Britain\u2019s return to the Erasmus youth exchange programme<\/a> is evidence that the change is working. The two sides agreed terms surprisingly quickly. I am told that the British team didn\u2019t expect to reach a deal this year, but that good relations between Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Europe minister who has just been promoted to the status of attending cabinet, and Maros Sefcovic, the EU\u2019s chief negotiator, made the early breakthrough possible. <\/p>\n The Conservatives pretend that they think the Erasmus scheme is poor value for money<\/a>. That is what Boris Johnson said when he failed to keep Britain in it as he negotiated his withdrawal agreement. <\/p>\n But it was not what his spinners said during those negotiations. Five years ago, as the talks grew more serious in the weeks before Christmas, The Times reported that the UK is \u201cexpected to remain part of the Erasmus exchange programme\u201d. It said that one of the costs of a \u201cno-deal\u201d Brexit, which was then still a possibility, was that UK access to Erasmus would be \u201cscrapped\u201d. <\/p>\n It was scrapped anyway, because the EU refused to be flexible. Johnson had to play the part of the fox in Aesop\u2019s fable<\/a> of the grapes and declare that he didn\u2019t want to be part of Erasmus in any case \u2013 instead of sour grapes, he said they were expensive ones. <\/p>\n Now the benefits of such a scheme will be available again to young people on either side of the Channel. Labour is obviously worried that it will be portrayed as a career-furthering opportunity for middle-class students, and has gone out of its way to stress that it will include apprenticeships, further education students and sports clubs, \u201cparticularly among disadvantaged groups\u201d. <\/p>\n But the Conservatives have refused the bait. Kemi Badenoch chose to devote not even one of her six questions at Prime Minister\u2019s Questions<\/a> today to accusing Keir Starmer of trying to reverse Brexit. She must have worked out that most voters would think a young people\u2019s exchange scheme is a good idea. <\/p>\n Erasmus is only the first in a queue of self-contained deals that are working their way through an increasingly well-oiled negotiation machinery. Next up is an agreement for the UK to rejoin the EU electricity market<\/a>. Thomas-Symonds\u2019 news release claims that this \u201ccould lower electricity costs\u201d, which sounds like a rather cautious claim, but anything that brings down the UK\u2019s exceptionally high electricity prices must be welcome. <\/p>\n Also in the queue is a deal on food and drink trade, the sanitary and phytosanitary agreement that would reduce the border checks between the UK and the EU, a tangled mass of red tape that the Tory government tried to unravel but never came close to succeeding. <\/p>\n Boris Johnson used to talk colourfully about the \u201cgravitational pull\u201d of the EU, as if it were a virtuous achievement to resist it, but the reason Labour is moving in the direction of working more closely with the EU is that it is in the national interest. <\/p>\n![\"We](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/5b7e52e80dca986383aee3fb7e083d27Y29udGVudHNlYXJjaGFwaSwxNzY2MDQ4Njgw-2.80209588.jpg\")
We are still a long way from \u2018reversing Brexit\u2019, insists Starmer (PA)<\/p>\n