Pro-EU prime minister Keir Starmer is starting a year marking a decade since the Brexit vote by pushing for “even closer alignment” with the EU’s single market and promoting a “youth mobility scheme” that would amount to a return of free movement—effectively betraying the decision of Britons to leave.
Reports this week suggest the UK is preparing to enter “dynamic alignment” with the European Union in several areas, some agreed last year. This will allow Brussels rules to take effect automatically in Britain, without approval from MPs.
The Telegraph described this as “the first loss of UK sovereignty on standards since Brexit,” adding that the Labour government’s EU deal “is the worst of all worlds.”
There has also been some pushback from Nigel Farage’s Reform party. Trevor Lloyd-Jones, the party’s vice-chair for Aldershot, bashed the plans as a “disgrace,” adding:
Starmer’s really going to do it, he’s going to overturn Britain’s most important democratic decision in a generation.
Reform’s Bracknell branch jibed that Starmer is “unlikely” to be PM by the time these plans come into force, although “we will have another Europhile in his place, unfortunately.”
“Dynamic alignment” could lock Britain into Brussels’ net zero rules, regardless of Parliament’s wishes. Reports warn that EU decisions could also reshape UK law on food standards, pesticide use, and animal welfare.
On the last of these points, Conservative frontbencher Andrew Griffith noted that “EU standards are lower than the UK—why would Labour want that?” He added that Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband “is doing a perfectly good job of ruining British manufacturing with high energy costs without needing more help from Brussels.”
Former Margaret Thatcher aide Nile Gardiner said Starmer “is surrendering to Brussels.” Not that there was ever any doubt that he would do this. Though it is debatable whether the Tories would have done much better had they won the last general election.
A bill outlining these changes will reportedly be introduced to Parliament—which will later be shut out of decision-making—this spring or summer.