Good morning. Hearing the reaction of British politicians to a report at the weekend that Rishi Sunak’s government might consider a “Swiss-style” trading arrangement with the EU, you might imagine that the only factor was whether or not the UK – and in particular the Tory party – is ready for it.
“Under my leadership, the United Kingdom will not pursue any relationship with Europe that relies on alignment with EU law,” Sunak told the CBI yesterday. But as the story rumbles on with claims that chancellor Jeremy Hunt disagrees, there’s a factor besides the preferences of the Conservatives that appears to have been forgotten: what the EU wants. And while there are many in the UK who now yearn for closer ties, it’s far from clear that their counterparts on the continent feel the same way.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke to the Guardian’s Brussels correspondent, Jennifer Rankin, about how European leaders view the prospect of a new deal, Swiss-style or otherwise – and what else might explain why this story has blown up.
Here are the headlines. Scroll down for a World Cup roundup – and this is too ridiculous to put in headlines, but I did think you might like to start the day with this story about a truly massive goldfish.
Five big stories
Conservatives | Dominic Raab behaved so badly in a meeting with the Home Office during his first stint as justice secretary that his department’s top official had to personally apologise to counterparts afterwards, the Guardian has been told.
Indonesia | Indonesian rescue workers were racing to reach people still trapped in rubble one day after an earthquake struck the main island of Java, killing at least 162 people, many of them children, and injuring hundreds more.
Human rights | Lawyers acting on behalf of Shamima Begum, the 23-year-old who left Britain as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State in Syria, said she was likely to have been a victim of trafficking and sexual exploitation during a new appeal against the removal of her British citizenship.
Labour | Keir Starmer will say on Tuesday that UK businesses must wean themselves off “cheap labour” and that a low-pay model for growth is no longer working. In a speech to the CBI, Starmer will stop short of pledging that overall migration should come down – a promise that Rishi Sunak renewed last week.
Space | Nasa’s Orion capsule reached the moon and is on its way to a record breaking lunar orbit. The $4.1bn test flight is the first capsule to visit the moon since Nasa’s Apollo programme 50 years ago.
In depth: ‘The EU sees its political unity as a greater prize than economic interests’
There’s a certain audible weariness in the voice of Jennifer Rankin, veteran of many years of Brexit coverage, when I ask her what European leaders would make of a Sunday Times story (£) that suggested a Swiss-style agreement – explained usefully here by Aubrey Allegretti, and featuring selective access to the single market, EU budget contributions, and the removal of most border checks for goods – might be on the cards again.
“It is amazing that we can keep going round in circles having these arguments,” she said. “There will always be a view that the UK can have this special status, even though it’s been denied so many times.”
While the latest story looks well sourced, it is a long way from a firm signal of intent, as the subsequent on-the-record denials suggest. “You don’t get much reaction from Brussels or national governments to stories like this,” Jennifer said. “They know it’s a test balloon for domestic consumption.”
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Why a Swiss-style deal isn’t attractive
Still, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that the UK were to actively seek such a deal in the short-term. The first problem is: the EU doesn’t like the arrangement it has with Switzerland. “It’s been trying unsuccessfully to improve it for about eight years,” Jennifer said. “They want to turn this sprawling set of mini-deals into one deal, and all the way through Brexit they’ve said that this is not a precedent for the UK.”
One important caveat to the Sunday Times story is that the UK wouldn’t want the free movement of people to be part of it – but Switzerland has that. “The EU has said so many times that it won’t separate free movement of people from goods, capital and labour,” Jennifer said. “I can’t see them moving on that principle.”
The reasons are about more than the straightforward advantages and disadvantages of such a deal with the UK in isolation. “They don’t want to set a precedent,” Jennifer said. “There’s a view that if you give non-EU countries benefits that aren’t available to member states, what’s the point of being a member state? Why would you allow the UK an opt-out you won’t give France?”
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Why a Swiss-style deal isn’t a priority
Even if you set aside such concerns, there’s another reason this is unlikely to make progress in the next few years: “It feels like an eighth or ninth priority in Brussels now,” Jennifer said. “There are so many other burning issues” – above all, the war in Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis across the continent – “that it’s very hard to find the political space for EU leaders to sit down and think through the relationship they want with the UK. And there’s exhaustion with the subject. There’s just not the appetite.”
As far as Brexit goes, the big subject at the moment is trade arrangements in Northern Ireland – “and we’re still a long way from agreement on that. There is cooperation on Russia, and there may be talks about the UK’s access to the Horizon scientific research programme. Beyond that, the answer is no.”
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Room for improvements
There is, at least, some optimism within the EU that relations are improving – but that hope is mostly confined to the Northern Ireland protocol for now. “We’ve heard, especially from the Irish taoiseach, some positive noises. But there is also a lot of caution [because] EU leaders have seen a lot of British prime ministers come and go, and just when you’ve got the measure of one, another comes along.
“They don’t know what to make of Sunak yet. They don’t think he’s made a decision about what kind of compromises he’s willing to offer on Northern Ireland.” If a deal on Northern Ireland can be struck before the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement in April, next year – as Sunak promised Joe Biden last week – that could open the door to better relations on other subjects. “I would say that there’s uncertainty but hopefulness that he is not interested in starting a vicious trade war.”
