The EU-UK reset - short on detail, big on tone

If Keir Starmer was hoping to keep the vaunted EU-UK reset a low-exposure affair, he would have been gratified by the news conference in the British ambassador's residence in Brussels on Wednesday.

Four of the six questions (all from UK journalists) focused on his repaying of £6,000 worth of gifts he’d received since becoming prime minister. On the substance of his meeting with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, he was short on detail, but big on tone.

"Today was as much about turning the page on the old way of doing these negotiations and starting a different way of doing them," Starmer told reporters.

What will be different?

The only tangible is there will be regular EU-UK summits at leaders’ level, with the first expected early next year.

A joint statement hailed a "stable, positive and forward-looking relationship" with "long term" cooperation yielding mutually beneficial results on "the economy, energy, security and resilience".

This was purposefully vague. The new Labour government has been "showing some ankle", as diplomats like to say, on a less neurotic relationship with Europe, a closer trading relationship and deeper cooperation on the crippling geo-political challenges of the age - but no rejoining the single market or customs union.

"Any ambitious renegotiation will require strong and sustained leadership from Number 10."

Keir Starmer is, indeed, caught between the entreaties of the pro-European wing of his party, and a fear of reopening the Brexit wounds in the Red Wall constituencies that he fought so hard to win back.

Nonetheless, after months of signalling, Starmer's visit was seen as the start of a process.

"What we expect from the British side is to come forward and specify what they mean by reset," said one EU diplomat ahead of the visit.

EU ambassadors had a short discussion on the topic just before Starmer’s arrival, without getting into major detail.

"A number of member states mentioned fisheries and energy," said a second diplomat. "Youth mobility was raised by a limited group, the Germans in particular, a small group mentioned [EU] citizens’ rights [in the UK], and there was broad support for strengthening foreign and defence cooperation."

A third diplomat said: "There was a sense of, well, we have positive language, let’s try and kick off a process leading to a more formal engagement where you could make concrete some of these issues."

In April, before the British general election, the European Commission attempted one concrete suggestion: a youth mobility scheme that would allow 18 to 30-year-olds to work, train and study in both the EU and UK for a four year period.

Both the Labour Party and the outgoing government rejected the idea. Once elected, Starmer floated instead the notion of bilateral mobility schemes with individual member states. The standard Downing Street response since then has been, no return to free movement. Officials in Brussels have pointed out that a strictly run youth mobility scheme would be far from free movement.

There are three improvements Labour has suggested.

The mutual recognition of qualifications so that architects and healthcare professionals could practice in the EU and vice versa, making life easier for British artists and musicians to tour in member states and a veterinary agreement which would lift onerous controls on British food and animal products entering the EU and vice-versa.

This would significantly ease the movement of such products entering Northern Ireland from other regions of the UK, under the Windsor Framework.

Notably, the veterinary agreement was not raised at the meeting of EU ambassadors.

Overall, the timing of key milestones in the coming months, and the level of ambition will be key, but there are early indications that Starmer is adopting a narrow approach.

He has not yet set up a structure, operating out of the Cabinet Office, that would have a cross-cutting role across Whitehall, generating a unity of purpose on what the reset should look like.

Before and during the Brexit years, a UK prime minister would have a "sherpa" dealing directly with European leaders, in concert with UKRep, the British embassy to the EU. That dynamic has yet to be reconstituted.

So Starmer and his senior ministers are not yet driving the reset from the centre. He has appointed a junior minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, to run relations with Europe (he was in Dublin with the foreign secretary David Lammy this week), but it’s unlikely he’ll override institutional resistance from critical parts of the UK system.

The Treasury worries about how much an Erasmus-type scheme for EU young people studying in the UK will cost, and the Home Office minister Yvette Cooper is publicly wedded to the idea of getting migration numbers down: she will not want 18 to 30-year-old Europeans arriving to work or study, adding to the numbers.

"The wider question remains about Starmer's strategic vision and, crucially, his willingness to push his ministers to make compromises to secure it," says Paul McGrade, a former UK official and currently counsel for Lexington, a political consultancy.

"Any ambitious renegotiation will require strong and sustained leadership from Number 10, for example to push back against Home Office resistance to a youth mobility scheme. He may even need to push the Treasury from a very sceptical position on any new EU cooperation, like Erasmus, which brings extra costs. So far there’s no sign of that."

Ursula von der Leyen also has limited room for manoeuvre.

The Commission is currently consumed by the transition to a new mandate (incoming Commissioners-designate undergo their hearings in the European Parliament early next month), and until her new team has been confirmed, she won’t get a fresh mandate from capitals to start serious renegotiations with the UK.

Already, member states are laying down markers, mindful of Britain’s attempts during the height of the Brexit negotiations to try to divide and rule.

Starmer has already held bilateral talks with the French, German and Spanish leaders (and Taoiseach Simon Harris) and he will be aware they have their own priorities.

Germany wants a new security agreement with London, the Baltic states and Poland are also keen on defence and procurement cooperation, and Italy is keen on tackling illegal migration.

That, indeed, is currently the most toxic issue in Europe.

Member states wonder if London wants a deal on sending migrants back to France, or does it want to participate in a broader EU project to outsource the problem to North Africa (the EU has embarked on a highly controversial deal with Tunisia, providing €105 million in exchange for stricter control of migrant flows by the country’s coast guard).

