There are plenty of reasons to be appalled by the news that Keir Starmer is about to break his word to the people, and take this country back into the clammy grip of the EU.
There is the sheer duplicity of the man, the bare-faced lies he told us all at the time of the election in July.
He said that he was going to respect the voters, and that there would be no going back on the Brexit referendum. He was categorical about what this meant: no going back into the single market or customs union, and no return to free movement for nationals from the EU.
Perhaps we were mad to believe him. Perhaps we should have recalled the dozens of times he tried to stop Brexit in parliament, or demanded a second referendum.
Perhaps we should have denounced him last July, and said he was lying just to get elected. But somehow he seemed so po-faced, so prissily indignant about any challenge to his rectitude, that we gave him the benefit of the doubt.
European Council president Antonio Costa and Keir Starmer meeting at No10 this week
Millions of people went to the polls honestly believing that Brexit was safe under Labour. It is clear that Starmer was taking them for fools.
As The Mail on Sunday has revealed, he has set up a giant negotiating team in the Cabinet Office – bigger than the team of civil servants who originally delivered Brexit. Their mission is plain: to haul us slowly back into the orbit of the EU – to the point where Britain is effectively a colony, a vassal state, the orange-ball-chewing gimp of Brussels.
The talks with the EU are to begin in February, and the demands of the other side are horrific. This is no “reset”. This is not about improving the “atmosphere” in discussions with our friends and partners.
If Britain accepts any one of these suggestions, our feet will be skidding desperately on the sloping waterlogged deck, and soon we will be back in the jaws of the EU machine. We already know of three key EU proposals.
First, they want to seize back UK fisheries – at the very moment when, under the terms of the Brexit deal, the entire spectacular marine wealth of the UK will revert to this country. From 2026 we and we alone will decide who will fish our waters, and for what fish.
We, and not the EU, will decide our quotas, and how to manage our stocks. We will decide whether or not to allow foreign supertrawlers to hoover the bottom of the Channel or the North Sea. We will finally atone for the betrayal of 1973, when the Heath negotiations abandoned the rights of UK fishing communities; and of course the EU has been dreading this moment.
They want the legal and perpetual right to grab our fish – especially the French – and it is vital that we do not surrender. Remember what is really at stake here. It is only partly about fish.
It is fundamentally about legal authority; it is about control; it is about power.
When Britain left the EU, we restored complete national independence – and so the strategy of Starmer and Labour is clear. They must get us back into the EU, bit by bit, by destroying that principle, eroding that independence, handing back control.
That is why the next EU demand is for a return to free movement of people. This is presented as a modest step, a ‘youth mobility scheme’ for all aged 18 to 30. But have you counted the EU nationals who belong to that age group?
It is about 70million people. If we agree to this, we will be saying to 70million people on the continent that they can come to live and work in this country, without let or hindrance, and to make use of our hospitals, welfare services and all the rest. Is that any way to deal with the problem of mass immigration? Just throwing wide the doors again?
Of course not. It’s madness; and it would be madness to agree to the EU’s final demand – that we should become ‘rule-takers’, accepting the great and sometimes bonkers corpus of EU food and agricultural law, with no say in making that law.
In fact, the EU goes further. They want us be in ‘dynamic alignment’ with the EU, so that we are continually clicking our heels and bowing respectfully to new EU rules, no matter how maddening, just as we have been somehow forced to accept EU rules on tethered bottle tops.
The PM at an anti-Brexit rally with Camden Council leader Georgia Gould in 2019
With European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in October
Of the three EU requests, this is the real nightmare, because it drags us a long way back into the single market. By forfeiting our control over agriculture, we lose much of our freedom to do good free trade deals – such as with the United States.
By agreeing to the adjudication of the European court – without even having a judge on the court! – we have junked one of the fundamental principles of Brexit. And to what end?
What the hell is Starmer actually trying to achieve, in lashing this economy closer to the EU, at the very moment when the EU model is so manifestly failing?
It seems to be an article of faith with Labour that being in the EU is somehow the nicer, kinder, more idealistic future for Britain. But has Starmer stopped to look at what the Brussels system is actually achieving?
France and Germany have both just recorded negative growth; the euro is under pressure; and across the continent we are seeing such dissatisfaction with the EU’s record of stagnant morosity that the far-Right is starting to make real inroads, for the first time since the 1930s.
In Romania, a Right-wing pro-Putin thug was on the point of winning the presidential election – so the Romanian court abruptly cancelled the vote, while Brussels coughed and looked the other way.
No, you could not say that the EU was working. As I have pointed out many times in this column, the US is the country to learn from, because it is opening up a truly astonishing gap over Europe in wealth and productivity.
France is now poorer than Arkansas, the poorest state in the US. If things go on as they are then in 2035 – only ten years away – the relative poverty gap between America and Europe will be as big as the current gap between Europe and India.
We need to learn from the US, with its culture of innovation and enterprise, and low taxation – not the EU, with its Brussels-driven culture of welfarism and regulatory sclerosis.
At a time when Starmer and Rachel Reeves have already managed to kill economic growth with their disastrous tax-hiking budget, this EU renegotiation is taking Britain in completely the wrong direction.
Above all, Starmer has no mandate to do it. He has no mandate to set up the Whitehall Surrender Squad, and no mandate for these talks, any more than he had a mandate for tax rises. He lied about both.
Labour has taken power by deception. We must of course respect the law and the constitution.
But I call on everyone who cares about democracy – and the economic salvation of this country – to fight, fight, and fight again for the freedoms the people voted for in 2016, and which they believed were secure.
