The European defence emergency has made talk of Brexit and its future less taboo on both sides of the Channel. The City lost 40,000 finance jobs soon after Brexit: those high earners who have departed Britain lost the Treasury £1bn a year in tax. Keir Starmer has called for an “ambitious UK-EU defence and security partnership”, but France has blocked British defence companies from accessing a €150bn (£125bn) European defence fund. It has just renegotiated its complex patchwork of EU agreements, partly in the single market, for goods only. However inflexible the EU seems, Switzerland shows painstaking deals of mutual advantage can crisscross the apparently rigid single market rules.

Source: The Guardian March 25, 2025 18:19 UTC