Beatrice F. 🇪🇺 @beafk.bsky.social

🇬🇧🇪🇺 Britain aligning food standards with the EU again. The ridiculous “Not for EU” labels may soon disappear and 👉 Britain can then begin to rebuild its food security 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 After years of arguing that Brexit meant escaping EU rules, Britain is now negotiating to align with them again to make trade easier, strengthen biosecurity and reconnect our food system with Europe. On 20 November, Britain and the EU are hoping to agree something genuinely significant. This could mean fewer physical border checks, the removal of costly veterinary export certificates and the beginning of dismantling the Brexit barriers we erected between ourselves and our largest, closest food market. The Government estimates the SPS deal could ultimately be worth up to £5.1 billion a year to the food and drink sector. Britain imports a substantial proportion of the food we eat. We cannot pretend our food system exists independently of Europe. And at a time of war, energy disruption, climate shocks and increasingly fragile global supply chains, putting barriers between Britain and the enormous food-producing region immediately beside us never made strategic sense. And EU alignment would mean Britain moving back towards European rules governing food safety, animal and plant health and imports from third countries. This matters when Britain has signed post-Brexit trade deals opening greater access to agricultural imports produced under different systems. Trade deals should not give anyone a legal right to sell unsafe food in Britain. But standards are only as good as the system that enforces them and since Brexit, we have had little control over imports.

🚨 This is HUGE. The Times reports that Britain is already holding talks with the EU about a potential return to freedom of movement and other options for much closer alignment. The options that will eventually be put to the British public are being discussed with Brussels now, to establish what both sides could agree. “The conversation is happening.” The 2024 red lines of no Single Market, no customs union, no freedom of movement only apply to this Parliament. What comes next is now being worked through. Burnham meets EU leaders on 20 November. He says he wants Britain to rejoin the EU in his lifetime. And tonight we learn officials are already discussing the possible routes with Brussels. This is no longer a hypothetical debate about whether Britain might one day change course. 🎉 The process of deciding how far Britain moves back towards Europe has finally begun. 🇬🇧🇪🇺

🚨 For years the Telegraph was one of the loudest cheerleaders for hard Brexit and the glorious economic freedom supposedly waiting outside Europe. Now the Telegraph is owned by a German 🇩🇪 company. And that German owner is cutting up to 100 jobs as it restructures the paper into a “global, AI-powered” business. Some of its most hardline Brexit voices are also reported to be among those leaving. Perhaps there is a lesson here. Markets really are global. Capital really does cross borders. And shouting “sovereignty” does not stop decisions about British jobs being made somewhere else. Brexit promised control. The ownership structure tells a rather different story.