The UK Labour Party’s manifesto, published in June 2024, promised to “reset the relationship” between the UK and the EU following Brexit and to “seek to deepen ties with our European friends, neighbours and allies”.
Since the Labour government came into office in July 2024, there have been new bilateral treaties with France and Germany; and at the EU-UK summit held in London in May 2025, the parties issued three documents on their future relationship:
- a joint statement setting out a new strategic partnership between them – largely a recitation of international issues on which the two sides already agree;
- a more operational ‘Common Understanding’, pointing to possible future co-operation in a wide range of areas;
- a Security and Defence Partnership (SDP), which, among other things, was designed to open the way to UK participation in EU defence industrial projects.2
The summit seemed to presage a new era in post-Brexit relations. The question is whether the reset and the EU’s response to it go far enough – bounded as they are by the Labour manifesto’s red lines of no return to the single market, the customs union or freedom of movement, and the EU’s mantra of ‘no cherry-picking’. The external threats to the EU and the UK have grown since the Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA) came into force in 2021. Russia is not only continuing its war of aggression against Ukraine; it is also mounting increasingly violent hybrid attacks against other European countries. China is using its economic muscle in ways that threaten the viability of many parts of European industry, in the EU and the UK.3 And the US is becoming more protectionist, more erratic as an international actor, more hostile to mainstream European political parties and less willing to defend Europe. In his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney described the global situation as “a rupture in the world order”.4 The next EU-UK summit meeting and the scheduled 2026 review of TCA implementation offer the chance – if both sides want it – to establish a much closer partnership, in the interest of enhancing their security and prosperity; but they could also decide that there are fewer political risks in staying within current boundaries, even if that leaves them collectively weaker. This policy brief examines what the UK-EU reset has achieved so far; looks at the prospects for 2026 – ten years after the UK voted to leave the EU; and sets out what more the EU and the UK could do to respond to the common challenges they face.
About the Auhtour:
Ian Bond has been the deputy director of the Centre for European Reform since November 2023. He joined the CER as foreign policy director in April 2013. Prior to that, he was a member of the British diplomatic service for 28 years.