The UK’s ‘reset’ with the European Union is just the beginning, Lord Mandelson has said, following the Prime Minister’s deal with Brussels.
The Ambassador to the US failed to rule out rejoining the bloc in the future as he spoke about the agreement yesterday.
His comments come after Keir Starmer was accused of a Brexit ‘surrender’ last week after agreeing to make concessions on EU fishing rights and plans to introduce a youth mobility scheme.
In a speech to the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington, Lord Mandelson said the Prime Minister had embarked on a reset to improve the ‘miserable’ deal with which the UK left the EU.
He said the agreement would ‘finish the job’ and ‘tie up some loose ends which we’ve done in trade, energy co-operation, police and border security and intelligence sharing and now, of course, in defence.’
He added: ‘It’s the beginning. It’s the foundation of a reset. It’s not the end of it.’
Referring to Britain’s place on the world stage, Lord Mandelson said that while the UK would not be rejoining the EU soon, he did not rule out a future return.
‘We’re not in the European Union any more and we’re not going to go back for the foreseeable future, certainly, but we are European,’ he said.
The Ambassador to the US failed to rule out rejoining the bloc in the future as he spoke about the agreement yesterday
His comments come after Keir Starmer was accused of a Brexit ‘surrender’ last week after agreeing to make concessions on EU fishing rights and plans to introduce a youth mobility scheme
Lord Mandelson also said that the UK would seek to negotiate a decrease in Donald Trump’s tariffs on British exports. Sir Keir managed to lower tariffs in a deal with the US but failed to cut the 10 per cent baseline rate.
While Lord Mandelson said he could understand Mr Trump’s ‘frustration’ that led him to introduce tariffs, he said they were not ‘welcome’.
‘We need to address [reciprocal tariffs] and we’re agreed to do so,’ he said, adding that the UK and US could use ‘non-tariff barriers’.
Warning that Europe must no longer rely on the US for security, he said that Mr Trump had done the bloc ‘a favour’ in saying he would no longer be responsible for protecting allies.
He said the world had lived in a ‘fantasy’ that a ‘friendly heavyweight across the water would be there when the going gets tough’.
Lord Mandelson’s remarks came after Pedro Serrano, the EU Ambassador to the UK, said the UK and EU were ‘old friends entering an era of new beginnings’.
Writing in the i newspaper, he said that their respective economies were ‘joined at the hip’ and that more would be done to strengthen ties.
