“Six-seven, yeah! Everybody here, six-seven! Are you doing page six-seven?” Keir Starmer’s in-no-way staged moment in a Peterborough classroom was an exercise in sphincter-tightening cringe that even Elon “I have become meme” Musk might have thought twice about. But to be honest, it wasn’t the most annoying thing said by a Labour politician this week.
That came when Nick Thomas-Symonds, Starmer’s EU negotiator, told the Spectator: “We’re not revisiting the single market, the customs union or freedom of movement.” At a time when the US National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that Brexit has reduced UK GDP by 6-8%, and House of Commons library research says it has cost the average Brit between £2,700 and £3,700, it’s a quote about as welcome as “let’s have all the relatives round for Christmas” or “great news, I’ve scored Mumford & Sons tickets for Hyde Park next summer”.
Put the doomed ‘make Brexit work’ mantra to one side though, and there was plenty to be encouraged by in an interview by Tim Shipman, once the Sunday Times’ Boris-and-Dom whisperer. Thomas-Symonds sounds hopeful that the new food and animal products (SPS) deal with Brussels will be in place in the first half of 2027, eliminating red tape, easing food price inflation and adding £5.1 billion a year to the economy. Talks are ongoing (with a Sunday deadline) on the UK’s defence industry joining a lucrative and necessary EU scheme to arm Ukraine, but he claims defence partnerships are on the way regardless.
Most interesting of all, perhaps, were Thomas-Symonds’s thoughts on how Brexit will be a battleground issue at the next general election. He told Shipman that he’d had a few run-ins with the “always respectful” former Brexit secretary Lord David Frost, and that voters would be given a clear choice between their views in 2029.
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Thomas-Symonds said: “My challenge to Lord Frost was simply this – it is a perfectly reasonable position to oppose a deal, of course, but I will want to have the debate at the next election. If the £200 per consignment is gone (for British exporters), the £1,400 cost if you are selected for sampling, and other fees are gone – are you seriously saying you were going to go into an election and put these back?
“Similarly, if there is downward pressure on food prices – that’s what the supermarkets expect – are you seriously going to put them up? We’re sharing criminal records of third-country nationals. Are you seriously saying we don’t want those tools any more?”
Thomas-Symonds added that he thought some Brexiteers were already running away from the issue. “I can’t help but notice that Nigel Farage seems to have gone into a vow of silence on it. As far as I can make out, he’s done something like two tweets (about Brexit) in six months. He barely said anything in the days after we secured the agreement.”
Yet Farage plans to strip EU citizens living in Britain of their right to claim universal credit, and to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). These would almost certainly torpedo Thomas-Symonds’s Brexit reset as well as Frost’s original pact with the EU, leaving the UK deal-less and friendless in Europe, and even worse off.
Let’s see Farage selling that at a general election. After all, we don’t want another prime minister at sixes and sevens.
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