PM Keir Starmer wants a food deal with the EU (Image: Getty)
Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of another “Brexit betrayal” as Labour announced plans for a new deal with Brussels over food. Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds will say the Government is ready to align with EU rules in order to get a permanent deal on food and drink agreed in the next 18 months.
Talks are due to begin later this year, but in the meantime, the UK will halt border checks on “medium-risk” fruit and vegetables, including tomatoes, grapes and peppers, which were due to be brought into force this summer. The Government has also cancelled border checks on live animal imports from the EU, and on animal and plant goods from Ireland.
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Mr Thomas-Symonds will pledge that the Labour Government will take “decisions rooted in the national interest, not party interest. Putting in the hard yards, not resting on empty slogans”.
He will say that aligning on standards with the EU will boost growth and lower food prices. He will say it is “sovereignty, exercised in the national interest”.
But Shadow Foreign Secretary Dame Priti Patel said: “Once again Labour are trying to justify their EU surrender – but the British public simply won’t buy this betrayal.
“Keir Starmer is dragging us back into Brussels’ arms and looking to once again make this country a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker, having sold off our fishing communities in the process.
“The Conservatives will never stand by and let Labour undo the democratic will of this country. We will fight them at every step.”
Mr Thomas-Symonds will also use a speech to launch an attack on Reform and its leader, Nigel Farage. He will say: “Nigel Farage's manifesto at the next election will say in writing he wants to take Britain backwards, cutting at least ￡9billion from the economy, bringing with it a risk to jobs and a risk of food prices going up.
“Farage wants Britain to fail. His model of politics feeds on it, offering the easy answers, dividing communities and stoking anger.”
Labour says an existing deal, which it is hoping to improve and secure a long-term confirmation of, lowers costs for supermarkets and shoppers.
It says that if Mr Farage were to reverse the deal, it would make exporting more difficult for farming and the fishing industry.
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Responding, a Reform UK spokesperson said: “No one has done more damage to British businesses than this Labour Government.
“With 157,000 fewer people on payroll since Labour took office, their jobs tax is stifling success and hitting small and medium-sized businesses across the country.
“Cosying up to the EU and leaving us entangled in reams of retained EU law, which Kemi Badenoch failed to scrap, will not resuscitate Britain’s struggling economy.”
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