It’s fitting that the UK–Germany Friendship Treaty was signed not in Berlin or Brussels but in London’s V&A. One of the last great temples of imperial display. Of course they signed it in a museum. What better place to commemorate a future built on the ruins of a past we won’t discuss? Starmer and Merz shook hands beneath marble ceilings and said what needed to be said. That Britain and Germany are friends. That Europe is better united. That defence, migration, trade, the climate crisis, none of it respects borders. All true. All late.
This is what pragmatism looks like when it’s been delayed by ideology. Brexit was a rupture not just with the EU but with the idea of interdependence itself. While the treaty is framed as a step forward, it’s more accurately a looping return, a partial reintegration dressed up as sovereign strategy. The dial has turned. But not all the way.
“I deplore Brexit deeply,” Merz told the cameras. “We have to do more.”
Yet there was no path to EU accession. No freedom of movement. No fiscal alignment. Instead: defence pacts, joint weapons production, co-managed border policy. Fortress Europe, slightly extended. The missiles will be co‑branded. The migrants will be jointly processed. Mobility will be controlled. Except, conveniently, for capital and arms.
“We left Europe shouting about sovereignty. Now we are creeping back in through defence deals and managed migration.”
Now, they are talking trains: a UK‑German taskforce will examine direct London–Berlin services, passport e‑gates at German airports by August, and smoother school exchanges, all tucked into the treaty’s list of flagship projects. A nod to sustainable connectivity. But these sums don’t outweigh the subtraction: the preservation of a bureaucratic border, dressed in greenwashed ambition.
Brexit wasn’t just an exit, it was a recalibration of connection: who moves, who stays, who gets protected. The Kensington Treaty doesn’t dismantle that logic; it codifies it in new architecture. The negation of the negation doesn’t bring freedom. It brings a quieter discipline. Defence deals instead of diplomacy. Managed migration instead of open passage. Checkpoint trains instead of European integration.
That “rail revolution” rhetoric? It’s not solidarity. It’s the managerialisation of what used to be called diplomacy. A McKinsey-style wishlist. And it will be sold as patriotic, pragmatic, post-ideological.
“From rupture to repair, from repair to militarisation.”
I want a closer relationship with Europe. Many of us do. But not like this. Not through the quiet militarisation of diplomacy, or the tightening of borders under the banner of cooperation. If the price of re-entry is to become junior partners in a global police state. Armed to the teeth, scanning passports at speed, managing migrants like data, then it’s not Europe we are returning to. It’s something colder, more technocratic, more brutal than the thing we left.
In the background: Trump’s shadow. Europe no longer trusts the United States. Biden is gone. The Atlantic axis unravelling. A second Trump presidency makes German rearmament and British dependency politically necessary. But this is the dialectic of disorder and order: chaos begets control. Brexit’s disorder begets Starmer’s strategy. Walls tilt, but logic holds.
None of this will satisfy Farage or the ERG, if the ERG even still exists. Do the Tories still have enough MPs to form a quorum, or is it just Jenrick muttering into a WhatsApp group no one reads? Either way, they will denounce the treaty as betrayal. Because for them, Brexit was never about policy. It was about theatre. About keeping the crisis alive. About telling voters they were robbed, again and again, until rage became ritual. They don’t want strategy, they want scapegoats. The only thing they ever built was a story where Britain is always the victim and they are always the saviours.
“The contradiction hasn’t been resolved, it’s been paved over with military contracts and promises of a train.”
So yes, the treaty matters, but not in the way they would have you believe. It doesn’t undo Brexit; it manages its consequences. It doesn’t bring Britain back into Europe; it hardwires Brexit’s logic into European power. It gives us military integration, technocratic coordination, digital border management, and maybe, one day, a train to Berlin, through more fences than forest. This isn’t resolution. It’s mutation. The rupture still runs beneath. It just whistles quietly through a high‑speed tunnel.
