Labour will put Brexit gains at risk
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This weekend marks the eighth anniversary of one of the greatest democratic exercises in this nation’s history. On June 23, 2016, 17.4 million voted for the UK to leave the EU, the largest mandate the British people have ever given in a public poll. It took three and a half fractious years for Britain to eventually exit the bloc. In January 2020, however, it finally did.
That was no thanks to Sir Keir Starmer. The now Labour leader did not play a prominent role in the referendum campaign. But in the parliamentary battles that followed, he used his position as shadow Brexit secretary to seek to frustrate the will of the people. Instead of seeing his duty as being to respect the mandate that MPs had been given, he manoeuvred to crush it. The result was a well-deserved rout for Labour in Brexit-supporting seats in the 2019 general election.
Labour today insists that its plans to change Britain’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU are relatively limited. It says that it will not attempt to rejoin the single market or customs union. It asserts that it only wishes to improve the UK’s ties with Brussels, through a veterinary agreement, work to prevent border checks, and a new security pact. But it may not need a formal new deal to effectively extinguish the Brexit project. As the Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch warns in this newspaper, Labour could take us backwards simply by copying everything the EU does.
There is no evidence that Sir Keir, his shadow Cabinet, or his party’s candidates have become genuine converts to Brexit or new freedoms. Their view of the EU tends to be cartoonish – unwilling to acknowledge, for example, that Europe is shifting to the Right on matters like immigration – but it reflects the party’s wider belief in international institutions and technocracy. Winning a massive majority would almost certainly result in a growing clamour within Labour for Sir Keir to seize the opportunity to put the UK back into the EU’s tractor beam.
It is strange that Brexit has played so little part in the current election campaign. Some imply that this is because leaving the EU has been a failure. That is wrong. As Lord Frost writes in these pages, many of the arguments made by Europhiles are fatuous and the opposite of the truth.
We have been critical of the Conservatives over the past few years for not embracing the full possibilities of leaving the EU. But it was always going to be a long-term project, and the deals that allowed Britain to leave Brussels’ orbit stand among the most significant recent Tory achievements. They gave us back our independence and restored faith in the UK’s democratic institutions. Sir Keir threatens to put that at risk again.