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What the story’s really about
To officials in Brussels, talk of a Swiss-style deal, particularly when followed by such vociferous denials, appears to follow a familiar pattern, Jennifer said: “The government sending out messages for domestic consumption, either to keep the European Research Group [the most dogmatically pro-Brexit Conservative MPs] onside, or to try out some new idea without any relationship to the status of talks with the EU at the time.”
Given how unlikely movement on the subject will be in the near future, there’s another possibility: the government wants to soften up the ERG for movement on Northern Ireland by dangling the prospect of a change to the relationship that Brexiters would find far more unpalatable. And while there will always be some hardliners who resist, the government may calculate that it can peel off enough members of the group – whose former chair Steve Baker is now a Northern Ireland minister, and recently apologised to Ireland and the EU for some of his behaviour during the Brexit process – to render any opposition impotent.
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What could happen in future
It sounds, then, as if any movement towards a Swiss-style deal during this parliament is a dead duck. But, Jennifer suggested, there may be a longer-term appetite for closer ties in Brussels as well as London. “My opinion is that if you had a government with a different agenda, the EU could go in a different direction,” she said. “Although the EU are very anti a Swiss-style deal, I do wonder if you could build bilateral deals over five or 10 years: start with a customs union, build on that with free movement for musicians and artists, sketch out a whole series of little agreements.”
“At the moment, if you talk to EU officials, they emphatically say they don’t want those kinds of mini-deals – which is what the Swiss deal consists of,” she added. “But if you had a reset of relations, that might ultimately be able to change.”
What else we’ve been reading
In May last year, Tamara Dean got hit by an SUV in Minneapolis. Her long read weaves a compelling account of her recovery from broken bones and a brain injury together with an exploration of why it’s so hard to get drivers to slow down in the US. Archie
Life is pretty tough at the moment, so it’s no surprise that many people are turning back to nostalgic food staples that remind them of simpler times. Leah Harper looks at one such staple, the chicken nugget, and asks restaurant owners why the public are craving these fried, beige bites. Nimo
The golden toad was a bright, spectacular creature that once lived in Costa Rica’s rainforest. About 1,500 of them were observed by researchers in 1987 but by 2004 the golden toad was declared extinct. Mattha Busby explores how the climate crisis killed off this rare species. Nimo
Few diagnoses are more horrifying than Alzheimer’s. Now, Ian Sample writes, there is reason for hope: “the first treatment that can unambiguously alter the course of the disease”. Sample’s piece explains that optimism, as well as sounding a note of caution about impact so far – and it sheds fascinating light on the shortage of research on such a devastating condition. Archie
Tired though I may be of reboots and sequels of classics, I will make an exception for the third Princess Diaries film. So does Rebecca Liu, who writes about what the original meant to her: “Following Mia’s life through high school and its discontents was a reminder that while this cocktail of self-loathing and humiliation would not go away, at least I was not alone.” Nimo
World Cup 2022
England started their World Cup with a dominant performance against Iran, with a goal from Jude Bellingham and two from Bukayo Saka leading them to a 6-2 victory. England’s captain, Harry Kane, did not wear a OneLove armband in support of LGBTQ+ rights after Fifa threatened to book players who did so, while Iran’s players refused to sing the national anthem in an apparent show of support for ongoing protests against the country’s regime. Barney Ronay writes that England looked “eager, fluent and fancy-free”, and calls the Iranian team’s gesture “an amplifier for freedom, group expression, modernity”. Meanwhile, a Gareth Bale penalty for Wales salvaged a draw in their opener against the USA, while the Netherlands left it late to secure a 2-0 victory against Senegal.
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Other sport
Cricket | Australia were 270-2 against England after 39 overs in the third one-day international shortly before 7am. Follow the latest here.
The front pages
The Guardian’s front-page lead story today is “Raab facing fresh questions over behaviour while justice secretary”. As in other papers, there is a World Cup picture story. “Pride and prejudice” says the Mirror highlighting the armband controversy. The Sun counts the England goals: “Hooray Jude! … and Saka (twice), Sterling, Rashford and Grealish”. “Bravery of Lions” says the Metro, which also shows a spectator holding a “Woman, Life Freedom” placard, a slogan from the protests in Iran. The i splashes with “Sunak warned over ‘fantasy’ Brexit plan” while the Telegraph has “Starmer: UK must wean itself off migrant labour”. Top story in the Times is “Tailor-made treatments to improve cancer care”. The Daily Mail unearths a new outrage: “YOU pay for MPs’ Xmas parties”. Get me a translator for the Financial Times’ headline: “Putsch against Chapek opens Iger’s second act at Disney”.
Today in Focus
Cop27: another blow to 1.5C?
At Cop27 in Egypt, negotiations ran 40 hours past the Friday night deadline. Country delegates were able to agree a historic deal on loss and damage, but less progress was made on global fossil fuel emission targets.
Cartoon of the day | Steve Bell
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Punk could be seen as a predominately white sub-culture, leaving non-white fans out in the cold. Osa Atoe, a Black punk fan, decided that she was ready to do something about after finding a new circle of queer people of colour who were also interested in punk. In 2006 Atoe created Shotgun Seamstress, a DIY fanzine designed to create a space for Black punk fans to participate in and enjoy punk. The zine is lovingly hand-crafted, with cut-and-spliced images and scribbled text that was designed to inspire her peers. (The eight issues of Shotgun Seamstress are now being compiled into an anthology.) While Atoe has not published a new zine since 2015, her project is still reaching young Black punks who are trying to find a community like the one she helped to foster more than 15 years ago.
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
