All he wants, for starters, is to accept all the obligations of membership, but with none of the privileges.
There we are, glad we’ve straightened this out. Now let’s delve a little deeper.
In common with all socialist apparatchiks, Starmer has a visceral loathing of governmental accountability. Since a revolution looks unlikely for the time being, the best way of making a national government less accountable is to vest decision-making into a supranational body beyond the electorate’s reach.
In 2016, Cameron, the Tory answer to Starmer intellectually, morally and – more or less – ideologically, tried to chisel Britain’s EU membership in eternal stone by putting it to a vote in a referendum.
All his friends on both sides of the aisle were sure of a Remain vote. That would have put paid to British sovereignty for ever, all nice and democratic. However, if any proof was needed of how far out of touch that lot were with the people, it was swiftly provided. More Britons voted Leave than had ever voted for anything else.
Direct assault having failed, the bipartisan clique closed ranks and began working in perfidious ways to get around the popular wish so unequivocally expressed. At first, they attempted to sabotage the actual exit. Since after a couple of years that was no longer possible, they tried to make the exit strictly a formality.
The idea was to give the EU so many concessions and accept so many of its laws as was possible without formally re-joining. The Tories did that rather well, but they had certain in-built restraints.
First, the party’s grassroots were solidly in favour of Leave, and they had the power of local and general elections to punish perfidy. Second, even the Tory hierarchy weren’t unanimous on the subject.
Starmer doesn’t have similar limitations. His cabinet colleagues are even more Europhiliac than he is, so is the Labour faction in Parliament, so are the party’s grassroots.
Still, the rest of the country can’t be completely ignored – nor especially seen to be ignored. Hence a pretext was needed to embark on a full-scale betrayal of public will.
Trump was happy to oblige. He too had his idée fixe, and he too needed a pretext to act on it. His obsession was with NATO, an organisation solely committed, in his primitive mind, to taking America for a ride.
I’m not going to indulge any conspiracy theories involving Trump and the KGB. But – purely coincidentally of course – when he returned from his first trip to Russia, in 1987, Trump took out full-page ads in the top American papers to deliver a diatribe against NATO and America’s membership in it.
The language was remarkably similar to his on-going rants forty years on. NATO members wouldn’t pay for their own defence, instead relying on the US to protect them against Russia. They were scroungers, leeches on America’s body.
America didn’t need NATO with its extended hand. We’d be better off out, was the clear implication. Yet either at that time or even during his first presidential term, Trump couldn’t yet act on his innermost feelings.
These, by the way, have become more complex. He clearly sees fellow NATO members as unfit not only to belong to the same bloc as America, but even to have a grown-up conversation with her. The only leaders rating that honour are Putin and Xi, who may be dictators, but they are Trump’s kind of dictators.
Now he feels sufficiently empowered, Trump has begun to attack NATO with venom. NATO is a ‘paper tiger’. It’s obsolete. It refuses to pay its way. It’s disgusting. You don’t pay, NATO, you don’t make any decisions.
And what does paying mean, Mr President? Why, five per cent of GDP spent on defence, that’s what. Anything less, and you are excluded. Since no NATO member spends that proportion, none deserves to be a member. Neither does the US for that matter – she only spends 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence, but let’s not talk about this out loud.
Worst of all, when Trump decided to attack Iran, he snapped his fingers, but fellow NATO members didn’t come to heel. What more proof does one need?
Before snapping his fingers, Trump hadn’t consulted his allies, asked their opinion, laid out war aims, suggested coordinated action. But so what? They showed disrespect.
And by the way, Trump added most bizarrely, he didn’t need their help anyway. That war was won in the first 24 hours, and in fact he only started the war to test their loyalty. They failed that rather expensive test, so it’s good-bye NATO. Would you consider leaving the alliance, Mr President? Damn right I would. Wouldn’t you?
Meanwhile the denizens of America’s Middle Eastern allies are wondering if this is what victory looks like. Iran continues to attack them with missiles and drones, causing billions’ worth of damage and beggaring them by making it hard for them to sell their oil.
If war was won in the first 24 hours, how come they are still dying a month later? Didn’t America anticipate Iran’s response? America probably did, but Trump didn’t. He was sure that once Iran was bombed flat and all the ayatollahs were killed, Iranians would come crawling.
Instead they are sending drones to reduce the Middle East to impoverished wasteland, and there’s little America can do to stop them. There are only so many multi-million-dollar rockets one can fire to stop drones that are tuppence a bucket.
Only one American ally knows how to stop cheap drones cheaply: the Ukraine. She has learned the trick the hard way, and now she is ready to help out the Persian Gulf countries. In fact, the Ukraine has signed an agreement to send experts and some defensive kit over to the area.
When Trump found out, he was incandescent. That action was nothing short of provocative. Its aim was to show that Trump can’t help his allies, but Zelensky can. Who the hell does he think he is?
That was slightly inconsistent. European NATO members are lambasted for withdrawing help; the Ukraine, for providing it. Both will be punished: NATO by being left to its devices; the Ukraine, by losing the last vestiges of American aid. It’s time that annoying obstacle in the way of Donald’s friendship with Vlad was expunged anyway.
Back comes Starmer who has heard all he needs to know. If America pulls out of NATO, NATO is for all intents and purposes defunct. Britain lies bare and virtually unarmed (Trump is right about the state of our defences), so she needs to look for alliances elsewhere.
The Middle East crisis, explained Starmer, shows the need to hug the EU with renewed vigour. The EU-UK summit in the summer will be a good time to intensify the foreplay.
For the time being, Starmer has weakened Britain’s negotiating position by saying we’ll accept ‘free movement’, EU laws and regulations, emission rules, the whole ethos of a single European state. And yes, of course, we’ll be paying into the EU’s budget.
Starmer has found his pretext, and his dream is about to come true. His senior accomplices are jubilant, although they aren’t sure Starmer is going far enough. Deputy PM Lammy and Health Secretary Streeting both want to re-join the customs union, while London mayor Sadiq Khan wants to cut to the chase and re-join the EU.
“It is increasingly clear,” explained Starmer, “that as the world continues down this volatile path, our long-term national interest requires closer partnership with our allies in Europe and with the European Union.”
Now seems to be the time when inadequate leaders compete with one another in making incoherent pronouncements dictated by nefarious urges. If Starmer wants to drag Britain back into the EU come what may, he should say so and proceed within the constitutional framework.
What on earth does the Middle East have to do with it? Britain has disarmed herself because our politicians, the Camerons-Starmers of this world, don’t want to spend money on defence. They want to spend it on bribing increasingly dependent masses to vote for increasingly incompetent politicians.
Our welfare spending is over six times the size of our defence budget – and the situation in the EU, its western part at any rate, is no different.
Instead of talking bilge about some mythical link between the Middle East and EU membership, Starmer should announce a massive rearmament programme. But that’s what a statesman would do, not a spineless socialist nonentity.
And of course we need to maintain a close military cooperation with our European allies. But the EU isn’t a military bloc; it’s a jumped-up trade Zollverein with hopes of creating a single European state.
Military cooperation with the EU can proceed as a bilateral agreement, within NATO, minus the US, or under the aegis of some new bloc. Re-joining the EU would serve no purpose other than fulfilling the wettest dreams of socialist apparatchiks.
It’s not crises that bring civilisations down. They perish when, at a time of crisis, they suffer from a slackening of the national will – and from being led by inept, malevolent and perfidious politicians. Our own civilisation qualifies in spades.