Was it Starmer's plan all along to make us so subservient to the EU that we'd be better off back in?

The Sun

a day ago

WERE we fooled too easily by Sir Keir Starmer's assurances that he had no intention of taking Britain back into the EU?
With the publication of the EU's draft documents for the 'reset' in relations between Britain and the bloc, it is tempting to wonder whether there has been a scheme in the PM's mind all along: to make Britain so subservient to the EU that eventually a return to full membership becomes a less-worse option.
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As announced by Starmer and EU ­Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at their summit in London in May, a new 'common sanitary and phyto-sanitary' area will be created.
That should mean the end of checks on food imports and exports — as well as petty customs officers confiscating sandwiches from lorry drivers.
Needless to say, it comes at a price. In order to escape the border checks, Britain will have to agree to full alignment with EU food standards.
And it is becoming increasingly clear what this means in practice: Britain ­simply agreeing to enact EU standards.
French farmers
In contrast to when we were members of the EU, however, we will have little say in what those standards should be.
We may be consulted, but it is the EU which will make the rules and Britain which is forced to accept them.
It is obvious from past experience what is going to happen.
EU legislators, heavily lobbied by French farmers and the like, will pass laws which are designed to discriminate against UK-made produce, in order to keep it out of EU markets.
We will have no power to stop them.
To take an example, Britain spent 27 years fighting the EU for the right to sell our chocolate bars across the Continent.
Keir Starmer- hopes for reset with EU do not mean 'reversing Brexit'
The EU, under pressure from French and Belgian manufacturers, wanted to impose a limit on the milk content and vegetable fat content of chocolate bars — which just happened to permit products made in France and Belgium but exclude those which were popular in Britain.
In a typical piece of EU-style bureaucratic invention, officials tried to come up with a compromise: where UK-made bars would be labelled 'vegelate' — presumably to make them sound so unappetising that no one would want to buy them anyway.
Britain eventually won that battle — in 2000, after nearly three decades of ­bruising political and legal battle.
But in future? Britain will have no say.
The European Commission will be able to pass a law banning British ­chocolate bars and there will be little we can do about it.
British food manufacturers could, perhaps, appeal to the new 'independent arbitrary tribunal' which will be set up to judge trade disputes, but it won't really be worthy of the name 'independent'.
As the EU draft documents make clear, the EU's Court of Justice will become 'the ultimate authority for all questions of EU law'.
Needless to say, the EU wants Britain to pay for the privilege of joining its ­common sanitary area.
We will also be under obligation to align our carbon levies with the EU, making it more difficult for a future UK government to escape the straitjacket of Net Zero.
Both Britain and the EU are in the process of imposing carbon border taxes — levies on imports according to their embedded carbon emissions.
Under the reset, Britain will be expected to align its own system with the EU's.
It was exactly these kinds of arrangement which Theresa May and Boris Johnson's governments fought so hard to avoid — not very satisfactorily, it has to be said.
We actually ended up with an arrangement which created an internal UK border between Britain and Northern Ireland.
But the system which will come about as a result of Starmer's reset will be far worse.
It will take us close to being the 'vassal state' that Jacob Rees-Mogg warned about — a vassal state being the name given to states in medieval Europe which were notionally independent but in practice were under the control of, and under ­obligation to pay taxes to, a much larger empire.
No UK PM ever really tried to play the EU at its game — even though they ought to have been in the driving seat in negotiations
At the moment, the reset will cover food, animal and plant products as well as a number of high-carbon materials such as steel and cement.
Second referendum
But this will almost certainly mark just a beginning.
Under a Starmer government we will be sucked further and further into the EU's orbit until it becomes a mere tidying-up exercise to rejoin the bloc in full.
Donald Trump has just shown what you can do if you negotiate hard with the EU — European Commission president Von der Leyen ended up agreeing to 15 per cent tariffs on EU exports to the US, as well as a ­commitment to buy more US oil and gas — all for very little in return.
Yet no UK PM ever really tried to play the EU at its game — even though they ought to have been in the driving seat in negotiations with the EU because they sell more to us than we sell to them.
While Conservatives were trying and failing to get a good deal, Starmer, you might remember, was campaigning for a second Brexit referendum in which — he hoped — Britons would vote to reverse the result of the first.
He didn't get his way on that, of course. But that doesn't mean he has given up on trying to reinstate Britain in the EU.
To judge by his actions, that may very well be his undeclared ambition.