UK wants closer ties with EU: Minister

The United Kingdom's Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has told her European Union counterparts her country now wants closer ties with the bloc it left five years ago.

Reeves took her message to a meeting of eurozone finance ministers on Monday, where she said the UK is targeting closer cooperation but is not seeking to rejoin the 27-nation political and economic alliance.

After the Eurogroup meeting, she told reporters the UK is looking to move on from the unpleasantness that was evident when it left the bloc in January 2020 and instead foster cooperation in areas including trade, security and defense.

"Today was not about starting a negotiation," she said at a news conference after the gathering in Brussels, Belgium, on Monday. "Today was the preliminary work that is needed to rebuild trust and to build relations after a very fractious and antagonistic few years."

She said the UK's Labour Party government, which came to power in July after 14 years of Conservative Party rule, wants to distance itself from the previous administration's confrontational attitude toward the EU.

'Turn a page'

"We want to draw a line … and turn a page to one of cooperation," she said.

At the meeting, which was the first between a UK finance minister and EU counterparts in five years, Reeves said London wants a "deeper, more mature relationship".

Business newspaper City AM quoted her as saying: "Division and chaos defined the last government's approach to Europe, it will not define ours."

And she said the removal of barriers between the UK and the EU will stimulate growth for both sides.

Reuters noted that Reeves told her counterparts she disagrees with commentators who have said the UK will have to choose between having closer ties with the United States or with the EU, saying "a closer economic relationship between the UK and the EU is not a zero-sum game".

After the meeting, which Reeves described as a "milestone", she said she had been "overwhelmed" by the response she received from her EU counterparts.

Eurogroup President Paschal Donohoe described the gathering as valuable and said it should "set the tone" for negotiations in the year ahead.

"The issue of fisheries, of youth mobility, and all those other matters are for another day," he said, alluding to likely areas in which the bloc and the UK may not see eye to eye.

The two sides are set to sit down in January to begin more detailed discussions of possible areas of cooperation, including greater regulatory alignment in key sectors.