Brits want Nigel Farage to step away from the Brexit shredder

LONDON – Britain’s opposition parties have pledged to shred Keir Starmer’s EU reset if they get into power. The U.K. public would rather they didn’t.

Polling commissioned by POLITICO shows the government’s agri-food deal agreed in principle with Brussels is popular with Remainers and Leavers alike — even when they’re told it means following EU rules.

Nearly two-thirds (63 per cent) of voters back the deal, which would realign EU and U.K. food standards, versus just 22 percent who are opposed, the representative survey of 2,037 British adults conducted by More in Common Sept. 13-15 found.

Predictably, those who voted Remain in the EU referendum backed the deal by a huge margin — with 78 percent in favor. But even 50 percent of Leave voters are keen.

Poll respondents were explicitly warned that the agreement “means we will be bound to European regulations on these products” — but most didn’t seem to care.

The government says the SPS or “sanitary and phytosanitary” agreement will smooth trade in food, animals and other plant products like flowers by eliminating the need for much red tape at the border.

The benefits could be lower prices, less fragile supply chains and more choice, ministers argue — as well as simpler Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland.

The quid pro quo would be that the U.K. would once again have to follow EU rules; this time with little say in what they are.

The poll adds to the mounting pile of evidence that while Brexit concerns about migration have always had popular purchase in the U.K., dogma about regulatory alignment has always been more of an elite obsession.

On the front foot

People who voted Labour and Liberal Democrat in the last election are most enthusiastic about the arrangements — which ministers hope will take effect from 2027.

Some 83 percent and 78 percent back the idea respectively. Tories and Green voters support it to the tune of 57 percent and 69 percent each.

Only the slice of the population who backed Reform in the 2024 general election is against the plan — by a narrower 50 percent against to 42 percent in favor.

The state of public opinion on the matter likely explains why Labour has chosen to use the agreement to take the fight to Nigel Farage’s Reform and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative parties.

After years of minimizing its EU policy for fear of upsetting swing voters, in recent months Starmer’s party has used the fruits of his EU “reset” to go on the attack — whereas on other briefs it has increasingly found itself on the back foot.

“Kemi Badenoch said she’d reverse the deal I’d struck before it had been struck, and before she’d even read it. The Tories and Farage are fighting yesterday’s battles,” the government’s normally mild-mannered EU Relations Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds thundered at the party’s conference earlier this week. “They’d rather shout slogans and peddle snake oil politics.”

Thomas-Symonds last month made similar arguments on enemy territory, delivering a speech at Tory house journal the Spectator in which he presented the government and its EU reset as the real defender of free trade and the scourge of business red tape.

The Reform and Conservative party press offices didn’t respond to requests for comment on the polling results, but one Labour source said the opposition parties’ plans to scrap the agreement had a “cooked 2016 aura” about it.

“Nigel Farage and the Tories want to rip up a deal that benefits jobs and bills in the United Kingdom, and all because they are incapable of bringing themselves to have any relationship with Europe,” they added.