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Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks at a reception for UK and EU businesses in Downing Street, London, May 19, 2025
PRIME MINISTER Sir Keir Starmer stepped up the hard sell of his trade deal with the European Union, telling MPs that it would boost jobs and cut the cost of living.
But he had little to say to the fishing industry, seen as the main victim of the agreement signed with Brussels on Monday.
The Prime Minister told MPs: “The principles we took into the negotiations are clear and simple. Does it drive down bills? Does it drive up jobs? Does it strengthen our borders?
“And in each case, the answer is resoundingly yes,” he claimed. “These deals release us from the tired arguments of the past,” he added optimistically.
The Prime Minister claimed that this represented a “hat-trick of deals” following the agreements with India and the US.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch claimed it was a hat-trick of “own goals” and raised the plight of Britain’s fishing industry.
“This is a prime minister who would pay to give away his family silver. Why is the Prime Minister selling our fishermen down the river? Is it because they don’t vote Labour,” she said.
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey urged Sir Keir to negotiate a customs union agreement with the European Union.
Scottish National Party Commons leader Stephen Flynn went further, arguing that “this is obviously not a surrender, just as it’s obviously no substitute for membership of the European Union.”
For the Greens, Ellie Chowns said the package was “not quite the step change that we need, but it is a step forward towards the closest possible relationships with our closest neighbours.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was conspicuously absent from the Commons exchanges, but his deputy Richard Tice told the Premier that “surrenders” on the fishing industry, freedom of movement and rule-taking from the EU would mean that “you have also surrendered the jobs of many of your backbench MPs at the next general election to Reform?”
Those threatened Labour MPs were universally supportive of the deal — unused as they were to hearing anything that could be passed off as a government achievement.
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