Starmer's EU strategy isn't a Brexit betrayal – it's a necessity
Keir Starmer is being accused of 'betraying the 2016 Brexit vote' by seeking a closer relationship with the EU to improve our economy, in his 'Brexit Reset' today. And here's why we shouldn't care.
The Brexit vote was nearly 10 years ago. We voted on it before we'd even negotiated what the new relationship with the EU would be.
Everyone, including the parties who supported it, thinks the new relationship is a disaster. And we're in a poverty crisis that matters a lot more than all the above. The only betrayal would be tolerating that poverty by not going far enough against Brexit.
Keir Starmer's Labour Party has said for years that they would not take us back into the Single Market or Customs Union of the EU.
The Single Market is how EU countries have the same rules for products and services so that anything made in one country is automatically legal to sell in another. The Customs Union is how the EU negotiates trade deals as a single bloc.
Both mean that EU countries can sell products and services between each other without the need for checks or paperwork, which keeps prices down. And neither was on the ballot paper in 2016. For example, Norway, a non-EU country, is in the Single Market.
In fact, Daniel Hannan, a committee member of the Vote Leave campaign, said, 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market.'
And in both of the following elections, the majority voted for parties that promised to retain all the benefits of the Single Market.
So Starmer's red lines about staying out of the Single Market and Customs Union have no basis in democracy. He's just making it harder for himself to properly address the cost-of-living crisis by tying his own hands during these negotiations. This raises the question: why?
Last week, the prime minister announced a major crackdown on immigration, where he said that immigration risked turning the UK into an 'island of strangers'. Downing Street denies deliberately parroting Enoch Powell's famous 'Rivers of Blood' speech, where he said immigration would make Brits 'strangers in their own country'.
But the fact that a Labour politician's words could even be considered an homage to one of the most famous racists in UK history should raise both alarm bells and the question 'why?'
The answer is simple: the Reform Party.
Keir Starmer is avoiding going too far in undoing Brexit and parroting racist lines about immigration because he's scared of losing votes to Reform. But you either believe progressive policies are good for people, or you don't.
If you do, then be progressive – talk progressively and enact progressive policies so that people can see in their bank balances and their kids' bellies that lefty politicians are on their side.
Making our trade with Europe less expensive – to fight poverty – while blaming immigrants and maintaining that staying out of the Single Market is in the national interest just looks confused.
It sends the message that people's lives would be better if they went with a party like Reform – a party that is rabidly pro-Brexit and unashamedly hostile towards immigration.
The irony is that Starmer's fear of Nigel Farage becoming prime minister is what is preventing him from properly addressing the cost-of-living crisis. And that fear of a Farage PM is what will deliver a Farage PM.
This is particularly ludicrous, given that several Reform Party politicians have admitted that Brexit is making us poorer – and that if they were in charge, they would damage our food supply for the next 20 years by pursuing a No-Deal Brexi t.
And we're expected to believe that Starmer, one of the most successful lawyers in the country, couldn't win a debate about whether Brexit is bad for working-class people against a party that has admitted that Brexit is bad for working-class people?
If we're aligning with EU rules to make our supply chains cheaper and lower the cost of living, then just say we're moving towards the Single Market because it's in the national interest. These red lines are only slowing us down.
As with any positive change in human history, one shudders to think of the number of people whose lives would have been saved or drastically improved if that change had come just a few years sooner.
We know Brexit is making people poorer. Every medical body in the UK says Brexit is damaging the NHS. And we know poverty and sickness cost lives.
So the question is: how many lives are going to keep being ruined because Starmer is too scared to put his foot down?
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