Sunak rejects von der Leyen’s comments that UK
could rejoin EU
European Commission president said Brexit could be
fixed because leaders had ‘goofed it up’
Lisa
O'Carroll in Brussels and Pippa Crerar
Wed 29 Nov
2023 16.06 GMT
Rishi Sunak
has rejected the suggestion that Brexit could be in peril after Ursula von der
Leyen, the president of the European Commission, claimed that the UK could be
on a path to rejoining the European Union.
At an event
in Brussels on Tuesday night, von der Leyen admitted that European leaders had
“goofed up” over the departure of Britain from the bloc and suggested the
younger generation could “fix” it.
Asked if
the UK could ever rejoin the EU, she replied: “I must say, I keep telling my
children: ‘You have to fix it. We goofed it up, you have to fix it.’ So I think
here too, the direction of travel – my personal opinion – is clear.”
However,
Sunak’s official spokesperson, replied that the British prime ministerdid not
believe that Brexit was in peril. He told reporters at Westminster: “It’s
through our Brexit freedoms that we are, right now, considering how to further
strengthen our migration system.
“It is
through our Brexit freedoms we are ensuring patients in the UK can get access
to medicines faster, that there is improved animal welfare. That is very much
what we are focused on.”
The
spokesperson added: “We have a prime minister that championed Brexit before it
was in his career interests to do so because he believes in it passionately. We
are very focused on making a success of it.”
Von der
Leyen made the comments at an awards ceremony staged by Politico as relations
between the EU and the UK continue to improve following their near-collapse
under Johnson and David Frost, who negotiated the Brexit trade deal.
David
Cameron, the UK’s foreign secretary, made his first official return to Brussels
this week after departing No 10 in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Officially
he was in the EU capital to attend a meeting of Nato foreign ministers but he
squeezed in an hour-long meeting with Maroš Šefčovič, a vice-president of the
European Commission who was a chief Brexit negotiator for the bloc.
Although
Cameron had campaigned for remain, nervousness about being back in the embrace
of the EU was evident. He declined to speak to the media on his first day in
the Belgian capital and was refusing any questions on the second.
Coincidentally
he met Šefčovič just as the EU car industry renewed its call for a tweak to the
Brexit deal to suspend looming tariffs on exports of EU vehicles to the UK and
imports to the EU from Britain.
Within the
Conservative party Brexit remains a divisive subject. Sunak and von der Leyen
have enjoyed cordial relations ever since they hatched a deal to improve the
deal for Northern Ireland and the UK returned to the Horizon programme.
However, on
Wednesday, Priti Patel, the former home secretary, said the Windsor framework
that changed the Northern Ireland protocol was not working. In an article for
the Unionist Voice website, she wrote that the UK government needed to act over
the “tentacles of EU control over Northern Ireland”.
“Government
satisfaction with the limited progress the Windsor framework has made should
not act as a block to seeking further progress to fully deliver our 2019
manifesto commitment and the promises made to Northern Ireland,” she added.
There is no
appetite in the EU to return to the toxicity of the Brexit years but Keir
Starmer, the Labour leader, has repeatedly made it clear he wants to improve
relations, with further alignment on issues such as veterinary standards, which
cover farm produce, fresh food, leather goods, fish and timber.
The trade
deal has a built-in facility to have a chapter on veterinary alignment that
means the Brexit deal would not have to be “reopened” and would not need to be
signed off by 27 EU leaders. However, well-informed sources in Brussels said it
would be a “painful negotiation” that could take years to conclude.
Senior
business leaders and trade bodies have backed Starmer’s comments that Britain
should not part from the European Union on standards ranging from the
environment to employment.
The Labour
leader has come under fire from the Conservatives, who accused him of wanting
to “unpick” Brexit after saying that “most of the conflict” since 2016 had
arisen because the UK “wants to diverge and do different things to the rest of
our EU partners”.
In a letter
to the Guardian in September, dozens of business leaders, including the chair
of Virgin, the head of the British Poultry Council and the chair of the
International Chamber of Commerce, said a policy of alignment would enable
businesses to have “confidence” while still allowing the UK to have “regulatory
autonomy”.
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