It was in the interests of both the EU and the UK to talk up the deal signed at the summit at Lancaster House on 19 May – the first of its kind since the UK left the EU in 2020. Keir Starmer said the agreement showed that the UK was now “back on the world stage”. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said that it was “historic” (a term that Starmer also used when the UK signed trade deals with India and the US recently).
In reality, however, the Common Understanding agreement, which is as aspirational as it is skeletal, illustrates how difficult it is to “reset” EU-UK relations. Starmer said he wanted to move on from “political fights” with the EU and focus on practical solutions to problems. But despite everything that has happened since the Brexit referendum in 2016 – including the war in Ukraine and the election and then re-election of Donald Trump – both the EU and the UK have limits beyond which they cannot go. The UK’s are political; the EU’s are structural.
The agreement extends arrangements that give European trawlers access to British territorial waters. The UK will follow some EU rules on food standards and in return the bloc will lift some checks on British food exports to the continent. British travellers will be able to use e-gates “where appropriate” at airports in EU member states, and the EU and UK will develop a new “youth experience” scheme. The EU is also going to “explore” the possibility that the UK could participate in the EU’s internal electricity market.
The agreement also includes a new security pact, which was presumably meant to signal that the EU and the UK are both united and serious about defence. The most important element of it, beyond the signalling, is that it could open the way for British defence companies such as BAE Systems to take part in EU defence procurement programmes, including the new €150bn Security Action for Europe loan facility announced in March – though this remains to be negotiated and will likely be opposed by France.
Each element of the agreement is sensible enough in itself. But they do not add up to a fundamental transformation of the relationship between the EU and the UK. Both the hyperbolic statements by Starmer and Von der Leyen, and the over-the-top criticisms from the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch overstate the economic and political importance of what was agreed, which amounted to minor adjustments to existing technical agreements between the EU and the UK.
The EU has not yet given the UK anything that it does not give to other “third countries” – the term it uses for countries that are not EU member states. For example, as critics of the deal have pointed out, the UK will be consulted on changes in EU food standards in the same way that European Economic Area (EEA) countries such as Norway are. Even now, in other words, the UK is not being given any kind of special treatment, despite its important role as a security provider for Europe, which the war in Ukraine has underlined and the re-election of Trump has made even more important.
Thus, the EU-UK “reset” illustrates the limits of the idea of a geopolitical Europe – something there has been much talk of in Brussels and other European capitals in the past five years. When Von der Leyen became European Commission president in 2019, she promised a “geopolitical Commission”. Although she never quite spelled out what that meant, the implication was that instead of simply enforcing EU rules in order to maintain the integrity of the single market, the Commission would act in a more strategic way under her leadership.
However, the EU stuck to the same approach regarding the UK that it had taken since the referendum in 2016 – that is, it sought to impose economic costs on the UK for leaving the bloc. A more strategic approach might have been to recognise the UK’s role in European security, which was especially important as the threats to Europe and uncertainty about the US security guarantee increased, and to make concessions to Britain even if doing so undermined the integrity of the single market. But instead, the EU took its traditional rules-based approach. Even with the new deal, this has not changed – nor, given the way the EU is set up, can it.
For all the talk of a reset, therefore, the basic dynamic between the EU and the UK remains the same as it was before the Lancaster House summit. Even as Starmer has sought to improve relations with Brussels – and even tentatively to reintegrate the UK into some EU institutions and structures – political realities mean that he cannot go much further, even if Remainers want him to. In particular, he has made it clear that under his leadership the UK will not rejoin the single market or the customs union.
Meanwhile, it sometimes seems as if the EU is incapable of having a cooperative relationship with countries in what it calls its “neighbourhood” without trying to integrate them into its own institutions and structures. The only way it seems to be able to conceive of European countries is either as a future member state or as a threat to the bloc. As a former member state that is also an important security provider, the UK is neither. It remains to be seen whether the EU can find a new way of co-existing with it – and if so, what that might look like.
[See also: Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers”]
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This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain’s Child Poverty Epidemic