It’s not Brexit, Sir Keir. It’s you

If Starmer actually believes what he says about Brexit, he is even dumber than I thought. And if he doesn’t believe it but still says it, he is even viler than I thought.

In his zeal to drag Britain back into the EU by hook or by crook, Starmer makes a defence case and an economic one. Both are offensively false, but what’s even more offensive is that he thinks we are too stupid to see through his lies.

I shan’t cover the same ground I covered yesterday when commenting on Starmer’s specious claim that Britain’s defence depends on our re-joining the EU, or as near as damn.

Essentially, the blindingly obvious fact is that it’s not necessary for a country to abandon its sovereignty to form a military alliance with other countries. For example, in the Second World War Britain was closely allied with the US without becoming an American state.

We possess no viable deterrent not because we are out of the EU, but because successive governments have been criminally negligent about investing in defence. And we can acquire such a deterrent not by re-joining the EU but by starting a massive rearmament programme.

The economic case is just as groundless, but, since the EU is indeed an economic entity, Starmer’s case can’t be dismissed in one sentence. But it can still be dismissed – by showing that everything he says about Brexit is either an ignorant falsehood or a pernicious lie.

Brexit, says Starmer, “did deep damage to our economy” and “the opportunities to strengthen our security and cut the cost of living… are simply too big to ignore”.

First, reducing the issue of British sovereignty to bean counting is spurious. Britons voted to leave the EU not because they wanted to become richer but because they wanted to become freer.

The outcome of the 2016 referendum showed that people at large have a surer grasp of the country’s constitution than Starmer does. They voted Leave because they wanted to be governed by their ancient Parliament in London, not by a cabal of socialist bureaucrats in Brussels.

However, Starmer and his ilk, the Europhile establishment, set out to sabotage Brexit from the very beginning. They’ve largely succeeded: Parliament had little role to play in over 60 per cent of UK legislation. Those laws have been either influenced or mandated by the EU.

The remaining 40 per cent are a constant burr under Starmer’s blanket, with Britain still falling short of his ideal of becoming a province of the EU. Achieving that worthy goal, however, would require a change of heart on the part of the British, and, as an intuitive Marxist, Starmer believes in the all-conquering persuasiveness of the economic argument.

Britons, he is sure, will be ready to do an Esau and sell their soul for a pot of economic message, no matter how rancid.

But his case is non-existent. It’s true that Brexit somewhat complicated Britain’s access to European markets. But it set the country free to seek new opportunities in the larger markets of America and Asia.

The remaining tethers of EU legislation have prevented Britain from exploiting those opportunities fully. But the main fault lies with our successive governments.

Leaving the EU enabled them to make their own decisions. But it didn’t guarantee they’d make sound decisions. Freedom of choice, after all, also means freedom of making bad choices, and our post-Brexit governments took full advantage of that opportunity.

From the effeminate socialism of Cameron to the intuitive Marxism of Starmer, they’ve been doing everything historically known to undermine the economy, while doing nothing known to boost it.

Having kept most of the EU shackles in place, they added their own trillion’s worth by systematically strangulating the economy with extortionist taxation and stifling regulations. The insane drive towards net zero alone would have been sufficient to do damage, but that was only one prong in the systematic assault on wealth generation.

Rather than producing a balanced budget or at least keeping the deficit down, both Tory and Labour governments have been borrowing with blithe disregard for the future — or indeed for the present.   

Our gross national debt rose from 87.6 per cent of GDP in 2016 to 95 per cent in 2026. Combined with higher interest rates, the cost of servicing this debt has quadrupled in the past five years to £114 billion a year (twice the size of our defence budget).

For all that, our national debt is still somewhat lower than that of France, one of the two principal powers in the EU. I struggle to think how re-entering a single market with that economic basket case would improve our fortunes, but Starmer has his reasons that reason knows not of.

Actually, incredible as it sounds, the UK economy is predicted to be 8.8 per cent larger in 2029 than it was in 2024, compared to 5.7 and 8.3 per cent for Germany and France respectively.

Where Britain trails both Germany and France is in labour productivity, but that gap was even wider when Britain was an EU member. Then as now, France had roughly the same GDP as Britain even though the French worked on average 25 per cent fewer hours annually.

Also, German workers typically produce in four days what British workers take five days to complete. This is largely due to higher capital investment, stronger vocational training and better management practices.

Without getting bogged down in details, let’s just say that our political establishment has squandered the opportunities provided by Brexit. They could have turned Britain into the hub of free trade in the Eastern Hemisphere, rolling up the red tape to release the dormant spirit of British enterprise and attracting foreign investment with low taxation and mild regulations.

Instead, they’ve done exactly the opposite. A concerted, ideologically inspired assault on productive classes has driven thousands of British entrepreneurs — and their companies — into exile. And a constantly rising cost of doing business has slammed the door into the face of foreign companies willing to invest billions.

Every economic measure introduced by Starmer’s government has fired a salvo in its Marxist war on wealth creation. But he and his accomplices are still not satisfied: they want to add the EU’s socialist tyranny to their own. That way they’ll be able to spread coarse salt on Britain’s economic earth, making sure that nothing will grow in it ever again.

And now Starmer has the gall to say: “I’m ambitious that we can do more in relation to the single market, because I think that’s hugely in our economic interests.”

What’s hugely in our economic interests, sir, is to get rid of you and your gang of Marxist saboteurs, letting Britain be Britain again. The country still has left some of the spirit that created the Industrial Revolution, but it takes wise governance to bring it out.

What it emphatically doesn’t take is surrendering what’s still extant of Britain’s sovereignty and paying billions into the EU’s coffers for the privilege. Adam Smith was right: economics is really a branch of moral philosophy. If only we had a moral government to remind us of that fact.

P.S. Every now and then I mention my attempts to improve my English by listening to football commentators.

It’s thanks to those savants that I’ve enlarged my vocabulary by adding words like ‘melodramatic’ to mean ‘dramatic’, ‘decorative’ to mean ‘beautiful’, ‘lacksadaisical’ to mean ‘lackadaisical’, ‘amount’ to mean ‘number’, ‘willy-nilly’ to mean ‘at will’, ‘fortuitous’ to mean ‘fortunate’, ‘vociferous’ to mean ‘full-blooded’ and so on.

But those scholars aren’t the only source of new knowledge: The Times’s general knowledge crossword is also a valuable tutor. Thus the other day a clue was ‘vis-à-vis’, to which the required answer was ‘à propos’. Just to think how many years I’ve wasted thinking the two expressions meant entirely different things.

Please let me know if The Times offers an on-line course in Franglais.