Exclusive: European affairs minister Nick Thomas-Symonds will tell ideologues on both sides of the Brexit debate that ‘alignment is not a dirty word’ as he seeks to embed a relationship reset with ‘ruthless pragmatism’
  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    9·
    5 days ago

    Britain will not rejoin EU or set up customs union, Starmer’s top negotiator warns

    I think that the likelihood of doing a Turkey-EU-style customs union was always going to be very low. Even back during Brexit, when some people were talking about it, I was pretty confident that that would not happen. It’d lower trade barriers, but just as it does with Turkey, the EU is going to demand exclusive control over it, and the tradeoff in control over trade policy probably doesn’t make sense for the UK.

    I didn’t see any serious push for a customs union with concrete proposals back around Brexit.

    Maybe in the long run the UK would rejoin the EU, but I don’t think that a customs union is likely in the cards in the near- or far-term.

    Honestly, for Turkey, I understand that the customs union was presented as a stepping stone to Turkey getting EU membership. When that membership started to look unlikely in any kind of near term, the customs union wound up just being the status quo. I’m not sure that Turkey would have accepted it if they’d expected that to be an end goal.

    If you want to have a customs union, to not check goods moving across a border at all, then you have to have the same set of rules for what’s allowed in the land on each side of the border.

    Someone has to write those rules.

    In the case of the Turkey-EU arrangement, it’s the EU. Turkey effectively gave up control over goods to the EU. The EU gets to write the terms of trade agreements and tariff schedule between Turkey and the rest of the world. I don’t think that the UK would likely accept that. Too many undesirable things that an outside party could do if it could set the terms of your trade agreements and you have no leverage.

    For something else to be the case, then the EU would have to do something like cede some meaningful level of control over its trade agreements to an outside country, the UK. I’m also deeply skeptical that the EU is going to be willing to do that — the benefit of getting the limited extra scale from the UK in isn’t likely going to be worth the loss of control over the EU’s own trade policy. I’m pretty sure that the EU’s response to the UK asking for that is going to be “if you want that, then you need to be an EU member”. It’s going to want to have control over routes into the EU itself. Just too many ways for outside countries to leverage having control over outside-world routes into the EU from a trade standpoint. And the EU doesn’t want to encourage more alternatives to membership that might encourage Euroskeptic people in existing members to start leaving EU membership to avoid political integration, while using as a justification that they could get some sort of special deal cut with the EU, because “look, the UK could do it”. Would be a political mess for the EU.

    There isn’t really a reasonable way to compromise on that to produce a customs union in a way that makes much sense for either party.