Giving back control

Andy Burnham has signalled his willingness to take the UK back into the EU — or at the very least, into the single market and customs union. His government is already doing so on the sly. 

On Thursday this week new legislation comes into effect which anticipates the Government’s planned “EU reset”. The regulations — on the apparently recondite issue of plant health — are the most obvious example of the EU’s tactics, abetted by the British government: to use the fact that Brexit was only delivered to part of the United Kingdom, to sabotage it for the whole United Kingdom. 

The price of the EU withdrawal deal negotiated by Boris Johnson in 2020 was that Northern Ireland remained effectively in the EU customs area. We told ourselves the arrangement would be temporary, but here we still are five years later. And now Andy Burnham and Ursula von der Leyen are cynically exploiting this painful reality, and our proper desire to keep the Union together, to impose European laws that apply in Northern Ireland to the rest of the country. 

The plant health regulations (to be precise, the Windsor Framework (Retail Movement Scheme: Plant Health) (Amendment) Regulations 2026) automatically align the rules on plant health in the GB to those set by the EU. I tabled a motion to annul this legislation on 22 June, a motion supported by parliamentarians across 4 four parties. But the House of Commons was denied even a debate, let alone a vote. 

The 17.4 million who voted Leave in 2016 voted for the whole United Kingdom to leave the EU. No one voted for England, or Wales, or Scotland, or Northern Ireland separately to leave or remain. Those questions were never on the ballot. Yet under the Windsor Framework, in 300 different areas, the laws of part of the UK are made by a legislature in which no part of the UK is represented. Indeed, Northern Ireland legislators discovered that their own plant health law had already been altered only when regulations for Great Britain, aligning with them, were published.

A divided Brexit cannot hold. The threat of divergence between GB and NI creates constant pressure to align the whole of the UK with EU law simply to stop the country breaking apart. 

These plant health regulations are only the latest in a run of supposedly “one-off” alignments, alongside recent tumble dryer and machinery measures. But two larger vehicles abandon the pretence of the “one-off” altogether.

The first is the Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025. This is an “enabling” law: rather than changing much itself, it hands ministers sweeping power to rewrite GB product rules by secondary legislation, including the power to mirror EU standards on product safety, the environment and measurement. Alignment can now be delivered by ministerial regulation on a regular basis, with limited parliamentary scrutiny.

The second is the promised European Partnership Bill, which would give domestic effect to the UK–EU SPS agreement. This commits Great Britain to “dynamic alignment” with EU food, animal and plant health law, meaning we automatically adopt future EU rules as the EU makes them. This involves our having to submit to the ultimate authority of the European Court of Justice in this area and being required to make an ongoing financial contribution to pay the EU for the privilege of the SPS Agreement.

In every case, alignment happens after the EU has written the law. We are reduced to a rule-taker, not a rule-maker —  and we’re giving away control, in what can only be described as a betrayal of the Brexit vote. 

The extraordinary thing is that even when the rest of the UK agrees to submit to the same SPS import laws that the EU has imposed in NI, goods imported into GB still are not allowed to move freely into Northern Ireland. The EU’s own negotiating mandate for the SPS deal authorises only GB alignment — but makes no mention of the removal of the Irish Sea border in exchange. The whole of the UK will now be tied to Europe — but Northern Ireland will still have extra chains of its own.

The Government claims that goods can move freely from GB to NI on the “UK Internal Market System”. But a genuine internal market means goods moving without meeting any customs or SPS border. Before 2021, goods moved freely across the whole UK. Under these regulations, however, goods travelling from GB to Northern Ireland still face customs and SPS paperwork checks, identity inspections, the cost of “trusted trader” status, proof they will not enter the Republic, and in many cases “Not for EU” labels. None of that applies to goods traded between England, Scotland and Wales. This is not an internal market — rather, it is an international trade border within our country.

We need a change of direction. First, we have to halt the machinery of drift. A new government should stop using, and move to repeal, the standing powers in the Product Regulation and Metrology Act that permit alignment by ministerial fiat. It should also abandon the European Partnership Bill and its commitment to dynamic alignment.

Second, reassert control of our own frontier. Goods entering the United Kingdom, whether at GB or NI ports, should meet UK border requirements (defined by the UK, not the EU) and then move unfettered across the whole country. The EU has no right to police the movement of goods from one part of the UK to another, however that border is dressed up in the language of an “internal market system”.

Third, use the tools we already have. Both the UK and EU are signatories to the WTO SPS Agreement, which requires each side to accept the other’s measures as equivalent where they achieve the same level of protection. Mutual recognition of equivalent standards, with each jurisdiction policing its own border, makes a separate SPS agreement, and the surrender it demands, wholly unnecessary. Moreover, arrangements can be further strengthened through the application of legal mutual enforcement which involves: i) the UK requiring that goods made in NI for consumption in the EU are made to EU standards and ii) a mechanism for the payment of duty without any border infrastructure.  

Fourth, tell the public the truth. Until the arrangement is gone, ministers should stop calling   their EU/NI-GB international trade border system a UK Internal Market System.

Underlying all of this is a point of principle. By dividing the UK with a customs and SPS border and giving the EU the power to legislate for part of it, the Windsor Framework offends not only the referendum result but Britain’s territorial integrity. This integrity should be a given. In fact, it’s protected by the Good Friday Agreement and even by the UN’s foundational declaration on the sovereignty and unity of states. It is unacceptable for Brussels to claim the right to legislate for any part of the UK.

Only a Reform government will end the sea border and restore British sovereignty to the whole of the United Kingdom.