No leader for 300 years has done more to undermine our interests than Starmer

Yahoo

20-05-2025

For the first time in three centuries – since the Hanoverian kings made Britain serve German interests – we are ruled by a political and administrative elite that does not put this nation first.
Our other rulers, whether they were kings, aristocrats or parliamentarians, took it for granted that their duty was to Britain. They laboured long and hard for the country in which they had a stake.
But not today. Sir Keir Starmer's 'reset' is only the latest example of decisions made since 2005 that obey other priorities. The Net Zero utopia is the most dangerous. The Chagos Islands fiasco – now 'on hold' – is the most incomprehensible. The 'reset' with the European Union is merely the most predictable. Michel Barnier predicted years ago that Starmer would lead Britain back into the EU.
I was naïve about Brexit. I thought a democratic decision would be honoured in good faith. I hoped that lowered immigration would accelerate improvement in education and training for neglected British communities. But the former Labour Europe minister Denis MacShane, with whom I appeared in my first Brexit debate in Cambridge in 2016, saw more clearly: 'It doesn't matter how people vote,' he said smugly, 'the Deep State won't let it happen.' Sure enough, the Deep State – let's call it the Blob, that indistinguishable mass of politicians, officials, and lobbyists– have won a victory.
I was doubly naïve. I thought that the British electorate could not simply be told to vote again and change their mind, as happened to the Irish and the Danes. Technically that has been true. But instead, our vote is simply ignored, like the French and Dutch votes in 2005. We are not being given the opportunity of a second referendum to rejoin the EU because that would require a proper campaign examining the pros and cons, and the BBC, for example, would be required to give a voice to all sides. In Greece and Italy, governments simply disobeyed their own voters and democracy was nullified. At least they had the excuse of being intimidated by brutal threats of financial destruction. What is Sir Keir Starmer's excuse?
Can anyone suppose that his 'reset' is the outcome of a dispassionate analysis of Britain's needs, thrashed out in a hard-nosed negotiation with the EU? Or is it a desperate attempt to reach any deal to placate blinkered Remainers and allow Starmer to declare victory? It is the Chagos deal on a vast scale: we give away things of huge value, and then pay the beneficiaries to accept them. How they laugh!
This reset floats on the ocean of misinformation with which the country has been inundated since 2016, and to which even some Leave voters have surrendered in despair. On one hand, propagandists declare that British trade has taken a huge 'hit' from Brexit – a 'hit' that can be found nowhere in the statistics. Goods exports have suffered not from Brexit, but from Whitehall's own policies, which have deliberately slashed exports of oil, cars and chemicals in the name of net zero, and decimated some of our major export industries by the highest energy costs in the developed world.
On the other hand, the EU, economically stagnant, politically crippled and strategically impotent, is hailed as a miraculous cargo cult, which will shower down wealth from the skies and make us somehow more economically successful than any of its actual members. Can anyone follow the logic here?
The EU's negotiators have ensured that what Starmer has presented as his gains are far outweighed by what we lose. As with EU research funds, we will doubtless pay in more than we get out. Does anyone think that the strategic defence fund will be different? Will the EU fund frigates and submarines we need for our defence rather than tanks made in France and Germany? How many rich European kids will be subsidised by British taxpayers to take coveted university places? How much of a regulatory burden will be placed on our struggling economy for decades to come without any choice by us?
But don't worry: we might be able to use e-gates when we go on holiday, and rock stars will roam the Continent unhindered. The frivolity of this whole exercise is utterly depressing. Have we as a country ceased to be able to think seriously and make proper decisions on matters of historic importance? Are we now incapable of distinguishing sense from nonsense?
The Labour Party once contained people like Attlee, Bevin, Gaitskill, Barbara Castle and not least Peter Shore. Listen to Shore's 1975 speech at the Oxford Union on You Tube: he spoke with wit, certainly, but also with a seriousness of mind now extinct in Labour ranks.
This 'reset' is depressing enough for its superficiality. But it is not just about trivial gains and losses. Above all it displays careless indifference to fundamental British values. The greatest of these is the belief that the people, finally, decide. This has been a golden thread in our history: Magna Carta; the Glorious Revolution; the Great Reform Bill; the People's Budget; Women's Suffrage.
Part of this is myth, critics might say, but it is a healthy myth, an aspiration to democracy and a warning to politicians that they are not the masters. But this week the people did not decide. Who did? Keir Starmer. He is counting not on popular consent but on popular apathy.
In short, the significance of the 'reset' goes far beyond its details, many of which will be trivial. It is significant as one sign – not the only one, alas – that our fundamental political values are despised. So I return to my opening thought. They are being despised by a governing Blob that no longer cares much about its country. 'Lives there a man with soul so dead?' asked Robert Burns. Yes, all too many. They are a post-national, globalised, post-democratic (that follows inevitably) elite happiest behind closed doors. The EU is their Eden.
The Opposition must not only say that it will reverse every concession that damages the national interest, as Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have rightly done. I am sure they both mean it: it is Farage's raison d'etre and Badenoch was often the only Tory minister trying to make Brexit work. But words are cheap. Badenoch is a planner, and she must explain in detail exactly how to extract us from this sorry mess and reassert popular sovereignty.
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