Will a Starmer government try to rejoin the EU?

I am among the first of those who would not trust Keir Starmer to put the interests of the UK before the rose-coloured spectacles view of the EU. He was a leader of those who sought a second referendum in defiance of the 2016 verdict of the people. He is, therefore, among those who know better than the people; in other words, no democrat.

There is a significant and influential body of thought that determinedly regards Brexit as a disaster, despite the absence of any evidence for that judgement. These people don’t need evidence; it would only tell them things they prefer not to know. It is enough, for them, that they wanted to stay in the EU and the people decided otherwise. They are resolutely blind to the facts: that the UK’s exports to the EU have already recovered to pre-Brexit levels, that the UK economy has grown faster than Germany since Brexit, and that we are attracting much of the foreign investment that might have been expected to flow to the EU, because we are less concerned to protect existing producers and their status quo methods from new technology and competition. In short, the effect of Brexit is too small to detect in the context of the aftermaths of Covid and Ukraine.

I suspect that Starmer might be emotionally akin to those recusants who still write tediously repetitive letters to The Times to explain (without evidence) that Brexit has failed, the editors who unaccountably continue to publish them, and those columnists who take the same view. I really only read this stuff to remind myself of the proverb about those who will not see. I really should change my newspaper, but I keep hoping they’ll grow out of this.

Fortunately, the facts will interpose between even the most rigid EU ideologue and the behaviour suggested by the questioner. There is, of course, no way back to the series of exemptions that had already made our position within the EU peripheral years before we decided to leave. The UK is now a third country, like any other, and would need to follow the protocol for new members.

The opinion polls that suggest there is majority public support for rejoining the EU take an enormous hit as soon as respondents are informed that joining as a new member means replacing the pound by the euro and accepting the EU’s ridiculous one-size-fits-all monetary policy.

The numbers take another hit when people are informed that free movement of people would be reinstituted.

And that the EU would be allowed to resume their destruction of British fish stocks.

And that we would have to undo all the bilateral and multilateral trade deals that we have achieved since Brexit and throw away the opportunities that they offer.

The UK would also have to reverse the repeal of 1,000 EU laws that it has already achieved and pass thousands of new ones that the EU has promulgated since we left. While leavers deplore the UK government’s lethargy in scrapping economically-damaging left-over EU legislation, from the EU’s point of view we have failed to keep up with their relentless passion for minutely-detailed regulation and bureaucracy and have become deplorably lax.

And do remember that the national veto has not existed in the vast bulk of policy areas since the Treaty of Lisbon, no matter what some EU enthusiasts seem to believe. If the EU passes a bad law, you still have to enact it unamended. In effect, our parliament is reduced to a rubber stamp.

But, of course, that means our mollycoddled politicians would be able to give up their pathetic attempts to think for themselves and resume the comfort blanket of blaming the EU for every badly-judged new rule instead. So we can’t say that nobody would benefit. The politicians would be paid to do nothing.

And you thought they were pretty good at that already? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

Identity Politics

 There is an unfortunate tendency in the UK to import social movements from the US, where society, and history, is very different.

Amongst these tendencies has been the substitution of identity politics for community politics. Instead of everyone uniting for the common good, this philosophy incites competitive victimhood amongst arbitrary groupings, focussing on what divides society (or can be made to divide it) rather than on what unites us. The foolish assumption is, that all people sharing a particular common characteristic are the same and have the same problems, needs and complaints.

The secondary, even more insidious, message is that non-members of the said arbitrary group have historically cherished enmity to its members and continue to discriminate against them today.

I cannot speak to the relevance of such thinking to The USA, though it seems to me that it can hardly be constructive anywhere. I do believe, however, that having crossed the Atlantic and found themselves largely irrelevant to British society, such movements have focussed on exaggerating any problems that can be found in order to justify their own continued existence.

Moreover, by taking the sort of public protest action that creates maximum annoyance and irritation to the uninvolved general public, they are succeeding in creating, by way of backlash, precisely the problems against which they supposedly protest.

I am reminded that, over a century ago, Booker T. Washington pointed out what one might today regard as the beginnings of the race relations industry. There were people, he said, who made it their business to complain about problems, but did not actually want them solved, because the problems provided them with influence and income as protesters.