On top of which, Brussels has come up with a new wheeze – demanding payments to its cohesion fund if the UK is to gain entrance to the single market in electricity.
That price tag was not mentioned before but it speaks to another problem haunting the talks. The EU is about to start negotiating its seven-year budget. And talks look set to be more bitter than ever. The danger for London is that member states look over the Channel and see a potential piggy bank that can be raided in case of need.
And if the EU’s focus on its own narrow interests were not obvious enough from all this, it is even more so when it comes to the future. In her recent Mais lecture, Rachel Reeves looked forward to a world in which the UK aligned with a whole host of sectors. Divergence, she argued, should be the exception and not the norm. Once again, common interests were invoked in defence of this argument.
In the EU, however, this is known not as common interests, but as “cherry-picking”. The idea that the UK should be able to pick sectors in which it wants to align sparks real opposition in Brussels. Partly because it smacks of British exceptionalism of a kind the EU got all too used to during the negotiations of 2016-2020. Partly too, because there are political reasons.
There are plenty of governments in the EU who would see any weakening in the principle of the indivisibility of the four freedoms that underpin the single market as an excuse to ask for special treatment for their own countries. What is more, any such weakening would be grist to the mill for the various populist parties – in power or hoping to gain it – who are arguing that the EU intrudes too much into the life of the member states.
There was perhaps reason for the UK to hope that the war in Ukraine, combined with the shock of the second Trump administration, might make the idea of shared interest more compelling. Realistically, the route to greater European security autonomy implies the involvement of the UK. Yet, the reality has been very different. The EU’s financial demands saw the UK walk out of negotiations to participate in the nascent Safe programme designed to support investments in defence. Economic nationalism won the day over shared security.
It is important that we in the UK start to understand where the EU stands on these issues. Partly, of course, so we calibrate our demands accordingly. Partly too because, the more our political leaders repeat asks that are seen as unacceptable in Brussels, the more EU negotiators think that the UK, almost 10 years after the referendum, still hasn’t learned the lesson that it will not get special treatment. Irritating our interlocutors is not a viable strategy.
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