European citizens in Germany and Poland are in favour of the UK being offered a special deal on trade with the EU in return for Britain’s help with defence and security, a poll has found.
More Europeans in five key countries would accept granting the UK “special access” to parts of the single market in return for a closer security deal, one of the continent’s few major defence players, than would oppose it, the survey suggests.
The willingness for the EU to bend or breach its own red line for Brexit reset talks – no “cherry-picking” of single market access for the UK while it is outside the economic bloc – was particularly strong in countries that feel a more direct threat from Russia.
A majority in both Germany (53 per cent) and Poland (54 per cent) backed the trade-off, according to the YouGov/Datapraxis six-country poll for the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Even in more sceptical France, which has its own large defence industry, 41 per cent supported giving the UK greater market access for a security deal, compared to only 29 per cent who opposed it.
More voters in Spain (42-37) and Italy (42-35) favoured granting some single-market access in return for a closer security relationship with the UK.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves used a visit to Brussels this week to signal a British push to join a multibillion pound EU weapons-buying programme, while stressing that it is in the interests of both sides to foster closer ties on trade to boost economic growth.
EU insiders have meanwhile signalled that Donald Trump’s election as incoming president in the United States could make Brussels more willing to do a wide-ranging deal centred around security.
Stella Creasy, chair of the pro-EU Labour Movement for Europe, said: “The public across Europe, including in the UK, are not daft. They are looking at the changing world around us, whether it’s Ukraine, America, Syria, and recognising that working together is the better option.
“It’s now up to us as politicians to have the difficult but necessary conversation about how to make that work.
“But we should be under no illusions that the public view has changed, the context has changed, so the opportunities have changed too if we are prepared to grasp them.”
However, Anand Menon, director of think tank UK In A Changing Europe, said the EU would find it difficult to bend its own rules to allow Britain favourable trade terms.
“There are three constraints on the EU side – one is bandwidth and the fact this isn’t a priority because compared to us, this is a low salience issue,” he said.
“The second is, the big macropolitical issue is that there is a problem for the EU with our economy doing well: that is populists saying we want the EU to be a looser, intergovernmental organisation less able to impose laws on us, and look at the Brits, aren’t they doing well?
“So you would not want to encourage that when you have elections coming up and strong populist parties who are Eurosceptic.
“The third thing is the internal rulebook – the EU is a confederation of sovereign nation states tied together with a series of quite loosely applied but quite directive rules.
“Weakening those rules for a non-member to get trade concessions not only encourages other non-members like Switzerland to ask for the same treatment, but might encourage member states to ask for the same flexibility.”
Sir Nick Harvey, CEO of the European Movement UK and a former Armed Forces minister, said that “forming closer ties between the UK and the EU has never been more important” and backed Reeves’s move towards Brussels on defence as “crucial”.
“The future of Europe depends not on elections on another continent but on Europe fulfilling its own destiny and own place in the geopolitical landscape. The UK needs to make a clear choice to be part of that European strength, in the interests of all of us – on defence and security, just as much as on trade and the economy,” he said.
“We cannot be the 51st state of America – it makes no sense geographically, politically or industrially. Europe’s defence is our defence, its security our security, its fight our fight – as Ukraine has shown. A failure by the UK to step forward and play a leading role in European defence is potentially suicidal both militarily and economically.”
- The poll was conducted online by Datapraxis and YouGov in France (11-24 November, 2,008 respondents), Germany (11-20 November, 2,026 respondents), Italy (11-20 November, 1,512 respondents), Poland (11-24 November, 1,018 respondents), Spain (11-19 November, 1,010 respondents), and the UK (11-18 November, 2,125 respondents). In all these countries the sample was nationally representative of basic demographics and past votes.
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