For young Britons, it is a slap in the face. Our 18-to-24-year-olds, who are already grappling with 16 per cent youth unemployment and a recent historic high of one million NEETs, would be thrust into direct competition with nearly three million unemployed EU youths for entry-level jobs.
And for what in exchange? A return to the Erasmus+ scheme that the report suggests is a total scam. Under the reset, British taxpayers would pay £570m a year from 2027, scaling up to £810m by 2028. Based on historic participation, this translates to a mind-boggling £42,100 per UK participant, which is nearly three times what it cost before Brexit.
Nowhere is the star-encircled insanity clearer than in its assault on Britain’s already beleaguered farming industry. Under the guise of seamless trade, every single farm and food business in the UK would be dragged back under rigid EU regulations, regardless of whether they export a single sausage across the border.
It is estimated that mid-2027 cliff-edge alignments with EU pesticide limits alone would wipe out between £500m to £800m in horticultural profits, slashing total income from farming by up to 11 per cent. Holy cow. To make matters worse, joining the EU’s strict regulatory framework would instantly suffocate Britain’s burgeoning agritech sector, which “despite Brexit” is currently worth £28bn, more than double the entire £12bn value of UK food exports to the EU.
Meanwhile, UK manufacturing would be trapped in made-in-Brussels bureaucratic straitjacket. Mid-2027 EU rules banning certain plastics and forcing new labelling would cost British business £2bn-£3bn upfront, plus £400m-£700m annually. Joining the EU Emissions Trading System would slap a 20 per cent tax hike on factory energy costs – a surefire way to drive heavy industry straight out of the country. Forget Burnham’s loathed Thatcherism, this will destroy what’s left of Britain’s manufacturing base.
Furthermore, extending the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism to fertiliser ingredients like ammonia – which neither the UK nor the EU produce in sufficient quantities – threatens to skyrocket US import prices by 34 per cent in 2027, rising to 60 per cent by 2034.
The ultimate insult of all this is that its touted benefits are fictitious. It will have no impact whatsoever on airport queues because member states oversee border control, not the European Commission (which explains why it’s easier to travel through welcoming Greece compared to hostile France).
Similarly, it won’t “stop the boats” because people smuggling remains under the jurisdiction of wherever the migrants are coming from. Remainiacs claim it will “supercharge” food exports, ignoring that food and live animals make up a paltry 1.3 per cent of total British exports. Others argue it will beef up Britain’s flailing defences but in reality it will require us to hand over our intelligence and intellectual property, while forcing taxpayers to guarantee up to £14bn of an off-balance-sheet £90bn EU loan to Ukraine.
This isn’t a negotiation but a capitulation and it must be stopped at all costs.
Listen to the Bregretful cheerleaders of the UK’s rejoin movement and a “reset” of our relationship with the European Union appears to be simple common sense. Framed as a sort of diplomatic act of conscious recoupling, advocates claim it will cut airport queues along with cross-Channel red tape. As with Project Fear, it’s scaremongering nonsense. Scratch the surface of the “dynamic realignment” schtick and you’ll find an act of domestic self-sabotage that broken Britain can ill afford.
According to a scathing new report by the Great British Business Council (GBBC) titled Unconditional Surrender!, Andy-Blame-everything-on-Brexit-Burnham’s grand EU plan isn’t a pragmatic middle ground in the vein of the new PM’s quest for “problem solving over point scoring”. It is an act of economic and political madness that would force the UK to pay billions for the privilege of bending the knee to Brussels in return for crippling key British industries and handing our national sovereignty away on a silver platter.
The central myth is that reversing the referendum will save Britain much-needed cash. The reality, according to the GBBC, is an eye-watering fiscal mugging. The report estimates that any reboot of our relationship with the bloc will cost British taxpayers, businesses and universities an astounding £17.6bn in 2027, rising to £20.5bn per annum by the 2030s. On top of this annual haemorrhage, British companies will be forced to cough up an initial £12bn just in one-off compliance costs. To put that into perspective, it would mean the UK would end up paying more money to Brussels than it did as a full-fledged member state, except this time, we would be rule takers not rule makers.
Under the proposed terms, Britain would be forced to automatically adopt every loony law and dodgy directive handed down by the EU with zero right of veto – all under exclusive jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Even worse, the plan would commit the UK to a permanent contribution to the EU Cohesion Fund, a pot of money specifically earmarked to level up poorer regions in continental Europe. Would we receive a single penny back in return? I think you already know the answer to that question. I appreciate Burnham is a fan of devolution, but borrowing money we haven’t got, to subsidise infrastructure projects in Slovakia and Poland while our own regional economies fight for cash is plainly a completely bonkers idea.
The social costs are equally eye-watering. Under the proposed concessions on Labour’s beloved “yoof mobility” scheme, the UK would be forced to part-fund EU citizens up to the age of 30, granting them discounted university fees, free access to the NHS, and, of course, the right to bring family members to Blighty. The GBBC estimates that would strip universities of £2.7bn in vital international student fee income at a time when they are already strapped for cash.