America is dragging us down. Let's grab that EU lifeline before it's too late

Reactions to Keir Starmer’s modest “reset” of UK-EU relations last week in the rightwing press took hyperbole into new realms of the absurd. It was a “surrender” in which we could “kiss goodbye to Brexit”.

- Will Hutton

You would never guess that only the edges had been taken off Boris Johnson's very hard Brexit - and that for all those welcome advances, in its essentials the UK cannot get beyond being, in EU terms, a “third” country, alone.

Britain will remain decisively outside both the EU customs union and single market. The Brexit right has succeeded in locking our geo-economic position firmly within the ambit of the US, the dollar and its mighty capital markets to which Britain’s are umbilically linked. Thus, for example, if yields on US bonds rise, lifting the cost of government borrowing, ours ineluctably follow.

Last week dramatised how uncomfortable this standing between two giants can be as Trump launched “one big beautiful bill”, one of the most economically and financially toxic measures in the US's recent economic history, while the next day threatening 50% tariffs on all EU goods imports because he no longer wanted a deal with one of the US's biggest trading partners — or so he said. His budget had already prompted US 30-year bond yields to climb above 5%, but simultaneously triggered a mirror-image rise in UK 30-year debt yields to more than 5.5%, a near all-time high. Share prices were sliding too. Yet confronted with this mayhem, to argue that the UK should try to build as close an association with the EU as it can central to global free trade and financially predictable - is to invite a frenzy of ridicule.