EU déjà vu: the emergency brake is back!
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Charles Grant from the Centre for European Reform and Tim Shipman join James Heale to reflect on the rumours about Britain's latest set of negotiations with the European Union. There are reports that the EU may be willing to accept some form of mechanism, that the UK could use, should Britain ever wish to temporarily halt the number of inbound students. Perhaps we could call such a mechanism an 'emergency brake'. Sound familiar?
What does this tell us about the dynamics of the EU, how the UK-EU relationship works – and how inevitable was the result in 2016?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Megan McElroy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Heald and I'm joined today by Tim Shipman, |
| 0:08.9 | Spettators, Political Editor and Charles Garant from the Centre for European Reform. Now, Tim, |
| 0:13.2 | in this week's magazine, you've talked about the 10 years since Brexit with the anniversary |
| 0:16.2 | coming up and you write that basically it was always going to be a very fraught relationship with the EU, |
| 0:22.1 | even if we'd voted to stay in in 2016. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, look, what struck me the |
| 0:26.5 | other day was this quote from someone senior in Brussels, effectively saying, well, we're in these |
| 0:33.1 | negotiations with the Labour government now. We've got Nick Thomas Simmons and Michael Ellum trotting out to negotiate. |
| 0:40.3 | There are two phases to this. The first is that they hope to have a summit in June or July and seal off what they call the SPS deal, which is getting food and animal products. |
| 0:53.0 | More access to the European market there in exchange for adhering to the rules. |
| 0:56.8 | But what the Europeans want in return is this youth mobility scheme. |
| 1:00.4 | Britain has effectively been saying that there has to be a hard cap on numbers and the Europeans don't want that. |
| 1:06.9 | Someone I was speaking to the other day basically said, well, if they have a hard cap, |
| 1:10.5 | the Europeans themselves will have to divvy it up between the different countries, |
| 1:13.0 | and that will be quite a lot of pain in the backside for them, so they don't want that. |
| 1:17.6 | But what they have offered, which I found amusing and almost to the point of trolling, |
| 1:23.1 | is an emergency break on numbers, which if you cast your mind back is precisely what David Cameron |
| 1:29.6 | was asking for in 2015 and 2016, and the EU refused to give him. And it seemed to me this was an |
| 1:35.3 | interesting example of how the EU's position constantly evolves the same as ours. Often, |
| 1:40.0 | you might argue too late for it to be strategically useful, but it also struck me as an amusing |
| 1:45.3 | kind of intervention. And if you look at what Britain's trying to do now, it is to gain access |
| 1:50.3 | in particular sectors of the single market. And that is the very definition of cherry picking, |
| 1:55.1 | which is what the EU always said. We couldn't do. Michelle Barnier spent two and a half years |
... |
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