Downing Street has left the door open to the UK joining an EU trading scheme as part of its plans to “reset” ties with Europe and boost economic growth.
The EU’s new trade chief Maros Sefcovic, who led post-Brexit negotiations for the bloc, said last week he would consider letting Britain join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention (PEM), which allows for tariff-free trade of goods across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
While the Labour government has ruled out rejoining the EU single market or customs union, it wants to improve what it has called Boris Johnson’s “botched Brexit deal”, and that the PEM could offer a straightforward way to do this without crossing so-called red lines.
What did the commentators say?
“It’s easy to see why a self-professed growth-obsessed government might seek to be closer to the EU,” said The Observer. “It’s less clear why it’s seeking what it is, or whether achieving any of it will be easy.”
Boxed in by pre-election commitments aimed at winning over Eurosceptic voters in Red Wall constituencies in the north and Midlands, “all that’s left is tinkering around the margins of the existing deal”. And with the EU “far happier than the UK with the status quo”, the bloc holds the upper hand in negotiations.
The problem is that a lot has changed since that deal was agreed. Five years on, it is “clear” that Brexit has “imposed costs, particularly on goods exports, without any large offsetting benefits”, said The Economist. At the same time the “geopolitical situation has deteriorated”, with Russia’s war in Ukraine, the rising influence of China and the return of Donald Trump as president all making “striking out alone in Europe less appealing”.
Given all this there is “bafflement” in Brussels, “that the UK is not being more ambitious on trade”, said The i Paper. However, the offer to join the PEM is “very much under consideration in Whitehall, where officials see no downside to entering the scheme”.
What next?
Sefcovic thinks the “ball is in the UK’s court”, said the BBC, but the UK’s post-Brexit relationship “comprises many strands”, said The Observer, “any or all of which might interact with and derail reset negotiations – were these ever to formally begin”.
A new deal with Europe will probably be an “amalgam”, said The Independent, consisting of “some modest improvements on veterinary checks and phytosanitary rules; give and take on fisheries; some limited youth mobility schemes; plus an embryonic ‘defence union’, still secondary to Nato”.
Starmer “will get ‘Brexit 2.0’ done, with the suggestion of more to follow in the 2028-29 manifesto.” But this much-vaunted “reset” will end up being “messy and fail to satisfy anyone – disappointing to the rejoiners and infuriating the Brexiteers”.