"The UK might want both," says one EU diplomat. "There are different approaches in the EU about how to approach migration and a discussion is ongoing. If you put a layer of UK cooperation on top, then administrative cooperation might be beneficial - but I also think the British side would want something more, and that would be problematic."

That something more is likely to be a means to return migrants to France.

"For there to be a migration deal a burden-sharing element has to be there."

There is currently no agreement between London and Paris on sending small boats back to the French coast (a joint action plan in 2019 does not facilitate returns).

Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak unsuccessfully attempted to raise a returns agreement with French President Emmanuel Macron (indeed, Starmer refused to get into a discussion with Dublin on returning UK-based migrants seeking refuge from his Rwanda policy in the south, via Northern Ireland, because the EU hadn’t agreed a returns policy with Britain).

By contrast, Keir Starmer acknowledged during a visit to The Hague and Paris last year that he would contemplate a returns agreement in exchange for Britain taking in some of migrants from frontline member states like Greece and Italy; what’s known as burden-sharing.

That might seem like robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the Tories would have a field day, but observers suggest some kind of umbrella agreement, linking the processing of asylum claims in third countries with burden sharing, would be the only way to holistically reduce the number of boats crossing the Channel.

Starmer is interested in the outsourcing idea.

In September, he met the right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome to learn about her plan to have seaborne migrant applications processed in Albania (Italy has a separate bilateral with Libya on stopping migrants from crossing the Mediterranean).

Any approach from London on returns would almost certainly be met with an EU demand for burden-sharing.

"For there to be a migration deal a burden-sharing element has to be there," says one EU diplomat. "Otherwise, 27 EU member states will ask themselves, what's in it for us, if we only take the returns of small boat migrants? We already have a problem with the numbers of migrants [entering Europe], and we're only going to get more through a returns agreement with the UK."

Crunch point on fisheries in 2026

Fisheries will be another key test of the reset.

Under the EU-UK trade agreement concluded in December 2021, Britain became an independent fisheries state, but that independence would be phased in and be reviewed in the middle of 2026.

EU vessels would continue to have access to UK waters until then, with the UK’s slice of shared stocks increasing by 25% of the value of the EU catch.

From mid-2026 onwards, both sides will have to agree new quotas, with annual negotiations on the Total Allowable Catch (TACs) for shared stocks, and on access to each other’s waters.

So the basic crunch point will be in 2026, with the UK wanting to increase even more its control of fish stocks, and the EU trying to maintain as much access as possible.

For Irish fisheries, this will be critical. The industry has taken a hammering since 2021, with gross profit falling by 82% in 2022 thanks to Brexit, but also the war in Ukraine, spiking energy costs and inflation (the industry was compensated to the tune of €23.9 million through the so-called Brexit Adjustment Reserve).

"The Commission has signalled that the potential for deeper cooperation is quite limited."

The Starmer reset, therefore, has injected unease, as well as hope, because the UK may have levers to pull now that it didn’t in 2021. Part of the deal then was that the fisheries review would be linked to the two-way energy market, with the EU having a distinct advantage.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the shock to Europe’s energy market, has upended that advantage.

"We ourselves had energy," says one official. "It was seen as something that provided a reasonable balance giving the EU a stronger hand, while the UK had the access advantage. Now it’s a bigger picture. How that will play out is obviously more complicated."

At Tuesday’s meeting of EU ambassadors, France made sure that that complication would not be to the detriment of its fishing fleet.

"The French almost made [continued fishing access] conditional when it comes to improving the broader relationship," says one diplomat familiar with discussions. "Other member states, including Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands - the most involved member states - all mentioned the necessity to get more clarity on the post 2026 arrangements on fisheries, as well as clear agreements on energy cooperation."

Wednesday's meeting, then, was a cautious first step.

Observers believe Starmer will be happy with the optics, contrasted as they were to the dysfunctional chemistry between successive Tory leaders and their EU counterparts.

He can show the UK business sector, especially the food and drinks industry, which is desperate for a veterinary agreement, and the pro-European wing of his party that there is momentum behind the reset.

For the EU, there is still anxiety that the Windsor Framework - and the other Brexit treaties - be implemented in full, and indeed the joint statement reflected that.

Once the actual negotiations get up and running, probably after the first EU-UK summit early next year, we will see how ambitious both sides are in really forging a closer relationship - something the Irish Government is more than enthusiastic about.

Starmer will, however, feel the heat from the Conservative opposition and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, who will outdo themselves to resurrect the EU bogeyman.

Member states, too, will be selective in what they’re prepared to offer in return.

"The Commission has signalled that the potential for deeper cooperation is quite limited," says one EU diplomat.

What’s more, the fact that the Windsor Framework appears to have settled the (Irish) issues that constantly bedevilled the bilateral relationship means that the EU may work against the UK strategy.

"We’re out of this dynamic where wrenches kept getting thrown in the wheels," says the diplomat.

"The EU has a plate full of different issues and Brexit just no longer features. So, the willingness to go above and beyond existing red lines on the EU side is smaller than ever, precisely because the kind of sore spots we had have been addressed by the Windsor Framework."