The topic UK’s former Brexit negotiator says Burnham should ditch much of Starmer’s EU reset… is drawing steady attention: readers, analysts, and industry watchers are all tracking how the story may unfold in the days ahead.
This is taking place in a fast-moving context — product cycles, platform shifts, and competitive moves can reshape the outlook quickly, so the details below are worth a careful read.
What follows is a clear walkthrough of the main facts and angles you need to make sense of the news.
Meanwhile, former Brexit negotiatior David Frost has said Andy Burnham, if made prime minister, should ditch much of Keir Starmer’s reset with the EU.
Specifically he should scrap plans including the food and drink deal designed to reduce red tape for British exporters to the EU.
Speaking at a UK in a Changing Europe conference, he said that he thought Keir Starmer and his team did not think through their “reset” properly and pursuing agreements that would force the UK to be a rule taker rather than a rule maker was a mistake. “I don’t think proponents of the reset have thought it thought properly,” he said of the outgoing UK leadership. “They didn’t think hard enough about choices and the processes,” he said.
“I guess my advice to Andy Burnham would be if you must continue with the reset … then don’t get into submitting to new laws,” he said adding “don’t proceed with the SPS, ETS, electricity” in a reference to the Sanitary and Phyto Sanitary or food and drink deal, the Emissions Trading system (alignment on charging for carbon emissions involved in manufacturing).
These he said “are the elements that involve EU law” adding that if Burnham “must proceed with Erasmus and other things” on the cultural side including youth mobility “try and persuade us that this is good use of our resources”.
His remarks come a day after the EU postponed a scheduled 22 July summit with the UK government to agree on SPS, ETS and youth mobility. Talks on youth mobility were until recently deadlocked over the UK’s refusal to accede to the EU’s demand that EU citizens should be able to study in UK universities on the basis of home tuition fees. Frost said he was “sceptical it was the right moment” to do a youth mobility agreement and “giving concessions to Europeans that we don’t give to others” such as tuition fees.