Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer shakes hands with Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, as they pose for a photo outside 10 Downing Street in London on July 17, 2025, ahead of their talks.
Justin Tallis / AFP
Spin doctors are repackaging the same old anti-Brexit schemes to fool the public onto their side.
Labour is forever trying to dupe voters on its approach to UK-EU relations. Having initially fought to reverse the 2016 referendum altogether, figures like Keir Starmer (the prime minister) and David Lammy (the foreign secretary) later—that is, during their first year in office—proposed what they called a Brexit ‘reset.’ Now the public has realised this plan will still overturn some of the key Brexit gains, especially regarding immigration, so the spin doctors are working to shift the rhetoric all over again. Crucially, the substance remains about the same.
The word “reset” has been “banished” from government communications, according to Politico, which cites a “senior official.” It appears Labour is taking the salami slice approach instead, making one small deal with an individual country at a time so that the wider image can be more easily hidden from the public.
For example, on Thursday, Starmer is welcoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz for his first official UK visit. The pair will sign what is being dubbed the “biggest UK-Germany treaty since 1945.” Defence is at the centre of this agreement, just as it has been in wider UK-EU ‘reset’ talks.
Another clever bit of spin has been to wrap joint measures to crack down on illegal migration—which will see Germany increase prosecutions of smuggling gangs on its own territory, in theory stopping them from operating across the Channel—in these latest talks, even though this was already agreed last year.
Germany has committed to change their law so we can disrupt the supply of small boats.
Working with our international partners gets results for British people.
We will smash the people smuggling gangs and secure our borders.
Starmer said the new UK-Germany agreement would be a “foundation on which we go further to tackle shared problems,” while a German government source claimed “we shouldn’t underestimate” how much relations have improved since the “traumatic” experience of Brexit. Soon, it could be as if it never happened.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
