Resetting the UK-EU Relationship (European Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, as I look back over the last decade in Brexit Britain, I am ever more convinced that the arguments for Britain’s wholehearted engagement with mainland Europe are as strong now as they were when I first, in the late 1960s, became a supporter of this country joining the European Economic Community.

Brexit is not an endorsement of treating the European Union as a political leper or pretending either that our near neighbours do not exist or that we do not share a whole range of interests with them. Rather, it indicated that our then way of doing the necessary business with them—at least, this was the case on polling day—did not command the country’s support. Against that background, the national interest demands that we find a different way of conducting that business which is acceptable not only to us but to our interlocutors, who need to have a firm belief in our good faith. No doubt that is much easier said than done.

This excellent report, Unfinished Business: Resetting the UK-EU Relationship, mostly spells out what nowadays might be described as the elite high-level aspect of much of this. As this debate has shown, current geopolitical circumstances show this is a priority. At the same time, we should think about some of the more domestic implications.

I say this because for a number of years I chaired the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership. There are many less high-level and “politically sexy”, but nevertheless very important, issues which need to be taken into account. The point of business is business. The business of business is business and the closer it is to home, the better. Many SMEs I know of which had integrated EU-wide supply-chain businesses found they could no longer compete because of tariffs and bureaucracy. The rules of cabotage have seriously diminished opportunities for hauliers, because the truck that you send abroad has to come home. The current crisis in agriculture, in which I am engaged, owes a great deal to what was agreed as part of leaving. All this amounts to the loss of real jobs and negative growth, affecting real people with great immediacy all the time across the whole country.

It is commonplace to say that one of the reasons for our current national distrust with politics goes back to alienation from the European Union, because it was so distant and failed to understand much of the real world away from the glitzy centre. It is a view I do not entirely share. At least as significant was the estrangement of UK national politics from the European aspect. UK political parties and the House of Commons as a whole always, it seemed to me, resented it. I speak as someone who served for 10 years in the European Parliament with a dual mandate. Rather surprisingly, I was elected on a Sunday and inherited a peerage the following Thursday—neither of which is now possible.

As the report rightly points out, resetting this relationship is an ongoing process, but that process has to provide emotional buy-in by the UK political establishment and the wider public as a whole so that it becomes part of the political normal, to avoid a repeat of last time. The past, as advice to retail investors always points out, is not necessarily a good guide to future performance. But, as this report points out, it has to be the starting point, recognising, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said all those years ago, that no man can stand in the same river twice, since both the man and the river are not the same the second time round. Nevertheless, the national interest demands that we get into the water.