West Yorkshire Mayor right to urge the PM to rethink his Brexit ‘red lines’ - Yorkshire Post Letters

West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin is right to urge the Prime Minister to rethink his Brexit ‘red lines’ and look again at a customs union with our European neighbours (The Yorkshire Post, March 17).

Following her recent trade mission to Germany and Switzerland, the Mayor is drawing attention to what local manufacturers and exporters already know: the Government’s rigid political ‘red lines’ are actively suffocating our regional economy. The simple truth is that geography matters. It will always be more vital for a Bradford manufacturer to sell easily to Berlin than to Brisbane.

Sir Keir has defended remaining outside the customs union by pointing to our freedom to strike independent trade deals. But for local businesses, Starmer’s sums simply don’t add up. The Government’s own estimates show that our post-Brexit deals with Australia, New Zealand, India, and our CPTPP accession will combined boost UK GDP by a mere 0.3 per cent in the long term.

Meanwhile, independent modelling shows that securing deep alignment with the EU on goods alone would boost our economy by up to 1.5 per cent – and probably much sooner, too. That makes a customs union worth five times the economic value of all our new global trade deals put together.

We were told that leaving the EU and its customs union would allow us to secure agile, ‘bespoke’ agreements tailored to our specific needs. Yet, the reality of global trade is that raw negotiating muscle counts for much more than finesse.

Look no further than the recently signed trade deals with India. The EU’s agreement, negotiated with the promise of access to a market of 450 million consumers, is projected to deliver twice the economic growth to their economy than our own isolated UK-India deal will deliver to ours.

It turns out that a bespoke suit is poor value when you lack the leverage to dictate the price to the tailor. Sometimes the bloc's ‘off-the-peg’ option simply delivers greater economic returns because of sheer market size.

This is no longer about the ideological debates of 2016; it is about pragmatic economic growth in 2026. If the Prime Minister is truly serious about wealth creation, he must listen to regional leaders like the Mayor and prioritise jobs in Yorkshire over Westminster dogma.