{"id":666067,"date":"2026-01-01T04:05:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T04:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/666067\/"},"modified":"2026-01-01T04:05:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T04:05:16","slug":"kemi-badenoch-starmers-trying-to-save-his-skin-by-unpicking-brexit-but-it-just-makes-him-look-even-weaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/666067\/","title":{"rendered":"KEMI BADENOCH: Starmer’s trying to save his skin by unpicking Brexit – but it just makes him look even weaker"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leaving the EU but joining a customs union is like throwing away the burger and eating the napkin, said the Conservative peer Lord Hannan. He\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

Recent weeks have seen a bizarre push by some Labour<\/a> and Lib Dem<\/a> politicians \u2013 including in major newspaper interviews \u2013 to rejoin the EU\u2019s customs union.<\/p>\n

Most of these MPs were not present during the political chaos of 2017\u20132019 that followed the Brexit<\/a> referendum, during which many in Westminster fought to overturn the vote. And those Labour MPs who were there, and who now want to rejoin the customs union, clearly learned nothing. The only people advocating for such a policy \u2013 and here I include the trade union bosses who have also proposed it \u2013 do not understand what a customs union actually is.<\/p>\n

As a former Trade Secretary, I know that trade is about hard choices. You defend British interests. You say no to deals that are easy to sign but bad for the country. Yet Labour, despite all the dramatic changes to the global trade system this year, have still not grasped one simple lesson. Trade policy is power: lose control of it, and you lose the ability to govern yourself.<\/p>\n

This is why the renewed chatter about dragging Britain back into the EU\u2019s customs union should worry us all. It is not a sign of pragmatism \u2013 it is a symptom of Labour\u2019s weakness.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s now painfully obvious to everyone that Keir Starmer<\/a> entered government without a plan. The list of humiliating U-turns is so long that, I hear, Labour MPs now think twice before supporting a policy announcement in case the PM scraps it a week later.<\/p>\n

\"It\u2019s <\/p>\n

It\u2019s now painfully obvious to everyone that Keir Starmer entered government without a plan. The list of humiliating U-turns is so long, writes KEMI BADENOCH<\/p>\n

\"Labour <\/p>\n

Labour have still not grasped one simple lesson. Trade policy is power: lose control of it, and you lose the ability to govern yourself, says KEMI BADENOCH<\/p>\n

From winter fuel payments to freezing income tax thresholds and the Family Farm Tax, Labour haven\u2019t just broken their pre-election promises, they\u2019ve inflicted untold damage to the British economy while doing so.<\/p>\n

And now the government is weak and has no plan or new ideas, it has re-opened old Brexit wounds in the vain hope that doing so will make it more popular.<\/p>\n

It won\u2019t. Going back into the customs union would make us all poorer and damage British business and British farming. Four major benefits of Brexit would be lost: we would no longer be able to set our own tariffs, negotiate our own trade deals, maintain the deals we\u2019ve signed as an independent nation, or reject deals struck by others, even when they harmed our interests.<\/p>\n

Worse, the bloc would demand even more concessions from us to rejoin \u2013 and this hapless Labour government would no doubt surrender. Keir Starmer\u2019s previous attempts at \u2018negotiating\u2019 with the EU have been one humiliation after another.<\/p>\n

The PM gave up our fishing rights to get into an EU \u2018defence fund\u2019 that we still don\u2019t have access to, and then paid almost \u00a3600million to rejoin an Erasmus scheme we\u2019d decided was too expensive at \u00a3100million and was mostly being used by EU students studying here, not young Brits going abroad.<\/p>\n

Starmer\u2019s trade agreement with President Trump, though considerably worse than the deal the Conservatives had ready to go with America, is nevertheless clearly better than anything the EU has managed to agree with the world\u2019s most important economy.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

A countdown clock is illuminated at No10 on Brexit day on January 31, 2020<\/p>\n

Why would we give up the trade deals we\u2019ve negotiated, all structured to work for British businesses, to join a customs union designed to benefit firms in EU countries, with vastly different priorities? Britain is in a slump. Talk of a customs union is a distraction. I\u2019m not here to make excuses for previous Conservative governments: we got things wrong, or we\u2019d still be in government.<\/p>\n

However, we did leave Labour the fastest-growing economy in the G7, record levels of employment and inflation on target at 2 per cent.<\/p>\n

We also had a clear trade policy: as Trade Secretary, I signed our biggest post-Brexit deal in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), securing preferential access to a vast market of 500 million people in the Indo-Pacific region \u2013 which will account for half of global economic growth in the next decade \u2013 while defending our farmers and making no migration concessions.<\/p>\n

Since Labour took over, growth has been flat, unemployment has increased every month and inflation has almost doubled.<\/p>\n

We need a government with a plan. Conservatives have the plan, the experience and the team to get the country back on track. We will scrap bad taxes like stamp duty and high-street business rates to get our housing market moving again and revitalise our town centres.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll crack down on benefits to get Britain back to work. And we\u2019ll leave the ECHR to stop the boats once and for all. These are the right steps to give Britain the kick-start it desperately needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leaving the EU but joining a customs union is like throwing away the burger and eating the napkin,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":666068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,92,6405,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,1198,8414,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-666067","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-dailymail","11":"tag-debate","12":"tag-eu","13":"tag-europe","14":"tag-european","15":"tag-european-union","16":"tag-great-britain","17":"tag-kemi-badenoch","18":"tag-labour","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115817868681268240","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}