Labour’s Brexit denial is damaging the UK – it’s time to rejoin the customs union

Martin Shipton

With Reform UK’s racist obsessions largely dominating the political discourse, it was refreshing to see a sensible legislative proposal getting some traction this week.

The Liberal Democrats’ spokesman on Europe Dr Al Pinkerton, a former associate professor in geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, proposed a Bill that, if passed, would oblige the UK Government to negotiate Britain’s re-entry to the EU’s customs union.

The Bill won a vote on its first reading with a majority of just one. So far as our 32 MPs are concerned, the proposition was backed by David Chadwick, the Lib Dems’ sole MP in Wales; Plaid Cymru’s quartet of Ann Davies, Ben Lake, Llinos Medi and Liz Saville-Roberts; and Labour’s principled Gower MP Tonia Antoniazzi.

All of Labour’s 26 other MPs from Wales chose to abstain. The Bill will return to the Commons later, regrettably with little chance of passing into law.

Everyone sensible knows that it was utter folly for the UK to leave the EU, and one recent estimate suggests there are now eight million more Remainers than Leavers in the UK. Most people understand the economic damage that has been inflicted on Britain by Brexit.

Yet the Labour Party stubbornly refuses to contemplate returning to the customs union, the single market or, heaven forbid, full membership of the EU.

In his House of Commons speech proposing our return to the customs union, Pinkerton states the bare facts: “Up and down the country, businesses know it, the public feel it and it is time that this House found the courage to lift our whispered voices and admit it: Brexit has been an abject economic failure. It has choked business investment, shattered economic resilience, strangled trade, shrunk the economy and left every single one of us poorer.

“ … Far from ‘taking back control’, today our country feels more precarious than ever. We lurch from crisis to crisis, uncertain of who we are, what we stand for or whether our children will be better off tomorrow than those who came before. Far from becoming a buccaneering ‘global Britain’, the UK is today weaker and more isolated than at any point in our recent history.

“Far from lowering food and living costs or slashing regulation, British businesses are now buried under 2 billion bits of red tape that stretch 15 times around the circumference of the Earth, all while the cost of living spirals even higher.

“Far from securing the transformative trading arrangements they promised, the government has delivered only Australia and New Zealand deals worth a combined 0.1% to UK GDP and exposed British farmers to tougher competition and diluted protections. The India deal would add just 0.13%, and the much-heralded US agreement has shrunk from a growth opportunity into damage limitation following Trump’s tariffs.

“Meanwhile, we have erected new barriers to our largest market, the European Union, which continues to represent around half of our global trade.

“Just last month, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a leading US think-tank, published a decade-long analysis concluding that Brexit has reduced UK GDP by between 6% and 8%. The House of Commons Library shows that Brexit is now costing the Treasury up to £90bn every single year in lost tax receipts—money that could be supporting our NHS, our defence spending and our public services.”

Tax burden

The day after the Bill won its first reading, Plaid Cymru’s Westminster leader Liz Saville-Roberts tackled Keir Starmer on this issue during Prime Minister’s Questions. She said: ‘“Let me put this plainly. The most dishonest campaign in modern British political history promised that Brexit would save £350 million a week. Instead, Brexit is now costing this country £250 million every single day. That is why we have the highest tax burden in 70 years. That is why families face sky-high bills. That is why we remain trapped in a cost of living crisis. This is the lived reality of the very working people the government claims to champion, but for whom they show neither the resolve nor the political will to protect.

“The Prime Minister just said that he wanted a closer relationship with Europe, but he then referenced the Labour party manifesto. Wales has been hit hardest by Brexit—exports are down by a third. When will he admit that the only solution to the chaos imposed by Brexit is to rejoin the customs union and the single market, or is he too afraid of what his party might say?”

Starmer’s response was pitiful, on several levels: “I went to Solihull to see the Jaguar Land Rover workforce before we got the deal with President Trump. They were worried sick that they were going to lose their jobs -that would be a loss for them, their families and their communities.

“I took the call from President Trump, when we got the deal, in Solihull at JLR, so that the first people I could tell were the workforce, who knew very well that it meant their jobs were safeguarded.

“We have also just done a deal on pharma, which is the first of its kind, and the best of its kind, in the world. It is not sensible or fair to the JLR workforce, or to the pharma sector, to say that, having achieved those things now, we should unravel them through discussion of a customs union. I just do not think that is a sensible way to take our country forward.”

Punitive tariffs

The reason why the JLR workers were worried about their jobs was because there is a lunatic in the White House who was threatening to impose punitive tariffs on foreign cars to the detriment of his own and other countries’ economy.

Equally, Trump had been threatening to impose tariffs on pharmaceutical drugs. Instead, the deal reached with the UK exempted tariffs on medicines from the UK that are sold to the US but imposed a significant increase in the cost of medicines supplied by the US to the UK.

The fact is that Starmer finds himself in the humiliating position of having to suck up to Trump out of fear that the UK would otherwise be punished economically. Our foolish decision to come out of the EU has left us isolated and more vulnerable to Trump’s bullying.

Yet Starmer refuses to contemplate standing up to Trump and claiming the bigger prize of economic growth inside the customs union.

Orwellian

Aligning ourselves with Trump rather than with the rest of Europe is to play a dangerous game. There have already been clear signs that the US under Trump is becoming an authoritarian state veering towards fascism. The proposal that foreign tourists wanting to visit the US should submit for inspection their social media accounts Those with views considered unacceptable won’t be allowed in – proving that Trump’s posturing about free speech is an Orwellian sham.

There can be no doubt that if Reform UK came to power in the UK, they would copy Trump’s repressive ideas. That cannot be allowed to happen.

The best thing Starmer could do now would be to start negotiations for re-entry to the customs union and promise a referendum on returning to the EU. That should spike Farage’s guns.