Just like the deluded emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy story, Sir Keir Starmer was eager to point out off his elegant new European garments yesterday.
Posing proudly along with his cosmopolitan friends, he extolled the virtues of his Brexit ‘reset’ deal, hailing it as a landmark victory.
Sadly for him, everybody else might see he was bare. Brussels had not solely stripped the shirt from his again however made off along with his complete ensemble.
This was the day the Brexit dream died, and with it the imaginative and prescient of a vibrant, assured, sovereign Britain making its personal guidelines and its personal approach on the worldwide stage.
The whole lot the EU wished from these ‘negotiations’ it obtained, from the UK accepting ‘dynamic alignment’ with its meals and agriculture requirements to a deal permitting European fishing boats to maintain plundering British waters for years to come back.
The European Court docket of Justice will once more have the ability to intervene in British regulation and commerce offers with different international locations shall be made tougher by the need to abide by Brussels laws.
Britain can also be anticipated to rejoin the EU’s emissions buying and selling scheme, which might see heavy trade being clobbered with even increased inexperienced levies within the mad race to Internet Zero.
What’s extra, the hard-pressed British taxpayer shall be pressured to pay billions for the privilege of as soon as extra turning into an obeisant Brussels rule-taker.
Keir Starmer posing proudly with European Fee president Ursula von der Leyen… the PM extolled the virtues of his Brexit ‘reset’ deal, hailing it as a landmark victory
Sir Keir claims the deal will give British fishermen ‘stability’ and is ‘good for fishing’, however the fishing trade says it’s ‘completely disastrous’ and a ‘sellout’
And on high of all that, there’s a plan underneath lively consideration to open Britain’s doorways to tens of millions extra migrants by a ‘youth mobility scheme’.
EU residents aged between 18 and 30 would have the ability to stay and work on this nation and our younger individuals would have the identical proper within the EU.
Expertise tells us there shall be many instances extra migrants coming right here from Europe than entering into the other way. Some will come to check, however the majority shall be coming to work.
The concept a 30-year-old must be classed as a youth is absurd. This isn’t some concession for college students, it’s a return to free motion by the again door.
And what will we get in return for all this largesse? The PM boasts that we’ll be allowed to affix EU queues and use e-Gates when arriving at European airports. However even this so-called ‘win’ is but to be finalised.
Equally, the much-vaunted defence pact agrees solely to ‘swiftly discover’ whether or not UK companies shall be permitted to faucet right into a £150billion rearmament fund arrange by the EU.
Sir Keir has offered the soul of Brexit down the river, but removed from being embarrassed about it, he’s jubilant. He might hardly cease grinning at his personal brilliance yesterday.
For whereas pretending to respect the 2016 referendum outcome, he has labored tirelessly to undermine and in the end overturn it. This was the primary big step in direction of that aim. It was not a lot a negotiation as a deliberate and calculated capitulation.
The primary to be counting the fee shall be Britain’s fishing communities. Fishing could account for under a small fraction of the UK’s GDP however that doesn’t imply it’s unimportant.
It’s a vital a part of the British maritime custom and helps many hundreds of jobs in a few of this nation’s most disadvantaged areas – almost all of which voted to go away the EU so we might take again management of our fishing grounds. Yesterday they had been cynically betrayed.
Beneath the unique Brexit deal, Boris Johnson minimize the annual quotas that might be caught by EU boats by 25 per cent. He set a closing date of June 2026, after which quotas had been anticipated to be minimize additional. Astonishingly, Sir Keir has agreed to increase the prevailing quotas for 12 extra years, far longer than had been anticipated – or certainly requested.
Professional-Go away supporters outdoors the Homes of Parliament yesterday
He says it’ll give British fishermen ‘stability’ and is ‘good for fishing’. Fishing trade our bodies says it’s ‘completely disastrous’ and a ‘sellout’.
And if a future authorities tries to limit these quotas, there’s a nasty clause within the settlement enabling the EU to slap tariffs on all British imports. This isn’t the behaviour of an ally.
Just like the farmers, fishermen are rapidly realising that Labour neither is aware of something about their lives and livelihoods nor cares about their destiny.
They’re merely collateral harm in Sir Keir’s obsession with sucking as much as Brussels.
His announcement yesterday was spattered with the vacuous language we got here to affiliate with New Labour.
‘Time to show the web page… transfer on from the stale debates of the previous… look forwards not backwards… open a brand new chapter.’ At no stage did he point out trashing the democratic mandate of 17.4million individuals.
Maybe essentially the most egregious of the numerous lies and half-truths he deployed to gull the general public was this one: ‘We’re following by on what the British individuals voted for final yr.’
Actually? His manifesto pledged to ‘make Brexit work’. To renege on that promise so quickly suggests he by no means had any intention of conserving it.
However the individuals is not going to be taken for fools indefinitely. Whereas they is probably not immediately affected by this reset, they may see it for what it’s – a bid to return to the EU by stealth.
True, Brexit has not been an unalloyed success, and the Conservative Celebration bears a heavy accountability for that. As an alternative of capitalising on its huge potential, it was far too timid.
If senior members of the final authorities had spent half as a lot time exploring new commerce alternatives as they did biting lumps out of one another, skulking again in direction of Brussels would now be pointless.
As an alternative, their appalling lack of goal has offered Labour’s guerilla military of Remainers a window of alternative by which they’ve gratefully climbed.
But when Sir Keir thinks the general public will thank him for it, he’s sorely mistaken. He’s already essentially the most unpopular incoming prime minister in historical past and his approval rankings proceed to plummet.
His celebration was routed on the native elections by a Reform celebration which is hovering within the polls and his latest Damascene conversions to migration management and defending women-only areas are an apparent try and restrict the harm. He’s fooling nobody.
The lesson Sir Keir has failed to grasp from Reform’s success is that voters are heartily sick of being patronised, ignored and lied to by a political class which scorns democracy.
The Brexit referendum was essentially the most highly effective expression of public contempt for the established order but now Sir Keir has the vanity to suppose he can override their needs.
They may repay him on the first alternative by sweeping him and his dishonest, deceitful, hapless authorities into the dustbin of historical past.
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