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There's a smoky smell in the air, and it's not the charred remnants of Brexit dogma, it's the first decent British burger sizzling its way back to a Parisian grill in nearly five years. Keir Starmer's so-called "EU reset" isn't just a deal. It's a quiet revolution - served medium rare, with a side of Erasmus and a generous helping of carbon border tax relief.

It's not perfect, but it is progress. And for a country that's spent years pretending chlorinated chicken was freedom, it's a miracle. Let's cut through the pre-digested soundbites. This deal isn't just about passports and prawns. It's about plugging Britain back into the world's biggest economic bloc after an exile that hit our exports like a brick through a greenhouse.

Starmer's team fought for the agrifood sector, clawed back youth mobility, and brought us to the brink of joining a €150bn defence pact that screams "grown-ups are back in charge."

And sure, the fishing concessions will sting in Grimsby and Brixham. But let's be honest, fishing was never more than a symbolic chip in the Brexit poker game.

The industry was used, then left out at sea by Johnson, and it's Starmer who's finally thrown them a rope - in the form of reopened EU export routes for shellfish and a hint of actual long-term certainty.

Here's the kicker, and it's what'll matter most in the coming years: the youth mobility scheme. At first glance, it's just a way for fresh-faced middle class Brits to pour pints in Berlin or study art history in Florence.

But behind the Erasmus nostalgia lies a lifeline to the UK's care homes, farms, and kitchens.

Let's not dance around it. The UK's migration strategy has been a screaming contradiction - we need workers, but we've told the world we don't want them.

The care sector is haemorrhaging staff. Farmers are watching produce rot in the ground because there's no one to pick it.

And the Right's answer? Rhetoric and red tape. Starmer's deal, in all its quietly competent glory, puts real-world economics over nationalist cosplay.

Mobility schemes aren't just nice; they're necessary. They plug the labour gaps until we train our own, and no, that doesn't make us traitors. It makes us functional.

Enter Kemi Badenoch, trying to paint this reset as a surrender. A "return to the past," she said, apparently unaware that the past she's invoking didn't include £800m-a-year carbon taxes on exporters, or queues that turned Eurostar into a travel anxiety simulator.

She's talking about "sovereignty" like it's a product on the shelf, but she's ignoring what every investor, farmer, and CEO knows: business doesn't give a toss about sovereignty.

It wants certainty, standards alignment, and market access. You don't fill shelves with ideology. You fill them with tomatoes, and this deal makes that possible again.

Badenoch's opposition isn't economic, it's nostalgic. It's a fetishisation of failure. And frankly, it's dangerous.

Because what she's selling isn't an alternative future. It's a scrapbook of delusions, dipped in Union Jack bunting and baked under a hard sun of performative independence.

Don't get me wrong - Starmer's path is littered with political landmines. Reform is sniffing blood in the water, and there'll be no shortage of backbench grumbling about Brussels.

But the Prime Minister is betting that the public is ready for boring competence and that they've seen what ideology gets you: empty shelves, stagnant trade, and a care system on life support.

He's also betting that Farage's ability to shout "traitor" in a pub doesn't outweigh the quiet power of putting money back in people's pockets. And he's right.

You can't fix the UK economy with a press release. But you can start with a burger that doesn't need a customs form, a care home that's fully staffed and a country no longer pretending that shouting "Brexit means Brexit" makes the paperwork go away.

This isn't the end of Brexit. It's the start of the post-post-Brexit era - the hangover after the nationalist bender in Trisha's, Soho. And if the smell of grilled shellfish and a few thousand smart, mobile young people heading out into Europe is how we mark our return to sanity, well... I'll take mine with fries.

Britain's back. And this time, we brought lunch.