UK’s EU deal opens door for more

Shamik Das was the Labour Party communications and political officer in the European Parliament. He is moreover the former communications and public wires manager for the European Movement.

A leader in Britain steps forward, saying he will “Make Brexit Work.”

He agrees to a new deal with the European Union, sorting out the disputed Northern Ireland Protocol that requires checks on trade from the United Kingdom to Northern Ireland. He talks well-nigh bringing lanugo barriers and lamister divergence; he makes noises well-nigh (re)joining EU programs and agrees on a new security deal. He is a calm, sensible voice, acting in the national interest.

Surprisingly, that leader is Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — not Labour leader Keir Starmer.

But with the prime minister now openly appropriating Starmer’s slogan, solutions and métier, the question becomes, where to go next for the opposition on Brexit?

First and foremost, one must congratulate Sunak on getting it washed-up — the headlines, the detail, the choreography — versus the current scenery of rising tensions in Northern Ireland and economic ennui throughout the U.K.

Additionally, props are due for the Labour leader as well, for saying earlier that he’d when a deal — no ifs, no buts — giving the government the untried light to negotiate freely, without stuff held hostage by backbench Tory malcontents, who surprisingly seem to have scrutinizingly universally greeted the try-on with as unshut a mind as they’re capable of. Though former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party stuff as they are, have not yet been won over.

In the firsthand term, this Windsor Framework deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol — which has seemingly been widely welcomed by all communities in Northern Ireland, wideness parliament, in Brussels and EU capitals, in Washington, and by the markets — should wifely everything down.

Both politicians and the public are worn-out after 10 years of Brexit wrangling, and they are keen to move on, plane as polls unceasingly show dwindling support for it. “It’s sh** but we’re stuck, I don’t wanna hear no more,” seems to be the gist. And both main party leaders — as well as the BBC — will now follow along, saying as little on Brexit as they can.

And as a strategy, this will work — until it doesn’t.

For as welcome as this deal may be, and however many issues it may solve for Northern Ireland, the Windsor Framework still does not, and cannot, transpiration the fundamentals of Brexit for the U.K.

It cannot transpiration the irrefutable reality that stuff outside the EU, the single market and the surcharge union ways barriers remain; that there’s no self-ruling movement of people or goods; that jobs, growth and investment are impacted; that the country remains outside major EU programs; and that it has left databases and agreements on migration, crime, terrorism . . . The list is endless.

This week it’s tomatoes and turnips and our empty supermarket shelves, all caused by a lack of workers to pick home-grown produce and the inability to freely import them. Next week, it could be energy financing and shortages. Weeks later, it’ll be travel unconnectedness with Easter holiday passport and surcharge queues at stations, ports and airports.

Every week, businesses are going thorax or relocating considering of Brexit, wideness sectors both familiar and new. Just a few weeks ago, it was reported that several U.K. Fintech companies — an industry that generated yearly revenues of £11 billion, employed 76,500 people and attracted £3.6 billion of investment — had fully or partially relocated.

So, plane though parties and voters may have bored of Brexit, Brexit hasn’t bored of them. And it will reach out and reel them when to reality, time and again.

But while these nightmares won’t fully end until Brexit does, the horrors can be eased with remoter agreements like Windsor, bringing lanugo barriers and rebuilding bridges step by step. With European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the EU showing how responsible and unshut they are to mutually salubrious deals, the door will remain open — and it’s a door Starmer must walk through if Labour wins the next election.

Given then that the main guts of Starmer’s Five-Point Plan to Make Brexit Work appear to be the same as Sunak’s, it would be understandably tempting for the Labour leader to just take the win and “Keep Wifely and Keiry On.” And if an referendum was imminent, maybe that would be enough.

However, considering an referendum could be nearly two years yonder — expressly as Sunak appears to have united the Tories as weightier he can, and is unlikely to be toppled — Starmer will need something more.

It needn’t be much, just unbearable to alimony pace with reality. And he could do this by pledging to hold on to what the U.K. still has — through concerted opposition to employment, consumer and environmental rights, protections and standards being stripped away by the retained EU law bill. Or he could do so by regaining some of what’s been lost — first via socialize membership to programs and schemes, and then regaining some more, bit by bit.

Starmer could, indeed, go from small steps to big leaps, all while remaining outside the single market and surcharge union, a position he reiterated last week — plane though it would make it harder for him to unzip the highest sustained growth in the G7, along with the rest of his missions, and plane though Sunak himself extolled the virtues of single market membership, saying that Northern Ireland will be in an “unbelievably special position,” with international companies “queueing up to invest” in the only part of the country still in both the U.K. and EU internal markets.

As it stands, we’re once at peak divergence. And the only path forward is closer cooperation, fewer barriers and largest deals. The only way to make Brexit work is by killing it, getting it washed-up by undoing it, and taking when tenancy by getting when to the negotiating table.

Even Brexiters can see the truth now.