Catherine McBride OBE

The EU Reset is bad for British taxpayers, British youths, and British businesses. This report by economist Catherine McBride OBE, published by the Great British Business Council, sets out what the UK gives up under the EU Reset and what it will cost.

EU Reset: What the Brexit Reset Deal Will Cost Britain
gbbc.uk/eu-reset-cost-…

For the many UK politicians @UKLabour and journalists @BBC who don't know anything about UK trade, here are the highlights:

1. The UK is now predominantly a service exporter. 57% of UK exports are services, which are not affected by EU 'red tape'.

2. UK goods exports have dropped from almost 70% of our total exports in 1997 to just 43% in 2025. This trend began long before Brexit and is tied to Net Zero mandates, high UK energy prices, and EV mandates.

3. Machinery and transport goods, such as cars and aircraft parts, are 42% of all UK goods exports. This is by far the UK's largest export sector, although it is also falling. It was 50% of UK exports in 2000. But if the UK joins the EU's CBAM, companies in this sector will see their imported material costs rise, making their exports even less competitive.

4. Chemicals are the UK's second-largest export sector. They account for 19% of UK goods exports, but this share is shrinking due to UK and EU energy costs and Net Zero regulations. These will increase if the UK joins the EU ETS.

5. Miscellaneous Manufactures account for 11% of UK goods exports. This is still the UK's third-largest export sector, even though it includes many goods the UK no longer makes because of our high Carbon taxes, which will increase if the UK signs up to the EU's even higher ETS on November 20th.

6. Fuels account for 9% of UK exports. This is still the UK's 4th largest goods export sector, even though the current and previous governments are/were trying to destroy it with bans on new exploration and ultra-high taxes.

7. Material Manufactures account for 8% of UK goods exports. This sector includes iron, steel, aluminium, ceramics, and glass manufacturing - industries that have gone, or are going, out of business in the UK because of high UK energy costs, which will rise if the UK joins the EU ETS.

8. These five sectors make up almost 90% of UK exports. The other 5 industry sectors are insignificant. But the government and our journalists think the UK is New Zealand and that the only goods we export are food and live animals to the EU. We don't! UK food and live animal exports to the EU were just 1.3% of the UK's total exports.

9. The government is about to sacrifice all of the export industries listed above to slightly reduce the IMPORT costs of a handful of Supermarkets, at least two of which are privately owned German companies.
These savings will not be passed on to UK shoppers because the government has also increased wages again, and supermarket energy costs will increase if we join the EU's ETS.

10. UK exports of food and live animals will not increase because we are paying farmers to not produce them, this has nothing to do with EU red tape. Instead we are paying farmers to plant trees and wildflowers or plaster their farmland with solar panels. (54% of UK electricity is coming from gas today, 12% from solar and 3% from wind.)

11. Write to your MP and tell him to #StoptheReset.
If you don't stop this, don't complain when all of our goods export industries have closed because of EU higher carbon taxes, EU higher carbon import tariffs, and the cost of complying with the EU's new packaging and process regulations.

The document also pledges its commitment to the International Criminal Court in Point 15, but not when EU criminals are concerned; in Point 51, the UK has had to agree to disobey its own Sentencing Act 2026 by not deporting EU criminals, even though the point of the Sentencing Act was to reduce the pressure on UK prison capacity.

So, the UK's Sentencing Act 2026 will only apply to criminals from non-EU countries. EU criminals will still take up UK prison places, and UK taxpayers will still be paying for their incarceration, while new criminals will be given noncustodial sentences because we don’t have enough prison places, but that’s OK because we can’t possibly upset the EU.

Illegal migration

Point 60 is more comedy gold. Apparently, we adopted the European Commission’s Channel Action Plan in June 2026, which is apparently providing ‘a structured EU-level framework for cooperation to tackle irregular migration and the criminal networks facilitating it, as well as to strengthen border management.’

The EU claims that its Action Plan is ‘coordinating action against migrant smuggling’. However, anyone who has watched footage of French Police standing on Calais beaches while enormous rubber dinghies are loaded with illegal migrants, which the French navy then escorts to the UK’s maritime border, may not have realised that this is a coordinated action against migrant smuggling.

Point 60 also explains that the UK is ‘making a financial contribution’ to the EU’s ‘coordinated action’ to reflect our ‘shared responsibility for addressing these challenges’.

Again, the Document doesn’t mention how large this financial contribution is, but we can see from the daily dinghy arrivals in the UK that the EU is either totally inept or it is actually coordinating the movement of illegal migrants into the UK, rather than trying to stop it. Or the EU is simply pocketing the money and letting the French Police do what they like. Also a possibility.

For more information, read my Substack: catherinemcbride.substack.com/p/captured-mar…

Point 66 gets to the EU’s main aim in its protectionist policies: the EU wants the UK to help protect the EU’s steel industries with a quota system under the WTO GATT process. This ‘reciprocal’ arrangement has two massive holes.

1. The UK hardly makes any steel any more. It is down to just 2 blast furnaces, and they are only still operating because of massive government subsidies, while the EU has 47 blast furnaces and hundreds of Electric Arc Furnace steelworks which run on much cheaper industrial electricity than the UK’s. So agreeing to Point 66 would simply result in the final death of UK steelmaking.

2. The EU has defied the WTO CODEX rules and has ignored a myriad of complaints to the WTO after the EU lowered its pesticide Maximum Residue Levels, and its banning of certain food ingredients and packaging materials without any scientific evidence to back up its changes.

The EU is happy to cherry-pick which WTO rules it wants to obey and which it wants to ignore, but now the EU wants to use the WTO to block Chinese EV and steel imports while the EU is simultaneously defying the WTO CODEX rules and blocking imports of fruit, vegetables, and cereals from other countries.

I should point out that if the UK is silly enough to let the EU make its SPS rules, the UK will also be defying WTO CODEX rules.

However, the UK would still have a steel industry and would not fear being undercut by Chinese steel if it had encouraged investment in new steel plant and equipment rather than making steel production uneconomic through short-sighted carbon taxes, bans on coking coal extraction, and high industrial electricity prices making EAFs uneconomic in the UK.

For more information about the 'Reset' read my latest Substack, catherinemcbride.substack.com/p/captured-mar…