As he unveiled the “reset” deal between the UK and the EU earlier this week, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declared it was “time to look forward” and “move on from the stale old debates of the past”.
At a summit in London on 19 May, Starmer and EU leaders announced a wide-ranging agreement touching on food, fishing rights, security and defence and passport checks.
Polling shows that most British voters want their government to improve ties with Brussels. A YouGov survey released over the weekend (prior to the UK-EU summit) revealed a majority of respondents supported Britain having a closer relationship with the EU.
'The day the Brexit dream died'
However, the British press gave a decidedly lukewarm reception to this week’s reset deal, using it as an opportunity to rehash many of the familiar arguments of the Brexit years.
The Daily Mail’s editorial didn’t pull any punches. The right-leaning paper denounced the deal in strident terms, saying Monday marked the “day the Brexit dream died and with it the vision of a vibrant, confident, sovereign Britain making its own rules and its own way on the international stage”.
In the Mail’s view, Starmer gave too much the EU in the negotiations and has left Britain “becoming an obeisant Brussels rule-taker”.
It added: “Everything the EU wanted from these ‘negotiations’ it received, from the UK accepting ‘dynamic alignment’ with its food and agriculture standards to a deal allowing European fishing boats to keep plundering British waters for years to come.”
The right-leaning Daily Telegraph took a similar view, accusing the UK government of “shameful capitulation” to Brussels.
The Telegraph editorial said: “Never in the history of human compromise has one side conceded so much for so little in return.
“The deal agreed by the Prime Minister in London yesterday is Britain’s most shameful capitulation since Edward Heath took us into the then EEC [European Economic Community] half a century ago. Britain will, in many respects, have reverted to the status of a non-voting member of the European Union.”
'A rational step forward'
The Guardian took a more measured approach. In its editorial, the left-leaning paper said the deal was a “rational step forward”, highlighting some of the positives from the negotiations – including what it calls “significant and timely” cooperation on security and defence, and a “significant easing of trade”.
While it noted some “disappointing omissions” in yesterday’s announcement – notably a lack of a mechanism to making touring by musicians and other artists easier – it said the deal represented a “modest scaling back of Tory-erected barriers is designed to show voters that his is a rational and responsible government that puts the interests of British businesses and consumers first”.
Pro-Brexit politicians also took the opportunity to cry betrayal over the signing of the reset deal.
In an interview with GB News, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson labelled the EU deal a "complete and deliberate betrayal of Brexit”, while the populist Reform Party leader Nigel Farage said it was an “abject surrender”.
Support from British businesses
British businesses have broadly welcomed the new deal – particularly those provisions that remove trade barriers, such as the removal of border checks on British food exports to the EU.
A British cheesemaker who made headlines in 2020 by criticising export costs introduced after Britain exited the single market told The Guardian that the “grown-ups are back in the room”.
Simon Spurrell, who was forced to sell his business because of a £600,000 loss caused by Brexit red tape, said: “Our biggest consumer market, 27 neighbouring countries that we lost, is open again. It is the small producers that lost out from Brexit. The biggest companies and supermarket chains were able to shoulder the costs.
“Now we can stop fishing in this small pond and cast our net wider again. Everybody has been waiting for this to happen. Just thank heavens the grown-ups are back in the room instead of people trying to make the EU be the bad guys when it is the British government who cut us out of the market in the first place and rejected the original SPS deal.”
