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Sitting in Brussels, or one of the EU’s 27 chancelleries, one could be forgiven for tuning out the latest psychodramas in Britain’s Conservative party. After all, the country has a new Labour prime minister who is a pro-European keen to build upon the “reset” begun by Keir Starmer. Who cares what a party in opposition thinks about anything when it is still reeling from its landslide 2024 defeat, and languishing third in the opinion polls as it haemorrhages support from its right flank? It is easy to dismiss Kemi Badenoch and her party as a sideshow.
That would be a mistake. Following her latest pronouncements, Badenoch has effectively committed the Conservatives to a policy of conflict, and possibly even rupture, with the EU. She recently suggested in a newspaper article that anyone who opposes her policy of withdrawing from the European convention on human rights (ECHR) or ditching net zero commitments would be considered “not serious”, and thus excluded from consideration as a Conservative candidate at the next election. She then withdrew the party whip (a UK parliamentary euphemism for “kicked out”) from Gavin Barwell, a member of the House of Lords who criticised Badenoch’s stance. Such a choice revives memories of Boris Johnson’s purge of pro-Europeans from the party.
Westminster has mostly viewed this through a domestic lens: a Tory leader prepared to jettison centre-right supporters in the hope of preventing further rightwing defections to Reform UK. What has been missing is the European dimension. Were the Conservatives to return to power – which polls suggest is possible in alliance with Reform UK – Badenoch’s ideological red lines will resurrect the ghost of “no deal” Brexit.
That’s because the UK’s continued membership of the ECHR underpins every element of its post-Brexit relationship with the EU. Article 763 of the trade and cooperation agreement (2021), for instance, commits both sides to adhere to shared values, including the human rights treaties to which they are signatories, while article 771 makes clear that this commitment is an essential condition of the deal and 772 states that in the event of a breach of this undertaking, the other party has the right to suspend or terminate the agreement.
The EU insisted on those references above all to protect peace in Northern Ireland, notes Catherine Barnard, professor of EU law and a fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank. The ECHR is embedded in the Good Friday agreement, in which Britain committed to enshrining the convention rights in Northern Irish law. Meanwhile, the Windsor framework, the deal hammered out by Rishi Sunak to ease post-Brexit trade across the Irish sea while keeping the land border open, specifically commits Britain to “no diminution of rights, safeguards or equality of opportunity” as set out in the Good Friday agreement.
What’s more, ECHR membership underpins many other areas of cooperation, including data sharing and criminal extradition arrangements. Even the Gibraltar agreement, signed only on 15 July, requires both sides to remain signatories. A British government that left the convention would not be making a narrow adjustment to its human rights regime; it would be pulling on a thread that runs through the entire fabric of the post-Brexit relationship.
Conservatives claim that the danger is overblown, that the EU would never let a dispute over the ECHR detonate an important trading relationship. But that smacks of the complacency apparent throughout the Brexit process. David Wolfson, the shadow attorney general, argued last year that quitting the ECHR would not breach the Good Friday agreement because it only required convention rights to be accessible in domestic courts. Other legal experts, not least in Northern Ireland, disagree, noting that the reason the ECHR is in the Good Friday agreement is to ensure that those rights are protected by a body independent of the British state. The EU’s victory over Hungary in the European court of justice this year in relation to an anti-LGBTQ+ law showed the weight it attaches to fundamental rights. It would hardly be less vigilant if it judged that the vital interests of a member state were threatened.
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Nor is it just Badenoch’s ECHR loyalty test that is problematic. The trade and cooperation agreement’s article 772 also states that “an act or omission that materially defeats the object and purpose of the Paris agreement shall always be considered a serious and substantial failure” to fulfil the “essential obligations” of the agreement. Depending on where the Conservative leader’s anti-net zero policy lands, that could spell serious trouble for the trading relationship. Its provisions to level the playing field hinge on shared climate goals.
Europeans may roll their eyes and take Badenoch’s grandstanding as further evidence that British politics remains, to use her word, “unserious”. But this, too, would be complacent. As the global order fragments and Europeans find themselves squeezed by an aggressive Russia, coercive US and mercantilist China, the UK-EU relationship has become vital to European security. It is not enough for Brussels to repeat that it is for Britain to decide what relationship it wants. Both sides have a responsibility to solidify it ahead of the next UK election.
Indeed, Andy Burnham may need all the help he can get. His goodwill has yet to materialise into clear European policy, and Starmer’s reset reached the limit of what can be achieved within Labour’s red lines of no return to the single market, the customs union, or free movement. To keep the relationship moving forward, a new project that deepens institutional and political links and does not cross either side’s current red lines is needed. A defence pact – building on existing coalitions of the willing and including Ukraine – is the obvious candidate. To slay Badenoch’s no-deal ghost, Brussels must play its part in proving the relationship’s value.
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Simon Nixon is a journalist and economics commentator
