EU would be crazy to alienate Britain as an ally

Michel Barnier’s hypocritical attempt to bargain with security is likely to backfire

The news that GCHQ has disrupted terrorist operations in four European countries in the last year should not be a surprise. Britain has the best intelligence agencies in Europe, and when I worked in government – in the Home Office and in Number 10 – our agencies played a vital role in arresting terrorists and disrupting plots across the continent.

So what is Michel Barnier, the EU’S Brexit negotiator, doing by trying to make UK-EU security cooperation conditional? Only last month, he said: “Solidarity is not to be negotiated”, and warned Britain not to seek a “trade-off between security and trade”. And he was not alone in doing so: other European leaders said the same.

For its part, the Government says Britain is “unconditionally committed” to maintaining European security. This is also unsurprising: Britain, along with France, has long been Europe’s strongest defence and security player. Through the formation of the European Counter-terrorism Group, EU measures such as the Passenger Name Records Directive and bilateral intelligence work, Britain has led the way for decades. But now Barnier talks of conditionality, the very thing he once rejected. Security cooperation, he says, “is made possible by trust founded on common rules and safeguards, shared decisions, joint supervision and implementation and a common Court of Justice”. Without these things, he threatened, “you lose the benefits of this cooperation”.

The first problem with Barnier’s position is his distinction between what he calls “internal” and “external security”, or the difference between domestic criminal justice work and intelligence and defence cooperation. He seems to think the former requires EU information sharing and – separately – the latter demands the cooperation of intelligence agencies and the military. This is misconceived. At a time when hostile foreign states like Russia engage in hybrid threats – combining military force with cyber attacks, state-sponsored criminality and media manipulation – and the terrorist threat is both home-grown and international, the two forms of cooperation are inseparable.

European intelligence agencies agree that routine information sharing is vital to counter-terrorism operations. In a statement earlier this year, the chiefs of the French DGSE, the German BND and Britain’s MI6 said, after Brexit, “close cooperation and cross-border information sharing must be taken forward on themes such as international terrorism”. Agencies’ capabilities also play an important role in fighting ordinary crime: GCHQ has helped to combat international paedophile networks, drug trafficking and cyber attacks against businesses around Europe.

The second problem is that Theresa May has already agreed many of the conditions Barnier wants to impose. He says the UK must meet standards on data protection, respect human rights and agree processes for enforcement and dispute resolution. In the Government’s security paper last September, and in Mrs May’s Munich speech in February – both before Barnier’s intervention on Tuesday – the Government said it would guarantee each of these things.

The third problem is Barnier’s blatant hypocrisy. He says there is no connection between security and trade, but the EU wants to block Britain from Galileo, the satellite system, to protect French and German industry. Elsewhere in the talks, he says the Northern Ireland peace process is sacrosanct, but he wants to bar the UK from the European Arrest Warrant, which is vital to cross-border justice in Northern Ireland and the Republic.

He also says he needs assurances about Britain’s attitude to human rights. But look at the human rights abuses the EU tolerates in Hungary and Poland. And remember the abuses in many European extradition cases, such as that of Andrew Symeou, who was extradited to Greece on a murder charge after the local police beat confessions out of witnesses, who later retracted their statements.

Since 2016, there have been 45 terror attacks in seven European countries: Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Sweden and Finland. Europe is dealing with thousands of its most dangerous citizens as they return from fighting in Syria. The continent faces the ongoing migrant crisis, cyber attacks from hostile foreign states and a revanchist Russia, all as Donald Trump proves himself an unreliable ally.

Britain is a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and has armed forces with a global reach. And we have the best “signals intelligence” capability in Europe, which, among many things, helps our allies to identify terrorists returning from Syria.

In contrast, Europe’s defences against mounting threats are pitifully weak. Few member states pull their weight and, after Brexit, 80 per cent of Nato spending will come from outside the EU.

So Mr Barnier ought to be careful. Britain’s leaders may be unconditionally committed to the security of Europe, but if the EU tries to hurt us, the next generation of politicians – and the public – might not be so generous. Solidarity works in both directions.

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