(Bloomberg) — Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch and her would-be Labour successor Jonathan Reynolds clashed over how the UK can ease trade friction with the European Union post-Brexit as part of Bloomberg’s election debate on Monday.

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Reynolds left open the question about whether Labour would accept a role for the European Court of Justice as part of a veterinary deal it wants to negotiate with the bloc to ease friction in the trade of fresh food. Senior EU diplomats have told Bloomberg that such an agreement is negotiable, as long as it’s overseen by the ECJ.

“I’m not going to give away our negotiating hand entirely,” Reynolds said on Monday in the debate at Bloomberg’s European headquarters in London. “In any trading relationship we should always be seeking to make it the smoothest, easiest relationship.”

Badenoch said that Labour is not being honest about what it would need to give up in order to forge a closer trading relationship with the EU. Bloomberg reported earlier Monday that UK officials, EU diplomats and even senior Labour figures believe leader Keir Starmer will struggle to deliver a significantly different trading relationship unless he relaxes his pledge to keep the UK out of the EU’s customs union and single market.

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National polling puts Labour on course to easily win the UK general election on July 4, ending the governing Conservatives’ 14-year stint in office. Badenoch sought to persuade the audience of business figures that they should be scared by the prospect of a Labour government. “You should be terrified about surrendering your business, the economy, tax to Labour,” she said.

Badenoch has not yet said whether she would run to be Tory party leader if Prime Minister Rishi Sunak steps down in the wake of an electoral defeat, and she dodged the question again when she and Reynolds were asked if they aspired to ever lead their parties.

“I think it’s obvious that question was for me,” Badenoch said. She said her current post had been the “job of a lifetime” that was “a lot easier” than being premier. She said questions about the Tory leadership would be settled after the vote, declining to rule out a run.

The two politicians also clashed over their approach to reducing UK greenhouse gas emissions to “net zero” by 2050. While Sunak has rowed back on the country’s green targets, stressing that net zero shouldn’t burden ordinary Britons with what the Tories describe as undue costs, Labour plans to establish a publicly-owned energy generation company to rapidly invest in green infrastructure.

The global shift to renewable energy is “one of the greatest opportunities that’s ever existed,” Reynolds said, disagreeing with Badenoch who said the UK’s legally-binding target to reach net zero is both an opportunity to be seized and a cost to be mitigated.

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“We need to be able to adapt when circumstances change,” she said, pointing to the Covid-19 pandemic and the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

–With assistance from Alex Wickham.

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