UK floated single market for goods with EU, media say

Britain's government proposed the creation of a single market for goods with the European Union in what would be an ambitious reset of its post-Brexit ties with the bloc, but Brussels ‌has rejected the idea, British media reported.

The Guardian said the EU instead suggested Britain should join a customs union or agree to deeper economic alignment via the European Economic Area, both of which would require Prime Minister Keir Starmer to reverse his refusal to allow free movement ⁠of workers.

UK officials told The Guardian that the EU has not definitively rejected a single market for goods and the idea was among options for discussion at a planned EU-UK summit expected in July.

A spokesperson for Britain's Cabinet Office said the government was negotiating "an ambitious package of measures" ahead of the summit, including a sanitary and phytosanitary deal for trade in food and drink and another on emissions trading.

The spokesperson declined to comment on the report in ‌The ⁠Guardian which appeared late on Friday and a similar story published by the BBC on Saturday.

Starmer's Labour government has talked increasingly about the economic costs of Brexit, and his finance minister Rachel Reeves said in March that London was ready to align with ⁠many EU business rules to lower the barriers to trade.

We conservatives, who are so often so dismissive of Europeans and the European Uniont, might contemplate our own history at the time of the Articles of Confederation. It was competing interests and jealousies among the states that made the 13 colonies of the Confederation defenseless and mired in civil tariff disputes.

Manufacturing states versus agrarian states, slave states versus free states, hard money states versus easy credit states, exporters versus importers, possessors of these competing interests were too jealous to surrender perceived advantages to another state. So the nation under the Confederation was a Hobbesian dystopia with no power to regulate commerce, define currency, impose taxes, raise armies or effectively wage wars. It had no effective executive, no judicial resolution of disputes between states, and a legislative branch that could enforce laws even if they could be agreed upon.

We are justly proud of the Constitution crafted by the framers in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 and often wonder why the Europeans when they birthed European Union did not made a perfect union. We might further remind ourselves that our experiment did not even endure for 80 years until we were riven by a catastrophic Civil War that nearly destroyed us.

Nor should we forget that throughout our history, before and after the Civil War, the American pageant as been a story of ceaseless striving and counter-striving or power. That ceaseless struggle should not surprise us, it is only that which the framers fully anticipated. That is the nature of democracy, and they knew it.

European Union has not been in existence for 80 years and it is not surprising that it is experiencing many of the growing pains that marked our history. One can understand the American Civil War was a struggle over slavery, alternatively, one can see it as a struggle about whether we as a country would rule from Washington DC or from Richmond, Trenton or other state capitals.

So the eternal struggle to empower the center to achieve coherence and united strength versus the need of the province to exercise God-given self-rule, takes a European shape and form but mirrors our own. We should not expect Europeans to be any better at achieving a more perfect union than we were. The European Union has its Brexit, that we had a Civil War.

It is an unattractive feature of conservative commentary to indulge in hubristic dismissal of Europe. We so often criticize the Europeans for failings that bedevil us at home.

For example, when we complain that they have succumbed to Marxism, we ought perhaps to consider the politics of California. When we despair over theirlack of immigration control, we seem to forget the excesses of the Biden administration and the resistance of sanctuary states. When we decry the excesses of sharia imposed by Islam on Europe, we are to cast a look at Minnesota, Manhattan, Patterson, New Jersey.

When we arrogantly sneer at their military capabilities, we might consider that our investment in NATO bought us power and influence over European nations' policy and fostered inevitable dependency in Europe. We might consider that we got what we paid for, and they got a bargain which gave them both physical security and wonderful healthcare.

We conservatives should consciously abandon our reflexive dismissal of Europe and turn to rigorous examination of political realities, applying the same standard to ourselves as we impose on Europe.

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